Meeting With Pakistani Leaders, Kerry Seeks to Ease Anger Over Bin Laden Raid

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has argued that it would be foolhardy for the United States to cut assistance to Pakistan. He said Monday that Pakistan had agreed to take “several immediate steps” to show its seriousness about the importance of relations with America. They included returning the tail of the helicopter that crashed on the night of the Bin Laden raid, he said.

But on the major differences at hand, Mr. Kerry declined to specify what, if any, progress had been made.

Mr. Kerry’s visit — and the postponement of Mrs. Clinton’s — reflected the strained ties between the two nations, but also the efforts by the administration to repair them.

Within the last 24 hours, a spokesman said Monday, Mrs. Clinton spoke with senior Pakistani leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, about the tensions caused by Bin Laden’s killing. The State Department announced that it was dispatching the administration’s special envoy to the region, Marc Grossman, who only recently returned from Pakistan, where he was the first American diplomat to confront the country’s leaders in the hours after Bin Laden’s killing two weeks ago.

“We’re trying to move, to move on to address those questions as well as move forward with the relationship,” the spokesman, Mark Toner, said, referring to the questions raised by the raid, “because we feel it’s in both our countries’ interests.”

Mr. Kerry shed little light on the crucial issue of whether Pakistan would stop assisting the Haqqani network, whose forces keep sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas and cross into Afghanistan to kill American and NATO soldiers.

The senator, who came to Pakistan with the backing of the White House, said he had discussed the presence of the Haqqani forces in Pakistan, as well as Pakistan’s support for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and for Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban, with the head of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

“We discussed every single one of them,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that Pakistani action against them would help the United States end the war in Afghanistan.

On Sunday, Mr. Kerry visited Khost Province in Afghanistan, where American commanders briefed him on the Pakistani insurgents coming across the border. It appeared that Mr. Kerry planned to use that information in his discussions with the Pakistani leadership.

In an unusual joint Pakistani-American statement negotiated Monday at a meeting attended by President Zardari and General Kayani, the main demand of the Pakistanis appeared to be a pledge that the United States had “no designs against Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic assets.”

“Senator Kerry stated that he was prepared to personally affirm such a guarantee,” the statement said.

Members of the Pakistani military have complained bitterly that the United States did not inform them in advance of the Bin Laden raid, and part of Mr. Kerry’s mission involved soothing wounded feelings and papering over American officials’ statements that Pakistan could not be trusted with advance knowledge.

Pakistani officials have said that they had no idea that Bin Laden was living in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, where Navy Seal commandos killed him in a raid on May 2. “Even in the U.S. government, very few people knew about it,” the joint statement said of the Bin Laden operation.

Mr. Kerry, an author of a major $7.5 billion package of civilian aid to Pakistan, said he had warned the Pakistani leadership of the “grave” worry in Congress about the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan. Those concerns had put future aid in peril, he said.

Mr. Kerry’s calming tone was apparently echoed Monday when editors of some of Pakistan’s newspapers met with General Kayani.

In contrast to the strong anti-American speech General Pasha delivered at a closed-door session of Parliament on Friday, General Kayani said that Pakistan would continue a relationship with the United States because otherwise the country risked becoming isolated, according to an editor who attended the meeting but declined to be named because the matter was politically delicate.

The editor said that General Kayani’s basic message was that “Pakistan understood the limits of its own reach.”

Moreover, according to the editor, General Kayani said that Pakistan needed to remain on good terms with the United States in order to have its say in the settlement of the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.

 

As Rift Deepens, Kerry Has a Warning for Pakistan

 

The United States has increased drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas in the past 10 days in an effort to exploit the uncertainty and disarray among militant ranks caused by Bin Laden’s death on May 2. The latest airstrikes, on Friday, occurred as Pakistan’s spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in a rare appearance before the nation’s Parliament, denounced the American raid as a “sting operation.”

Parliament then passed a resolution declaring that the drone strikes were a violation of sovereignty equivalent to the secret attack on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The lawmakers warned that Pakistan could cut the supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan if there were more such attacks. The resolution contained no condemnation of a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, who killed more than 80 Pakistani paramilitary cadets on Friday.

Pakistan stepped up its condemnations of the United States as Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime emissary to Pakistan in times of crisis, was preparing to land in Islamabad. He was arriving with a list of actions — and some offers from Washington to ease tensions — that he finalized in meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and other top American security officials.

A senior administration official said Saturday that the United States would try to use the threat of Congressional cuts to the $3 billion in annual American aid to Pakistan as leverage. Any evidence of Pakistan’s complicity in sheltering Bin Laden — culled from the hundreds of computer flash drives and documents recovered in the raid — could also be used, the official said. So far, no such evidence has been found.

“In the Congress, this is a make-or-break moment” for aid to Pakistan, Mr. Kerry said in an interview just before he left for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Kerry said he would tell Pakistan that there needed to be “a real demonstration of commitment” to fighting terrorist groups in the next few months. But he will also reassure Pakistani officials that they will be a central part of any political accord with the Taliban in Afghanistan, to ease their fears that India will take over large areas of Afghanistan as the United States pulls out.

The Obama administration has said nothing about the Pakistani government’s criticisms, in the hope that they are designed to alleviate public anger and the Pakistani military’s embarrassment that American forces attacked the Bin Laden compound without being detected. Mr. Donilon and other senior administration officials declined to be interviewed about the administration’s strategy.

The American reticence stems in part from the reality that such ultimatums have been sent before — most recently after the arrest of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency contractor who shot two Pakistanis during what he said was a robbery. Pakistan has repeatedly called the administration’s bluff and revealed the threats as hollow. The United States relies heavily on transit routes in Pakistan to supply American troops in Afghanistan, and any move to cut off aid would probably lead Pakistan to close the supply routes, as it has done during previous disputes.

Mr. Kerry is arriving at the moment of highest tension between the two countries since Pakistan, given little choice, formally broke with the Taliban and allied with the United States just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Kerry said both countries must make “fundamental choices” about their relationship.

“I have had some of these conversations with Pakistan before,” he said, “but never in the context of the world’s No. 1 terrorist being found 35 miles from the capital, next door to Pakistan’s West Point, and with the discovery he was fully, fully operational.”