Pakistan Hopes Premier's U.S. Visit Will Yield Funds, Forbearance

Yousaf Raza Gillani, Pakistan's prime minister, and his aides should expect a testy reception on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, a U.S. official warns. "I'm not sure they're ready for what they're walking into," the official says. (By Asad Zaidi -- Bloomberg News)

Washington needs to recognize, they say, that Pakistan has at least as much to lose from terrorism as the United States does. "This is our own fight," Gillani told reporters before his departure yesterday. He recalled that his own Pakistan People's Party lost its leader, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to a terrorist attack in December.

Gillani has "high hopes" that he can make Congress understand the "many interconnected and complex issues of India-Pakistan relations, Pakistan's internal civil-military relations and Pakistan's insecurities about its environment, its neighborhood and the intentions of its neighbors," Haqqani said. "It cannot simply be resolved within a matter of a few days or a few weeks."

U.S. legislators "should be patient with the new government for a year or so and see if it is able to translate its ideas into actions," he said.

But to an administration and Congress that expected a Pakistani military offensive months ago, waiting a year is unthinkable.

"We fully agree they need a multi-pronged strategy" combining economic assistance, negotiations and development of a stronger indigenous security force in the tribal regions, a senior administration official said. And the Bush administration welcomed a full-throated government pronouncement last month that expressed unwavering opposition to any terrorist activities launched from Pakistani soil.

"But you've got to be willing to do what's necessary when it comes to people who are trying to kill you," the administration official said. "We'd all be happy if you could do this by persuasion or development alone. But I think we all know that . . . in the end, you have to use force."

The administration has vacillated between pressuring Pakistan and concern that it might push too far. Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, has made four recent trips to Pakistan to try to ease tensions and develop a Western-Afghan-Pakistani strategy for the border area.

U.S. and NATO officials have their own suspicions about the anti-Taliban zeal of Pakistan's intelligence services. But NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer went out of his way during a visit to Kabul last week to take the onus off Islamabad and deflate Afghan President Hamid Karzai's charges that the intelligence service was behind recent attempts on Karzai's life.

"Only saying Pakistan is part of the problem or Pakistan is the problem might clear your conscience but will not help in solving the problem," de Hoop Scheffer said, calling for both countries to cooperate.

Hours after Gillani's departure for Washington yesterday, the government announced that he had ordered the army's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency placed under Interior Ministry control, a move some Pakistani observers said was an attempt to assert civilian control over the powerful spy organization. But Pakistan's governing coalition remains divided over a range of domestic issues far removed from Washington's concerns over terrorism. When the coalition partners met in Islamabad on Wednesday for a final military briefing before Gillani's departure, they concurred only on the need to come up with a long-term security strategy they could all support.

The direction and pace of their efforts, however, are unlikely to please the White House -- either the current administration or its replacement -- or Congress. The "main thrust" of a nationwide campaign against extremism should be political, rather than military, the coalition partners concurred, and they will instruct the Pakistani Parliament to begin discussing the issue.

In the meantime, a government news release said, the coalition reiterated that Pakistan's territory will not be used for terrorist attacks and that "attacks from external forces on Pakistan's sovereign soil" will not be tolerated.