Washington, Dec 2 (IANS) Even as US-Pakistan ties have touched a new low over the NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, a senior Republican leader again accused Pakistan’s spy agency of supporting terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, while the White House declined to ‘apologise’ for the incident.
White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted Thursday that the US did not apologize for the attack on Pakistani troops and merely expressed condolences.
But as an investigation is pending into who is at fault, he refused to rule out a future apology saying: ‘We anticipate the results of our investigation to come when they’re ready. … I’m not going to pre-judge what we’re going to say in the future.’
Meanwhile, 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain, while expressing ‘sympathy and sorrow’ for the families of the killed soldiers, again accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of actively supporting ‘terrorist organizations in Afghanistan that are killing Americans’.
‘But the fact is also, and this must be a basis of our relationship with Pakistan, that there are members of the ISI, their intelligence services, that are actively supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan that are killing Americans,’ he told Fox News Thursday.
‘Among other things, there are two major fertiliser factories (and) their product is resulting in the production of IEDs that are in Afghanistan that are killing and wounding American soldiers. That is an unacceptable situation,’ McCain said.
Suggesting a review of US aid to Pakistan, he said: ‘I think we have to gauge our support, and we have sent billions to Pakistan, directly related to their degree of cooperation.’
But noting that ‘Pakistan is a country with a nuclear inventory that’s dangerous’ and the US was ‘dependent, to a large degree, on the supply lines through Pakistan into Afghanistan,’ he suggested a measured approach.
The US, McCain said, should ‘make sure the Pakistanis know what we expect of them, set up guide posts and goals that we would expect them to meet and make judgments accordingly. And it has to be done soon.’
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
