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| US vice president non-committal about ending drone attacks |
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Monday, January 26, 2009
WASHINGTON: US Vice-President Joseph Biden on Sunday said the United States is working towards strengthening Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capability but declined to specifically address the issue of drone strikes against suspected militant targets on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border.
Biden said the “good news” is that there is “a great deal of cooperation to check cross-border militancy”. “What we’re doing is we’re in the process of working with the Pakistanis to help train up their counterinsurgency capability of their military, and we’re getting new agreements with them about how to deal with cross-border movements of these folks, so we’re making progress,” Biden told CBS channel programme Face the Nation in his first interview as vice-president.
According to a Pakistani embassy spokesman, agreement of views on coordination of border monitoring, improvement in intelligence sharing and bolstering the capacity of Pakistani security forces is a continuous process between the coalition partners.
Pakistan has said it is clear that only Pakistani forces can carry out any anti-terrorism actions on its side of the border. A senior official in Islamabad on Sunday said drone attacks were counterproductive to Pakistan’s efforts aimed at curbing the menace of extremism.
In the interview, Biden also expressed understanding of the fact that the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) have been historically ungoverned. “I can’t speak to any particular attack. I can’t speak to any particular action. It’s not appropriate for me to do that,” he said in response to a question in the backdrop of this week’s air strikes on the Pakistani side of the border.
“But I can say that the president of the United States (Barack Obama) said during his campaign and in the debates that if there is an actionable target, of a high-level al-Qaeda personnel, then he would not hesitate to use action to deal with that.
“But here’s the good news. The good news is that in my last trip — and I’ve been to Pakistan many times and that region many times — there is a great deal of more cooperation going on now between the Pakistani military in an area called the Fata — Waziristan, North Waziristan — all that area we hear about, that is really sort of ungovernable. Not sort of, it’s been ungovernable for the Pakistani government. That’s where the bad guys are hiding. That’s where the al-Qaeda folks are, and some other malcontents.”
On Afghanistan, Biden said the administration has inherited a ‘real mess’ in the insurgency-battered country. “What’s happened is that because of — neglect may be the wrong word — but failure to provide sufficient resources, economic, political and military, as well as failure to get a coherent policy among our allies, economically and politically, and in terms of the military resources, the situation has deteriorated a great deal. The Taliban is in effective control of significant parts of the country they were not before.”
Secondly, he pointed out, 95 per cent roughly of the world’s opium and heroin comes out of that country. “We need — and their police department, the national police force, which was relied upon heavily as you noticed in Iraq, as it was in Bosnia, we trained them up and so on, is essentially — the corruption is rife. Some of our allies who have committed to train these troops did not do them well.
“So the bottom line here is, we’ve inherited a real mess. We’re about to go in and try to essentially reclaim territory that’s been effectively lost. So it’s going to require — there are going to be some additional military forces. There are going to be additional efforts to train their police and to train their Afghan army.
And all of that means we’re going to be engaging the enemy more now.” Asked if the US should expect more casualties of its forces, he said: “I hate so say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick. Because as the commander in Afghanistan said, he said, Joe, we will get this done, but we’re going to be engaging the enemy much more.”
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ISSN 1563-9479 
