By IANS
Washington : The US government is “extremely concerned” about the emergence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, but will not act without a nod from the Pakistani government.
“There are concerns now about how much Al Qaeda turned inward, literally, inside Pakistan, as well as the kind of planning, training, financing and support that the worldwide effort is,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters here Friday.
Expressing Pentagon’s extreme concern over the development, he said: “I think continued pressure there will have to be brought”.
Adm. Mullen, however, added: “Pakistan is a sovereign country and certainly it’s really up to … President (Pervez) Musharraf and certainly his advisers and his military to address that problem directly.”
US intelligence officials suspect Al Qaeda is establishing training camps in Pakistan’s tribal region along the border with Afghanistan and recruiting fighters from as far away as Europe and Africa.
They suggest that the area is an operational command centre for Al Qaeda’s senior leaders including Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri.
US officials are worried that Al Qaeda’s strong presence along the border is destabilising progress that has been made in Afghanistan, according to the Washington Times.
But Pakistan has not taken kindly to newspaper reports that the CIA and the US military want to begin covert operations in Pakistan to target Al Qaeda.
“Nobody will come here until we ask them to come. And we haven’t asked them,” Musharraf told Singapore’s Straits Times in an interview published Friday.
He said a unilateral intervention would be seen as an invasion against the sovereignty of Pakistan.
Senior military and intelligence officials privately say that they are eager to gain at least tacit approval from Pakistan to loosen restrictions on the CIA, allowing operations against selected targets in the unruly tribal areas, according to The New York Times.
On Thursday, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Mahmud Ali Durrani, told the Washington Times that contrary to reports that terrorists were entering Afghanistan from strongholds in Pakistan, it is a “reverse flow” with terrorists entering Pakistan from the outside and recruiting members within.
Durrani added that the Pakistani military was capable of handling the growing threat of Al Qaeda in the region and that talk of sending US troops into Pakistan, regardless of Musharraf’s permission, was not helpful to Pakistan or Pakistan-US relations.
“We never said we don’t need any help,” Durrani added. “We’ve said we don’t need any interference.”
Pointing out that there are nearly 100,000 Pakistani troops in the vast tribal area, much more than the number of US troops in Afghanistan, Durrani said: “Pakistan has caught, captured, killed the most Al Qaeda people in this world. We’ve had the most casualties in our region.”
Pentagon is now mulling sending an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan, Adm. Mullen said.