By NNN-APP,
New York : Pakistan is resisting increasing Obama administration’s pressure to provide the United States with much broader airline passenger information to track terrorist travel patterns, The New York Times reported Monday.
Citing unnamed administration officials, the newspaper said in a front-page report that Pakistan had for several years rebuffed the request but the issue is now on a short list of sticking points between the two countries that have intensified since the failed Times Square car bombing attempt.
“Terrorists are enemies of both Pakistan and the United States, who need to discuss how to enhance cooperation and that is what we are doing,” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said in a text message to The Times on Sunday.
“Pressuring an ally is not the way forward, and both sides understand that.” Pakistan, like other countries, currently provides the names of airline passengers traveling to the United States. But the administration is pressing for information on all Pakistan airline passengers, wherever they are traveling, to feed into complex databases that can detect patterns used by terrorists, their financiers, logisticians and others who support them, the officials were cited as saying.
The Times said Pakistan has been resisting this “politically unpopular request as an invasion of its citizens’ privacy”.
Apart from this issue, the ‘short list’ of outstanding problems between the two countries include some classified counterterrorism programmes, a long-running dispute over granting visas to American government workers and contractors in Pakistan, and enhanced intelligence sharing.
The United States, according to the newspaper, currently has a range of confidential agreements with countries governing how much information each will share about its citizens traveling on commercial airliners.
Many countries share only information about passengers traveling to the United States, while others, including several in the Caribbean, have agreed to share more information about other countries that their residents visit.
In the case of Pakistan, the report said, American officials are seeking details like the recent travel histories of airline passengers and how they paid for their tickets.
President Barack Obama has given his top aides a deadline of the next few weeks to resolve the issues with Pakistan, the administration officials said.
That pressure to deliver results has prompted senior officials like General James Jones, the national security adviser, and Leon Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to warn senior Pakistani leaders of the risks to the country’s relationship with the United States if a deadly terrorist attack originated in their country, the officials added.