By IANS,
Islamabad : US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday told Pakistan to act against the Haqqani network, a militant group that the US blames for attacking its interests in Afghanistan.
Addressing a joint press conference with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Clinton said here that the US has reasserted its commitment to eliminating safe havens of terror.
“We are specifically for cooperation from the Pakistani side to squeeze the Haqqani network,” Clinton, who arrived in Pakistan Thursday on a two-day visit, said.
She said that eliminating the terror group from “one side is not going to work”.
Clinton added that the two countries were “working to establish concrete steps”.
Clinton’s visit takes place at a time when Pakistan-US ties have deteriorated sharply — following the attack last month on the US embassy in Kabul and the truck bomb blast at a major American military base in Afghanistan’s Maidan Wardak province, blamed on the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.
The US accuses Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI of supporting the Haqqani network in both attacks, a charge denied by Islamabad.
There is also tension over the massing of heavily-armed US and NATO troops at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.