John Kerry asks Pakistan to take action against militant sanctuaries

US Senator John Kerry today pressed Pakistan to take action against militant sanctuaries on its territory, saying the two countries had agreed on a "series of steps" to get their relationship back on track in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden in a covert US operation.

Washington needs Islamabad's cooperation to eliminate terror "sanctuaries" inside Pakistan from which militants were "still destabilising Afghanistan and killing Americans as well as Germans, French, Italians, Canadians and others", Kerry said during an interaction with a small group of editors.

"We need to build more ways to guarantee that people who are planning and plotting and conducting terrorist acts are going to be held accountable," he told the editors.

Kerry said he had received assurances of cooperation and there is a "need to flush them (terrorists) out".

Kerry, the first senior American official to visit Pakistan since the al-Qaeda chief was killed in Abbottabad on May 2, said during a separate media interaction, that he had conveyed to the country's top civil and military leadership "as clearly as possible the grave concerns in the US over Osama bin Laden's presence in Pakistan".

The chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations committee said both sides need to have "very realistic expectations" about their relationship as there are "some real differences" between the two countries.

During both his interactions with the media following his meetings with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Kerry said the two sides had agreed on a "series of steps that will be implemented immediately to get the relationship back on track".

He did not give details about the steps to be implemented by Pakistan. However, he added, "Our progress in the days ahead will be measured by actions, not by words".

Kerry said the Pakistan government had "recommitted to finding more ways to work together against the common threat of terrorism and to explore how increased cooperation on joint operations in intelligence-sharing can maximise our efforts to defeat the enemies we face".

He made it clear that these were only "initial steps" and two senior US administration officials will visit Islamabad later this week to work on "details of implementing" them.

Subsequently, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton will visit Pakistan to "expand on those discussions to help develop a new trust and a new level of cooperation" between the two countries, he said.

Pakistan-US ties had gone into freefall after helicopter-borne commandos swooped on a compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad and killed Laden earlier this month.

Though Pakistan initially welcomed the killing of Laden, it subsequently criticised the US raid as a violation of its sovereignty after the civilian and military leadership faced anger and embarrassing questions about the al-Qaeda chief's presence in the country.

Prime Minister Gilani recently warned that Pakistan would respond with "full force" if the US carried out another raid and Gen Kayani informed Kerry about the "intense feelings" in the army over the raid against Laden.

After CIA chief Leon Panetta raised questions about the complicity or incompetence of Pakistan's security and intelligence set-up in detecting Laden's presence in the country, US lawmakers threatened they would review measures to provide the country billions of dollars in aid.

Kerry said he had raised these issues in his meetings with Pakistani leaders.

"I emphasised to our Pakistani friends that many in Congress are raising tough questions about our ongoing economic assistance to the government of Pakistan because of the presence of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan," he said.

He said he had told Gen Kayani and ISI chief Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha that Americans understood "their feelings and the feelings of Pakistan about the circumstances surrounding the operation against bin Laden".

"We recognise that the Pakistani people and their leaders take their sovereignty very seriously," he said.

At the same time, he said that he had told the Pakistani leaders that the extreme secrecy surrounding the raid against bin Laden was essential to "protecting the lives of the professionals who were involved and to ensuring that they succeeded in capturing or killing the man responsible for so much death".

In an apparent response to Pakistani criticism of the US raid, Kerry said it was Laden and the foreign fighters who followed him who "truly violated Pakistan’s sovereignty" over many years.

He also said he had not come to Pakistan to apologise for the raid.

"My goal in coming here has been to talk about how do we manage this important relationship and put us back on a track where isolated episodes, no matter how profound, don’t jeopardise the larger relationship between our countries," he said.

Kerry said his meetings had reopened dialogue between the two countries and allowed them to move forward "toward a better partnership with Pakistan".