Rejecting the assertion that US-Pakistan relations are on the slide, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia has said the bilateral ties "have been very positive recently."
In a briefing at the Foreign Press Centre on Monday, Richard Boucher said that United States and Pakistan had been co-operating across the board "in things that are important for Pakistan's development, areas that are important for Pakistan's success as a moderate, stable, democratic society.
"And our goal is to help Pakistan achieve success in all those areas that we're working with them: strategic issues, the fight against terrorism, finding energy supply, educating its population, building the democracy," he said.
In this behalf, he referred to his opening statement, in which he detailed progress in bilateral relations between the two countries. These were "all the areas" that have been "outlined by President Pervez Musharraf in his programme of enlightened moderation," and added, "we want them to succeed, and we are working with Pakistan across the board to try to help them achieve that success." He said the fight against terrorism "is a tough one," and that, "We all have to do more.
"We all have to make sure that terrorists are not allowed to operate, not allowed to prosper, not allowed to find sanctuary," Boucher said: "We're playing an important role in that direction with the military operations we're conducting in Afghanistan. We play an important role in terms of the development programmes we have in Afghanistan, or the support that we give to Pakistan for its own development programme. So we're all in that together." "We're all fighting a common enemy and we are all going to try to keep cooperating, keep improving and keep doing better so that we can beat this threat," he added.
In his opening statement, Boucher said the US relationship with Pakistan was "much broader," and that "we have initiated a whole series of dialogues with Pakistan, the strategic dialogue to economic dialogue, the education dialogue to science dialogue - all these areas where we have real practical co-operation going on with Pakistan."
He also said that United States was "helping Pakistan with its energy needs as well." In addition to that, he said "there's a lot of co-operation with Pakistan in terms of helping the Pakistani government support its efforts out in the border regions."
In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said, "you have a similar process going on of government extending its control, extending its peaceful and beneficial activities to the edges of the frontier on both sides, and we're supporting the Pakistani government in doing that."
On the Afghan side of the border, Boucher said, the United States was supporting the Afghan government in doing that, - with the deployment of Nato forces and the deployment of policemen, drug eradicators, but also the building of roads, building of electricity lines, irrigation schemes and government offices.
He said, "we are helping both Pakistan and Afghanistan extend their authority out to the edges of the countries so that these places can't be used by terrorists to fight us, to fight Nato, to fight the Afghan government and to fight the Pakistani government."
The efforts at hand, he said were to bring in the benefits of good government and development to these regions, what in the long term, he added, would "bring peace and security to the people who live there."
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