Top US and Pakistani military officials have met to discuss strategies to contain the growing militant threat along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff Admiral Michael Mullen said Thursday.
Mullen, who led the US side to the talks this week, also said that Pakistan military chief General Ashfaq Kayani had stepped up operations to flush out al Qaeda and Taliban militants using the border area as a staging point for attacks in Afghanistan.
"We certainly talked about the complexity of the challenges that we have in the border area, the pressure that we believe needs to be applied there for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the effect it's having on the fight in Afghanistan," Mullen told a Pentagon briefing.
The meeting of the top military brass, including US General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq who is set to be the senior military officer in the Middle East, was reportedly held on a US aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean on Tuesday. There was "a very clear need from a US standpoint and from the Pakistani standpoint that we have got to figure out a way to get at this problem," Mullen said, in an indication that fresh strategies could be drawn up to combat the rising militancy threat.
General Kayani "is undertaking operations that were not ongoing a few months ago," Mullen said, cautioning that it could take some time to bring the problem under control. "I am encouraged that he's taking action and I also think it's going to take some time," he said. "Expectations for instantaneous results are probably a little bit too high."