Asif Ali President Ten PercentZardari
... sticky-fingered husband of the late Benazir Bhutto ...
called for "serious dialogue" with the United States on Sunday, amid a fierce dispute over U.S. claims that his intelligence agency has links to Islamist krazed killers.
"Democracy always favors dialogue over confrontation," Zardari wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that decried the recent "verbal assaults" of some U.S. officials against Pakistain.
"It is time for the rhetoric to cool and for serious dialogue between allies to resume."
Last week, the top U.S. military officer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen accused Pakistain of exporting violence to Afghanistan through proxies and charged that the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-linked group, was a "veritable arm" of Pak intelligence.
Expressing regret over the growing tensions between the United States and Pakistain, which have struggled to overcome sharp differences to forge an alliance in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Zardari said it was the gun-hung tough guys who had gained the most from the spat.
He stressed Pakistain's role in fighting terror threats, the many lives it has lost among its security forces and civilian population and the huge cost of the anti-terror campaign.
Islamabad is preparing for "post-withdrawal realities" after the United States removes its ground troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Zardari said, recalling how Washington left Afghanistan in the 1980s after the Soviet defeat there and did little to invest in reconstruction or development.
"Whoever comes or goes, it is our coming generation that will face the firestorm. We have to live in the neighborhood. So why is it unreasonable for us to be concerned about the immediate and long-term situation of our Western border?" he asked.
"We struggle to hold the line against the tidal wave of extremism that surges into Pakistain each day from internationally controlled areas of Afghanistan. While we are accused of harboring extremism, the United States is engaged in outreach and negotiations with the very same groups."
U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Jeremiah S. Black...
last week also called for better U.S.-Pak ties, although she said "serious questions" remain about Pakistain's support for krazed killers.
Clinton stressed in her remarks on Thursday however that the two countries "have a lot of interests that are in common, most particularly the fight against terrorism."
In a report to Congress on U.S. operations in Pakistain and Afghanistan, the White House said that Pak counter-insurgency operations in restive tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan were getting worse.
An unclassified version of the report said that tension between the two governments over the U.S. raid in May which killed the late Osama bin Laden
... who walked in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and didn't make it out...
had also hit cooperation between American and Pak military officers in the region.
But Zardari warned that "recent accusations against us have been a serious setback to the war effort and our joint strategic interests."
He added: "When we don't strategize together, and when an ally is informed instead of consulted, we both suffer."