Cheney Presses Pakistan on Al-Qaida Border Crossings

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan _ Vice President Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Pakistan on Monday to bluntly tell President Pervez Musharraf that his forces must markedly heighten their efforts to track down al-Qaida militants crossing the border into Afghanistan.

But Pakistan was defiant in its response to Cheney’s message, blaming the increased violence in the region on lapses in security on the Afghan side of the border.

“Our reading is that there are security failures inside Afghanistan …,” said Nadeem Kiani, a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. “It doesn’t have much to do with Pakistan.”

Kiani also suggested that the Afghan-Pakistani border is not as porous as the one between the U.S. and Mexico.

The Bush administration has said it expects al-Qaida and the Taliban to launch a spring offensive against U.S. and Afghan troops from its staging areas in the tribal areas that straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border.

To prepare for new attacks, the U.S. is increasing its forces to 27,000, the highest level since a U.S.-led invasion drove out the Taliban government in 2001.

While Cheney made no comment to journalists about his meeting with the Pakistani president, the public nature of the American message was a departure from the past, in which the U.S. would praise Musharraf’s regime publicly and make its criticisms in private.

Musharraf’s office released a statement saying, “Cheney expressed U.S. apprehensions of regrouping of al-Qaida in the tribal areas and called for concerted efforts in countering the threat.”

Cheney also “expressed serious U.S. concerns on the intelligence being picked up of an impending Taliban and al-Qaida `spring offensive’ against allied forces in Afghanistan.”

Pakistan says it has more than 1,000 border posts on its side of the 1,400-mile-long border of Pakistan and Afghanistan while there are only 100 posts on the Afghan side.

While U.S. and British officials have publicly praised Pakistan’s anti-terrorist operations in the past five years, there has been a growing sense of unease about militants operating freely in tribal areas and infiltrating into Afghanistan. The militants are operating in the same region where some believe Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the U.S., is still hiding out.

“The administration is beginning to recognize that it has to combine some public pressure with the private remonstrations in dealing with Musharraf,” said Husein Haqqani, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. “In the last five years, the U.S. policy has been that any criticism of the Musharraf government be made in private, while all the praise has been public. It has made Musharraf think he’s the only chef in town _ he can serve any dish he wants.”

Cheney’s message may spell the beginning of a changed relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan. “The administration is going to stop giving Musharraf a totally free hand,” said Haqqani, who was an adviser to three previous Pakistani prime ministers. “Instead, Cheney might put forward a laundry list of things that need to be done, and there will be a lot more active monitoring of compliance.”

After stopping in Islamabad, Cheney made a second secrecy-shrouded visit, going to Afghanistan for meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. In the vast, largely lawless border region, the Bush administration is also trying to bolster U.S. and NATO efforts to help the Afghan government withstand any resistance by the Taliban and other armed groups.

Cheney traveled to both nations with no public announcement beforehand, following a weeklong diplomatic trip across the Pacific.

The vice president was joined by Steve Kappes, deputy director of the CIA, on his three-hour flight from Oman to Pakistan. Cheney was taken by military helicopter from Choklala air base to the Aiwan-e-Sadr presidential palace on a hillside in Islamabad.

Cheney and Musharraf met with aides and also alone over lunch at the palace. The meetings were carried out behind closed doors. On the way into his private lunch with Cheney, the Pakistani president, who has survived two assassination attempts, turned to photographers snapping pictures.

“Military term: They are called trigger-happy,” Musharraf joked about the photographers. Then he addressed them with a smile: “Good that you’re trigger-happy with a camera, not …”

After spending less than four hours on the ground in Pakistan, Cheney made an hour-long flight to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for briefings before heading to the meeting with Karzai.

Cheney, who had spent Sunday night in Oman at a luxury gulf-coast resort across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, is capping a week of globetrotting travels that started with meetings with U.S. allies in the Pacific in which he credited Japan and Australia for support of the U.S. military mission in Iraq.

As the U.S. escalates its military force in Baghdad and western Iraq in a bid to regain control over the violence-torn nation, the U.S. and NATO allies are girding for an escalation of combat in Afghanistan with Taliban and al-Qaida forces, which have reorganized and stepped up their own attacks on the nascent democratically elected government of Karzai.

“The snow is going to melt in the Hindu Kush Mountains, and when it does we can expect fierce fighting,” President Bush said in a recent address in Washington. But he added, “This spring, there is going to be a new offensive in Afghanistan, and it’s going to be a NATO offensive.”

The president has promised to bolster U.S. aid for Karzai’s government by $15 billion this year. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a new $172 million reconstruction aid package for Afghanistan.

While the U.S. works on building up Iraq’s military, it is also attempting to dramatically boost Afghanistan’s forces, aiming to expand an army of 32,000 today to 70,000 by the end of 2008, while adding commando battalions and helicopters.

The Bush administration is counting on Musharraf’s government to help quell the insurgency that straddles his country and Afghanistan. Musharraf, who first gained power during a bloodless military coup in 1999 and since has been elected president, has become a key U.S. ally.

“We’re going to work (with) Pakistan and Afghanistan to enhance cooperation to defeat what I would call a common enemy,” Bush said in his Feb. 15 address to the American Enterprise Institute. “Taliban and al-Qaida fighters do hide in remote regions of Pakistan _ this is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West. …”

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(Silva is traveling with the vice president. Fang reported from Washington.)

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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