Gates says Pakistani army is committed to rooting out quickly extremists

Gates: Pakistan committed to fighting extremists

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered strong praise Friday for Pakistan’s efforts to root out extremist militants amid concern about potential links between the failed Times Square car bombing and Pakistan-based Taliban forces.

“The Pakistanis have been doing so much more than 18 months or two years ago any of us would have expected,” Gates told reporters traveling with him from Washington to this Army post on the banks of the Missouri River. He referred to Pakistani Army offensives, dating to spring 2009, against Taliban extremists in areas near the Afghan border, including in south Waziristan.

Gates said the Obama administration is sticking to its policy of offering to do as much training and other military activity inside Pakistan as the Pakistani government is willing to accept.

“It’s their country,” Gates said. “They remain in the driver’s seat, and they have their foot on the accelerator.”

The topic arose later during a question-and-answer session with Army officers at the Command and General Staff College here.

One officer asked Gates about anti-American sentiment among the religious elite in Pakistan. Gates said the problem extends beyond the religious elite to include more broadly those Pakistanis who recall that the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven out in 1989, as well as the imposition of U.S. sanctions against Pakistan in the early 1990s that cut off U.S. military contacts.

“If you look at it from the Pakistanis’ standpoint, there is some justification for their concerns,” Gates said. “Their view is that in several successive instances the United States has turned its back on Pakistan. And the biggest question they have is, ‘Once you are done in Afghanistan, are you going home again? Or will we have a long-term relationship?’”

Gates said the U.S. intends to have a long-term relationship with both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the history of the U.S. role in the region is being exploited by the extremists to raise doubts about the Obama administration’s strategic goals and intentions.

“I have to say, regardless of the anti-American sentiment on the part of many Pakistan elite, what the Pakistani army has done in the Northwest Frontier area and south Waziristan … has been tremendously helpful to us,” he said. “They are moving in a direction and they are taking action in places that I will tell you that 18 months or two years ago I would have thought impossible. And they are doing it because it is in their own interest.”

Officials are trying to establish whether Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American suspected in the incident, had connections to foreign terrorist groups that either funded or helped in the botched bombing.