Clinton is blunt on Pakistan's terror fight
"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where [al-Qaeda leaders] are," she said in Lahore.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, pressing an unusual blitz on Pakistani public opinion, bluntly asked yesterday why Pakistan's powerful military was unable to find al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who is widely believed to be hiding in the country.
She also told university students that Pakistan would have to fight religious extremists unless "you want to see your territory shrink."
She delighted her audience by emphasizing her opposition to former President George W. Bush's administration, saying the difference was "like daylight and dark."
America's top diplomat wondered out loud why Pakistan had not been more successful in tracking down al-Qaeda's top leaders.
"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," she told newspaper editors in Lahore.
There was no immediate reaction from Pakistani officials, but Clinton's comments were startling, especially after months of comments from her and other U.S. officials portraying Pakistan's leaders as finally receptive to the war against extremists.
As a political spouse, career public official, and now diplomat, Clinton has had a tendency toward bluntness, sometimes followed by a softening of her comments.
But her charge that Pakistan isn't doing enough against al-Qaeda comes at a sensitive moment - amid a major Pakistani offensive against extremists and a deadly spate of insurgent violence, including a bombing in Peshawar on Wednesday that killed 100 people.
The Pakistani military yesterday took journalists for a first look inside the largely lawless South Waziristan since it launched a ground offensive in the rugged border territory in mid-October.
The U.S.-backed operation is focused on a section of the tribal region where the Pakistani Taliban is based and is believed to shelter al-Qaeda.
Soldiers displayed passports seized in the operation, among them a German document belonging to a man named Said Bahaji.
That matches the name of a man believed to have been a member of the Hamburg cell that conceived of the 9/11 attacks. Bahaji apparently fled Germany shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The passport included a tourist visa for Pakistan and a stamp indicating he had arrived in Karachi on Sept. 4, 2001.
Another passport, from Spain, bears the name of Raquel Burgos Garcia. Spanish media have reported that a woman with that name is married to Amer Azizi, an alleged al-Qaeda member from Morocco suspected in both the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
Her family in Madrid has had no news of her since 2001, according to Spanish media.
It was impossible to determine the authenticity of the passports.
Although the Pakistani military spent months using air strikes to soften up targets in South Waziristan, nearly two weeks into the ground offensive it has captured only a few areas, none of significant strategic value.
The army is still trying to secure the main roads and regularly comes under rocket fire.
"It's a long-drawn haul," a military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said.
Two days into Clinton's three-day visit, Pakistani analysts said distrust of the United States was so deep that Clinton had little hope of swaying attitudes.
The Pakistani public, news media, and political opposition blame the surge of violence in the country in large part on the U.S. presence in the region.
Even many highly educated Pakistanis believe far-fetched theories, including one that the United States is secretly backing the Islamic extremists so that Pakistan is destabilized and Washington can seize its nuclear weapons.
Pakistani commentators praised Clinton's spirit, however, for touring a country in which the president, Asif Ali Zardari, is rarely seen in public out of fear for his safety.
Clinton took on a panel of six of Pakistan's most aggressive talk-show hosts in a television appearance Wednesday, and she eagerly engaged the students in Lahore.
It Could've Been Obama-Clinton
Barack Obama seriously considered picking Hillary Rodham Clinton for the vice presidency, even though his top aides weren't enthusiastic about it, his presidential campaign manager says in a memoir.
"Neither Ax [top-level adviser David Axelrod] nor I were fans of the Hillary option," David Plouffe, who ran Obama's 2008 race, says in his memoir, portions of which were published by Time magazine yesterday.
"What surprised me was that Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than Ax and I had realized," Plouffe writes, describing a meeting the three had in late spring of last year when it became clear Obama would be the party's standard-bearer.
Plouffe says that by early August, Obama had narrowed his list to Sen. Joe Biden - now vice president - along with Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
- Associated Press
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