(MENAFN- The Peninsula) The US and Pakistan vowed yesterday to intensify a crackdown on militants hiding in lawless border areas, as top diplomat John Kerry urged renewed peace talks with India to strengthen regional stability.
Last month's shocking school massacre in Peshawar by the Pakistani Taliban triggered global outrage, and sharpened the focus on militant groups hiding in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region. Islamabad began a full-scale offensive against Taliban and other militants in the North Waziristan tribal district in June, after ignoring US calls for action for years.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Pakistan's national security adviser Sartaj Aziz, Kerry said Pakistan deserved "enormous credit" for the operation.
"I emphasised that the US is committed to deepening our security relationship with Pakistan in order to eliminate threats in the border area and elsewhere," the US Secretary of State told reporters.
Last month's massacre killed 150 people, mostly schoolboys. In response the government announced plans for military courts to hear terror cases and ended a moratorium on the death penalty for convicted militants.
The attack was "a reminder of the serious risk of allowing extremists to find space, and be able to command that space and operate within it", Kerry said.
Earlier in strategic talks with a top Pakistani official, he said the operation in Waziristan had already led to "significant results".
Kerry later met senior Pakistani military commanders at their headquarters in Rawalpindi to discuss joint military efforts and plans for greater intelligence-sharing.
The US has carried out a series of drone strikes in the tribal regions since Islamabad resumed its own offensive there, raising speculation that the two nations' militaries are working together on Pakistani soil. Pakistani officials, however, denounce the drone attacks as a violation of sovereignty. Kerry had planned to visit Peshawar where the massacre took place, but the State Department later issued a statement saying weather concerns forced him to cancel the trip and he later departed for Geneva.
Kerry warned that all terror groups - such as the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-e-Taiba - "continue to pose a threat not just to Pakistan and its neighbours but also to the United States and the world".
"Make no mistake the task is a difficult one and it is not done," Kerry said.
"We all have a responsibility to ensure that these extremists are no longer able to secure a foothold in this country or elsewhere."
Some analysts believe Pakistan's security services see the Haqqanis as an "asset" and maintain close links with them.
But Aziz vowed yesterday that Pakistan would take action "without discrimination, against all groups" seen as spreading terror both in Pakistan and neighbouring countries, adding that the Haqqani network's infrastructure had been "totally destroyed" by the North Waziristan operation.
Kerry also stressed that Washington had what he called a "uniform concern about the region's stability", urging India and Pakistan to return to peace talks.
"It is profoundly in the interests of Pakistan and India to move their relationship forward," he told reporters.
"This is the hardest kind of work. It means you have to put a lot of time and effort into overcoming historical mistrust and past events, enmities."
Washington would do whatever it could to help, the top US diplomat said, but he stressed it was ultimately up to the two sides to resolve their differences. India abruptly called off planned peace talks last August after Pakistan consulted Kashmiri separatists before the dialogue began.
Pakistan and India, who have fought two of their three wars over disputed Muslim-majority Kashmir, have traded blame for an upsurge in firing and shelling across the de facto border in Kashmir which started in October.
Recent exchanges of fire across the frontier known as the Line of Control (LoC) have killed more than two dozen civilians and forced thousands to flee their homes on both sides.
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