Pakistan pleads for trust in battle against terror

UNITED NATIONS - More than 30,000 Pakistanis have been killed by "the monster of terrorism" in the past decade, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Tuesday appealing for greater international trust in her government's efforts.

The minister set out Pakistan's case to the UN General Assembly as her government faced US demands that it clamp down on a Pakistani-based group blamed for an attack on the US embassy in Kabul.

"We must demonstrate complete unity in ranks, avoid any recrimination, build greater trust and more importantly bring about the requisite operational coordination in combating this menace," Khar said.

"Otherwise only the terrorists will gain."

Khar told the UN summit that "very few countries have been ravaged by the monster of terrorism as brutally as Pakistan."

She said that among the 30,000 "innocent Pakistanis" killed over the past decade, 6,500 were troops and more than 3,600 were police and paramilitary personnel.

Khar highlighted the death of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in a 2007 attack.

"Numerous politicians have lost sons and brothers and fathers at the hands of terrorists. Our streets are filled with armed police posts. We cannot enter our parks, or shopping centers or churches or mosques without being frisked," she said.

Pakistan is "united in its determination to eliminate the specter of terrorism from our soil, our region and the world. It is important to enhance international cooperation to totally obliterate terrorism."

Virtually as Khar spoke at the UN headquarters, the White House was renewing its criticism of the Pakistan government.
"The Pakistani government needs to take action to deal with the links that exist there," said spokesman Jay Carney, accusing the "the Haqqani network" of blame for attacks on the US embassy in Kabul and international troops in Afghanistan.

The Paki! stan-US alliance in the 10-year war in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda hit rock bottom this year after the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad on May 2.

In a series of escalating rows, Washington has accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of involvement in the September 13 attack on its embassy in Kabul and a September 11 attack on a NATO base in central Afghanistan.

The White House has demanded that Pakistan "break any link they have" with the Haqqani network, which was founded by former CIA asset Jalaluddin Haqqani and is run by his son Sirajuddin -- based in North Waziristan.

Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Kayani on Monday scrapped a visit to London as Islamabad refused to bow to mounting US demands for action against Haqqani.

Last week, the outgoing top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, accused Pakistan of "exporting" violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect US troops.