American efforts to talk peace with insurgents in Afghanistan mean Washington can no longer expect Pakistan to attack all the militant factions on its side of the border, some of whom Islamabad is also reaching out to, the commander of Pakistan's forces along the frontier has said.
In a sign of the bad blood between Washington and Islamabad, Lt Gen Khalid Rabbani also accused the US of seeking to make Pakistan a scapegoat for its failure to beat the insurgency in Afghanistan.
US and NATO officials say Pakistani tolerance of, or support for, Afghan factions operating on its soil is hobbling efforts to end the resistance to the foreign military presence in Afghanistan. The US wants Pakistan to launch an offencive or otherwise disrupt militant groups in North Waziristan, the stronghold for multiple insurgent networks on the border.
"Why do they to raise their fingers toward Pakistan? It is shifting the blame to others," Rabbani told AP in his offices in a highly secure section of the main northwestern city of Peshawar. "Is Afghanistan free of Taliban? It has hundreds of thousands of them."
Rabbani was speaking a day after militants in North Waziristan beheaded 13 Pakistani soldiers, including four that it captured when Pakistani troops raided a militant hideout.
The killings highlighted the dilemma facing the military in dealing with an area used by both the country's fiercest enemies, the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, and Afghan and Pakistani militants who are battling US-led forces in Afghanistan but who the army believes don't pose a direct threat to Islamabad.
One powerful faction in North Waziristan is led by a commander called Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who is believed to have signed a nonaggression pact with the government but still funnels fighters into Afghanistan. Rabbani defended the government's dealings with Bahadur, saying "at the moment he seems to be trying to keep himself out of the trouble."
