ISLAMABAD, 7 January 2008 — Pakistan reiterated yesterday that it will not let American forces hunt Al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on its soil, after a news report said Washington was considering expanding US military and intelligence operations into Pakistan’s tribal regions.
The military dismissed as “speculative” a story in the New York Times yesterday saying US President George W. Bush’s top security officials discussed a proposal Friday to deploy American troops to pursue militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
“We are very clear. Nobody is going to be allowed to do anything here,” said Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the army’s top spokesman. “The government has said it so many times,” Arshad said.
“No foreign forces will be allowed to operate inside Pakistan.
“It is not up to the US administration, it is Pakistan’s government who is responsible for this country,” Arshad told AFP.
“There are no overt or covert US operations inside Pakistan. Such reports are baseless and we reject them.” The New York Times reported on its website late Saturday that under a proposal being discussed in Washington, CIA operatives based in Afghanistan would be able to call on direct military support for counterterrorism operations in neighboring Pakistan.
Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said the proposal called for giving Central Intelligence Agency agents broader powers to strike targets in Pakistan.
The United States now has about 50 soldiers in Pakistan, the report said.
The new plan was reportedly discussed by Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security aides in the wake of the Dec. 27 assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.
The US government has not formally presented its proposals to President Pervez Musharraf or the new army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the report noted.
But several of the participants of the meeting argued that the threat to the Musharraf government was now so grave that both he and Pakistani generals were likely to give the United States more latitude for action, the paper pointed out.
Pakistan’s former Ambassador to Italy Zafar Halaly, who was a close aide to slain former Premier Benazir Bhutto, told Arab News, Benazir was making serious efforts to prevent any such eventuality.
Aftab Shabaan Mirani, a former defense minister, also told Arab News, Benazir was concerned such a situation might develop and she had plans to tackle it.
Army spokesman Arshad also dismissed comments from US White House hopeful Hillary Clinton that she would propose a joint US-British team to oversee the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if she was elected president.
“We do not require anybody’s assistance. We are fully capable of doing it on our own,” he said. “So far as we know right now, the nuclear technology is considered secure, but there isn’t any guarantee, especially given the political turmoil going on inside Pakistan,” Hillary said during a Democratic debate here.
If elected president, the US senator said, “I would try to get President Musharraf to share the security responsibility of the nuclear weapons with a delegation from the United States and, perhaps, Great Britain, so that there is some fail-safe.” The four Democratic candidates — Hillary, Sen. Barack Obama, Gov. Bill Richardson and former Sen. John Edwards — were critical of President George W. Bush’s policy toward Pakistan. They said they were prepared to launch unilateral military strikes in the country if they detected an imminent threat or could pinpoint the location of Bin Laden.

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