<b>US nixes Pak plea for Indian troop withdrawal</b>
WASHINGTON : Pakistan is pressing the Obama administration to ask India to reduce troops from its borders in order for Islamabad to spend more resources to fighting extremists inside its own territory. President Obama isn't buying that, according to US officials
<b>Instead, Pakistan will be told again that it needs to get out of its India fixation and look within itself when President Asif Ali Zardari meets President Obama at the White House on Wednesday.
Zardari will also be asked to account for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its security amid worldwide concerns about extremists getting close to the weapons.</b>
Zardari's line going into the three-way talks with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai to be hosted by Obama this week was outlined by the country's US ambassador Hussain Haqqani, who told an online forum "It's time for Obama to put in a call to the Indians telling them, 'If you move some of your troops, they'll move theirs."
Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kiyani is said to have made just that promise in a recent meeting with US special envoy Richard Holbrooke. But the White House dismissed the idea, while conceding that there may have been some conversations along those lines.
"I think the President spoke pretty clearly to this last week in underscoring where the threat lies in Pakistan and where it doesn't," Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs said at a White House briefing on Monday. The President, Gibbs said, will reiterate what he told the media at his White House press conference last week, when he essentially maintained that Pakistan's obsession with India as a mortal threat was misguided and the country ought to get over it.
Instead, US officials revealed that Washington is now focused on Pakistan's nuclear weapons with laser-like intensity and it will be the top item on the agenda for talks where even Afghanistan is talking a backseat.
In an interview with BBC, US National Security Advisor James Jones said Washington needs specific guarantees from Islamabad that its nuclear weapons are safe.
"If Pakistan doesn't continue in the direction that it presently is (moving towards moderation) and we're not successful there then, obviously, the nuclear question comes into view," Jones said.
"We have received many assurances from the military that this is something they have under control but this is very much an ongoing topic," he added. "The world would like to know that on this question, that there's absolute security and transparency."
Privately, US officials say Pakistani guarantees are vague and unspecific and Washington is looking for more concrete assurances. Pakistan's descent into chaos and custody of its nuclear weapons has become the hot button topic in Washington, where Iraq has virtually fallen off the map. Every think tank in town is bashing heads about Pakistan. Headlines and cartoons in the US media portray a dire situation and a bleak future for the country.
One recent cartoon showed a lone Pakistani sentry sitting atop a nuclear bomb and asking "Stop! Who goes there?" as shadowy Osama-like figures lurk all around it. Pakistan's eternal gripe against India is getting less and less traction as US talking heads get more familiar with the region's history going back to the events leading to the creation of the Islamic Republic. On Sunday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined current administration officials in reflecting about Pakistan's identity crisis and its India's fixation.
"Pakistan is just such a fragile entity," Rice was quoted as saying in response to a question at Jewish Primary Day School in Washington after delivering the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Lecture. "You know, having been carved as it was, essentially, out of India, its identity has always been a problem and its always -- not always, but some elements in Pakistan find their identity through extremism and through extreme anti-India sentiment."
India, Rice said, speaking freely in a rare public appearance, does not want to be part of this crisis and is focusing on more positive things like economic development. But "there are some people for whom there is no positive agenda for Pakistan; it's all about aggression."
Whether the Obama administration will be able to convince Pakistan fully about this -- despite the President's claim that Islamabad is starting to comprehend it -- remains to be seen. Most experts reckon that while Zardari and others in Pakistan's civilian leadership get it, its hardline military remains inflexible.
Zardari is being accompanied to Washington by the ISI Director General Ahmed Shuja Pasha and the chief of military operations Maj Gen Javid Iqbal.
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