Twirp: Terrorist Wahabi Islamic Rep Pakistan 5

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[URL="http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/03-us-struggles-to-get-pakistan-policy-right-ss-02"] US struggles to get Pakistan policy right[/URL]

WASHINGTON: The Obama administration may be putting out a fire in Afghanistan, but the dynamite factory is next door in nuclear-armed Pakistan, commented Democratic lawmaker Gary Ackerman this week.



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'My constituents keep asking? Is it worth risking the lives of those who respond to the fire in a place that may or may not hold a lot of value in and of itself,' Ackerman, a US congressman from New York, told Obama's defense and diplomatic chiefs.

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'It is a very delicate balancing act,' said Riedel, now with the Brookings Institution think tank. 'You don't change Pakistan's strategic behavior very easily. It is not something that will change in the course of months or years,' he added.





The Pakistanis are rattled by what the United States is doing in Afghanistan, with contradictory positions of not wanting a 'surge' of 30,000 more US forces across the border while also fearing Washington will withdraw too quickly and destabilize the region further. 'So they don't want us to surge or leave, but they also don't want to do more to make America and Nato policy in Afghanistan more likely of any sort of success,' said Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center, another Washington-based think tank.



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For example a proposed $7.5 billion non-military US aid package has been met with bountiful suspicion, particularly from the army, which says it comes with too many conditions. 'They don't seem to want a strategic relationship. They want the money, they want the equipment, but at the end of the day they don't want a relationship that costs them too much,' said Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.