Pakistanis confront Clinton over drone attacks

On another thorny topic, Clinton slightly softened her blunt charge of a day earlier that Pakistani officials know where Al Qaeda terrorists are hiding and are doing little about it.

Clinton faced sharp questions from Pakistani civilians about the US effort that uses unmanned aircraft to launch missiles to kill terrorists along the porous, ungoverned border with Afghanistan.

But she refused to go into detail about the classified strikes that have killed both key terrorist leaders and bystanders, long a source of outrage among Pakistan’s population despite an equally deadly campaign of militant-spawned bombings.

Asked repeatedly about the drones, a subject that involves highly classified CIA operations, Clinton said only that “there is a war going on.’’ She added that the Obama administration is committed to helping Pakistan defeat the insurgents.

Clinton left Islamabad for Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates after a tour that was rocked at the start by a devastating terrorist bombing in Peshawar that killed 105 people, many of them women and children.

Her visit revealed clear signs of strain between the two nations despite months of public insistence that they were on the same wavelength in the war on terror.

What is less apparent is what US officials hope will come from Clinton’s tough language about Pakistani officials’ failure to eliminate Al Qaeda as a threat within their borders.

While her remarks echo the skepticism that many Americans have felt about Pakistan’s failure to target Al Qaeda’s leaders, it is not at all certain that they will prod stepped-up action.

Pakistan’s military recently launched a major offensive in the South Waziristan border area to clear out insurgent hide-outs. But two earlier army efforts made little progress there - leaving questions about the military’s resolve to tackle Al Qaeda head-on.

Two US defense officials said yesterday that the latest Pakistani sweep into South Waziristan, though still early, was making progress. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about the Pakistani offensive.

Before she flew to the emirates Clinton carefully scaled back her comments from a day earlier suggesting that some Pakistani officials knew where Al Qaeda’s upper echelon has been hiding and have done little to target them.

When the US gathers evidence that Al Qaeda fugitives are hiding in Pakistan, Clinton said yesterday during a Pakistani media interview, “We feel like we have to go to the government of Pakistan and say, somewhere these people have to be hidden out.’’

“We don’t know where, and I have no information that they know where, but this is a big government. You know, it’s a government on many levels. Somebody, somewhere in Pakistan must know where these people are. And we’d like to know because we view them as really at the core of the terrorist threat that threatens Pakistan, threatens Afghanistan, threatens us, threatens people all over the world,’’ she said.

The White House is standing behind Clinton’s blunt suggestion that Pakistani officials know where top terrorists are hiding.