January 28, 2003	Tuesday	Ziqa’ad 24, 1423

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WASHINGTON, Jan 27: “We are not fools that we will act in a reckless manner and jeopardize the interests of our country,” said Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, who began a series of meetings with US officials in Washington on Monday.

He was responding to media reports that Pakistan had provided assistance to North Korea’s nuclear programme in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“We have not and will never indulge in activities that endanger our own security and cause unnecessary risks to our allies,” he said.

The first senior US official he was scheduled to meet in Washington on Monday was Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, however, would be more interested in Pakistan’s assistance to net the Taliban and Al Qaeda fugitives.

On Wednesday, Mr Kasuri will meet Powell for talks on various issues, including Kashmir and INS registration. On Thursday, he has two difficult meetings with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA director George Tenet.

Both Rice and Tenet are considered tough customers. As some Pakistani diplomats indicated, the two leaders may confront the foreign minister with information they might have received from their field agents in Pakistan — information that is not easy to deal with in such meetings.

Tenet, particularly, is expected to raise questions about links between Pakistani religious groups and Al Qaeda, the infiltration across the Line of Control and how Kashmiri groups have retained their ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban movement.

There’s a thinking in Washington that some people within the Pakistani establishment might have played a role in assuring the MMA’s victory from certain areas in the October elections to built pressure on Washington. This may or may not come up in Kasuri’s talks with US officials but is often reflected in media reports in the United States.

In his address to the Pakistani community at the embassy, Mr Kasuri described such reports as motivated by those who wanted to thin out Pakistan’s relations with the United States.

“Every week you see a story planted, there has to be a reason behind this. There are forces that are trying to draw a wedge between Pakistan and the United States,” he complained.

The foreign minister said that Pakistan wanted to “maintain its friendship with the US and further strengthened it”.