April 12, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 5, 1429

WASHINGTON, April 11: A senior US official has acknowledged that there are people in the tribal areas who need to be engaged but warned against talking to those who perpetuate violence.

In an interview to Dawn, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said there were two types of people in the tribal region: “reconcilable” and “irreconcilable” and the United States was not against talking to those it considers “reconcilable.”

He noted that negotiation with the militants hiding in the tribal area has always been part of Pakistan’s policy. “It’s part of the previous government’s policy and will be of a future government’s too,” he added.

But he also noted that the Pakistanis were being attacked every day in their own country. “Bombs going off, soldiers being killed, so when some people are trying to kill you; you are going to have to fight them.”

The US official, however, acknowledged that there were “other people in the tribal area who want peace and development and you have to talk to them.”

Mr Boucher said that he met leaders from both the government and opposition groups during his recent visit to Pakistan and discussed the issue of terrorism with them.

“We found the same spirit across the spectrum,” he added, explaining that the Pakistanis were as eager to fight terrorism as the United States was.

Asked who among the militants were not eligible for talks, Mr Boucher said the “irreconcilable” elements included hardcore Al Qaeda bombers and kidnappers who also had killed a lot of Pakistanis.

“But we also know a lot of tribal people who want peace, stability, and development,” he said, and these are the ones who can be engaged.

Mr Boucher said that Deputy Secretary John Negroponte and he talked about Al Qaeda’s presence in the tribal region when they visited Pakistan but Pakistani security agencies are not only aware of their presence, they also know that Al Qaeda elements are behind the attacks they have to encounter.

He said he did not go to Pakistan with any fresh evidence of Al Qaeda’s involvement in former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination but “we too have information that indicates that Baitullah Mehsud was behind the killing.”

When reminded that several US leaders have said they would not hesitate to hit targets inside Pakistan if they had “actionable intelligence,” Mr Boucher said since the US and Pakistan were partners in the war against terror, they work with each other to deal with this threat.

Mr Boucher described the demand for the restoration of judges dismissed during the emergency as “a political issue” and said that since parties in Pakistan were already discussing it, he would not say whether the US supports or opposes the demand.“It is not for us. It is for them to discuss,” he added.

The United States, he said, was for an independent judiciary in Pakistan and once key issues were discussed and decided in the Pakistani political system, “We will be prepared to do whatever we can to support it.”

Asked was the US against the restoration of the former chief justice because he released a number of terror suspects, Mr Boucher said: “We made comments on various junctures on that.”

He said that a deal Nato signed with Russia earlier this month for supplying its troops in Afghanistan did not diminish Pakistan’s position as a lot of containers still go through Pakistan.