WASHINGTON: The United States has committed itself to help improve Pakistan’s ailing economy with a particular emphasis on assisting the country in dealing with the energy crisis, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke said on Monday.

Mr Holbrooke, in an interview to CNN, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had made this commitment during her recent trip to Pakistan.

Separately, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told a briefing in Washington that President Barack Obama was once again consulting his senior advisers on Wednesday for developing a new strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. This will be his 8th Situation Room meeting on the issue.

Secretary Clinton, who returned last week from a three-day visit to Pakistan, is expected to attend the meeting.

‘And this was an incredible … a very important trip in which we committed ourselves to much greater support of Pakistan’s democratic institutions and the economy in Pakistan, with particular attention to energy,’ said Mr Holbrooke.

Earlier, the interviewer – CNN’s Christiane Amanpour – played a clip which showed Secretary Clinton as saying that ‘there exists a trust deficit’ between Pakistan and the United States. She also pointed out that the secretary had ‘quite a lot of combative encounters’ with the Pakistanis during this visit.

‘The secretary of state had the most extraordinary trip I’ve ever seen of an American secretary of state,’ said Mr Holbrooke while commenting on the clip.

‘Hillary Clinton is enormously popular personality in Pakistan, but America is not popular. When she talked in that sound bite you just used of a trust deficit, that’s what she was referring to.’

Mr Holbrooke said that in Pakistan, Mrs Clinton ‘embarked on two trips at once’, the private meetings with the president, the prime minister, the foreign minister, the military and the opposition.

But at the same time, she also did massive public diplomacy, making herself available to editors, television, radio, Fata leaders, students, women and business leaders, and ‘very hostile journalists, very aggressive sceptical journalists’, said Mr Holbrooke.

‘In every discussion, when there was a disagreement — and there were plenty of disagreements — she said, in effect, the same message: We are friends who have some disagreements.’

Mr Holbrooke said he could not disclose how the new US policy for the region would look like but it would include two key points: Afghanistan is extraordinarily important to US national security and ‘Pakistan’s western areas remain a clear and present danger’.

Militants hiding in Fata, he said, were threat to ‘everyone, not only in the United States, but in Western Europe, in Pakistan itself, in India, and elsewhere throughout the region’.

The United States, he said, remained committed to the core objectives of defeating and dismantling Al Qaeda and of helping strengthen civilian democratic rule in Pakistan.