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.

In other words, if President Barack Obama wants to achieve his goal to defeat al Qaeda, the strategic prize is Pakistan and its border area with Afghanistan, a region Obama called the 'epicenter' of violent extremism when he announced his new Afghan war policy Tuesday night.

'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.

The hard part, said ex-CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, was to get Islamabad to cooperate in the fight against extremists in what is an increasingly complex political climate in Pakistan.

President Asif Ali Zardari's government is teetering and public opinion still staunchly anti-American, albeit less so than under the Bush administration.

Too much US pressure makes Zardari's position even more precarious, particularly with the army and police.

'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.

RATTLED BY STRATEGY

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.

Congress has been pushing the Obama administration to put more pressure on Pakistan and Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts made this point during a hearing in Washington on Thursday.

'Today it is the presence of al Qaeda in Pakistan, its direct ties to and support from the Taliban in Afghanistan and the perils of an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan that drive our mission,' he said.

Senior US officials traveled to Pakistan in recent weeks to discuss the new Afghan strategy, including national security adviser James Jones, who personally delivered a letter to Zardari from Obama, urging Islamabad to do more.

Obama has offered Zardari a range of incentives, including enhanced intelligence sharing and military cooperation, and experts expect there to be more CIA-operated pilotless drone attacks on suspected al Qaeda and Taliban targets as part of the new strategy.

Nearly 50 drone air strikes in northwestern border regions this year have killed about 415 people, including many foreign militants, according to Pakistani officials and residents, but these attacks raise hackles locally.

Since 2001, the United States has given more than $10 billion in US military aid to Pakistan, and the Pentagon has started rushing hundreds of millions of dollars more to its military in recent months.

Much of that assistance is under the radar because of political sensitivities and fears of annoying India, Pakistan's arch rival but an increasingly important ally for Washington in the region.

The Pakistani government has been asking for additional F-16 fighter jets, and Riedel said they were also pushing for jets that could operate at night as their current capacity was limited mostly to the day.

During the strategic review, Vice President Joe Biden was pushing for more focus on Pakistan, with discussions over whether to have more 'unilateral operations' inside the country, seen by most experts as very risky.

'I can imagine the very, very exceptional case where some limited operations might be called upon, but as an ongoing military tactic it has bad news written all over it,' Hathaway said.

Any radical, unilateral action, such as sending in special forces, would further alienate pro-Western elements in Pakistan, said Nick Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation who recently wrote a book on Pakistan.

No amount of goodwill could remove the decades-old trust deficit between the United States and Pakistan, he said. 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. – Reuters