WASHINGTON, Oct 28: The United States is confident that Pakistan will continue to back the military campaign in Afghanistan despite Gen Pervez Musharraf’s expressed reservations with regard to the duration of the campaign.

This was indicated by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appearing in a talk show on the ABC network on Sunday in reply to a question drawing attention to Gen Musharraf’s recent remarks about the need for the bombing to be shortened and a switch made to a political strategy.

Asked whether this could mean that Pakistan was beginning to chafe at the bit and could pull out if the situation remained unchanged, Mr Rumsfeld said: “Pakistan is not going to pull out.” He also pointed out that there was nothing in the General’s statements with which one could disagree, because everyone wanted the military campaign to come to an end as soon possible. It should be realized that Gen Musharraf was in a difficult position, and he was “doing a terrific job” in managing a “very difficult situation,” the defence secretary added.

He repeated his assessment of Pakistan’s problem in another interview on Sunday, this one on CNN, saying America was respectful of the situation facing that country. But he stressed also that the risk posed by terrorists continued and would have to be eliminated. The problem, he said, was not the US, but terrorism.

Mr Rumsfeld, asked by ABC to comment on commander Abdul Haq’s execution, admitted that the commander had requested for assistance and had got it from the air, but it was too late to rescue him. But the defence secretary refused to define the source of the assistance, saying it was not from the US military but from another government agency or element.

A report in The Washington Post on Sunday alleged Abdul Haq was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and other Western intelligence agencies.

Mr Rumsfeld said the Afghanistan operation was going “the way we expected it to go”. Pressure had been built up on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and the US was getting better information from the ground to guide its air attacks.

He was ambivalent on whether or not the United States was contemplating military action against Iraq for involvement in terrorism or if it was found that it was the source of the current outbreak of anthrax attacks in America, a point repeatedly brought up in news commentaries here.

Mr Rumsfeld referred to the fact that Iraq was on the US list of states sponsoring terrorism and said he was not going to get into “could haves” and “might haves”, but asserted that the war against terrorist networks would be waged across the globe.