WASHINGTON, April 27: The Americans so strongly believed in the reports that Pakistan wanted Afghanistan to abandon the United States and ally itself with China that the US military chief asked the Pakistani army chief to personally assure him that such reports were incorrect, diplomatic sources told Dawn.

“When Admiral Mike Mullen met Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in Islamabad last week, he too asked his Pakistani counterpart to assure him that Islamabad was not working with Kabul and Beijing to forge a secret deal with the Taliban,” the sources said.

Later, a senior US official told Pakistani diplomats that Washington “trusted the assurance given by Gen Kayani”.

“The Americans were so concerned that when Gen James N. Mattis, commander US Central Command, met Ambassador Husain Haqqani, he also sought a similar assurance.”

As Centcom commander, Gen Mattis is responsible for all US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the alleged Pakistani overture to the Afghan government, attributed it to Afghan officials present during a meeting between Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul earlier this month.

But Obama administration officials, when contacted by the US media, said their reading of the Gilani-Karzai meeting differed sharply from that of the Afghan officials.

“Although the Pakistanis did caution the Afghans not to become too dependent on the Americans,” one official said, “they were reaching out to the Karzai government in a way that suggested they thought the time was right to move towards some kind of political settlement.”

“The good news,” the official said, “is that I think that there’s some prospect that Afghanistan will become the common ground on which the US and Pakistan” could solidify their relationship.

A spokesman for the Afghan president also has rejected the report as “baseless and incorrect”.

“Reports claiming Gilani-Karzai discussion about Pakistan advising alignment away from US are inaccurate,” Ambassador Haqqani wrote on his Twitter feed.

“It is part of a campaign to constantly paint Pakistan in a negative light in America,” he said. “We are rebuilding the relationship based on mutual trust.”

Earlier, Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tehmina Janjua told reporters in Islamabad that “this is the most ridiculous report we have come across”.

But in a report posted on its site on Wednesday afternoon, The Washington Post claimed that Prime Minister “Gilani read to President Karzai from a paper outlining Pakistan’s view that the US military strategy had no prospect for success, that its troops antagonised the region and that the Afghan government should avoid any agreement that allows long-term American military bases in Afghanistan, according to the Afghans”.

“Because of the growing fiscal problems in the United States, Mr Gilani argued, America was a power in decline, one without the ability to support Afghanistan and Pakistan in the future, and Afghans should look “for alternative allies”, a senior Afghan official told the Post.

“That was the first time that the whole Pakistani state, military and civilian, spoke to us with one voice. That is important,” the Afghan official said. “If a country comes and puts its conditions on the table, we have to take that seriously

Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at Heritage Foundation, said: “It’s also possible that some Afghan leaders are exaggerating or fabricating Mr Gilani’s statements for their own purposes, particularly to influence crucial US-Afghan negotiations on a strategic partnership agreement to guide relations beyond 2014.” Others said they were surprised why WSJ decided to publish a story that was “so obviously biased against Pakistan”.