WASHINGTON: The United States remains committed to a relationship with Pakistan and will continue to work with it “in our mutual interest”, says the US State Department.

“We remain committed to our continued cooperation, and we will continue to work at it in our mutual interest,” State Department’s spokesperson Victoria Nuland said when asked at a briefing to define America’s relations with Pakistan.

On Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest described the arrest of a senior Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan as “an example of the longstanding partnership between the US and Pakistan in fighting terrorism, which has taken many terrorists off the battlefield over the past decade”.

In Pakistan, the military’s press office, Inter Services Public Relations asserted that “both Pakistan and the US intelligence agencies continue to work closely together to enhance security of their respective nations”.

Diplomatic observers in Washington have noted that such statements show a new desire in both US and Pakistani capitals to repair the damage done to their relationship by the May 2 US raid on a compound in Abbottabad that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky, known for his critiques of US foreign policy, is among those intellectuals who believe that the unilateral US raid has hurt America’s interests by encouraging jihadi tendencies in the Muslim world.

“Was there an alternative? There is very likelihood that the jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of Bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11,” he argues in an article published on Wednesday.

“The ‘crime against humanity’, as it (the 9/11 attack) was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognised at the time, but no such idea was even considered.” —Anwar Iqbal