WASHINGTON: In her first public speech since taking over as Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, has emphasised the need for resetting US-Pakistan relationship under new rules of engagement to prevent future crises.

Addressing a Washington policy audience on Wednesday, she also said that Pakistan was working to step up dialogue with India and to make it more result-oriented with the hope the Kashmir issue could be resolved peacefully.

Her appearance at the US Institute of Peace marked the first time a Pakistani official has spoken in Washington since the Nov 26 Nato air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, causing Islamabad to block Nato supply routes to Afghanistan.

“A reset is needed for a number of very good reasons. Some of these are structural, while some of the famous ‘trust deficit’ gaps are informed by a profound cognitive, and even institutional, disconnect,” she said.

“Our challenge in the days ahead is to not only re-set this relationship in seminal ways so that we avoid being caught in the cross-hairs of a tough conflict in a very tough neighbourhood, but also to build on vital gains that can bring more light than heat to any given situation.”

Among other tangibles, both sides needed a series of codified protocols to prevent episodes like the Nov 26 raid and to deal with future crises more aptly.

She pointed out that the current rules of engagement, “leave this vital relationship too vulnerable to the enemies of peace, as well as to our own gaps in communication.”

On an equally important relationship, that with India, Ambassador Rehman assured the audience that Pakistan notonly wanted to continue the peace talks but also to make them more meaningful.

“It is our intent to enhance our dialogue with India and to make it productive and result-oriented, with the hope that the Kashmir issue finds just and peaceful resolution,” she said.

Pakistan, she said, was pursuing a non-intrusive peace offensive in South Asia.

“In English, this means broadening and strengthening our relationship with India, which is stepping up to our offers of multiple and sustained conversations,” Ms Rehman said, adding that Pakistan would support a peace process that was Afghan-led and Afghan owned, in real-time practice, not just as a policy platitude.

“We do not consider Afghanistan our strategic backyard, as many claim we do, but we do have the highest stakes in Afghan stability since we simply cannot afford the blow-back from either a civil war there again, nor any other kind of surge into Pakistan, with its long, porous border,” she said.

“Our motives in the region are driven by a legitimate anxiety about the security transition in a post-US draw down timeline in Afghanistan, certainly not ambition,” she said.

Coming to the US at a time when relations between the two countries have hit a rock-bottom, Ms Rehman insisted that it wasstill not late to mend this relationship.

“Many of the gaps can be mitigated, if we step back, give pause and re-construct,” she said.

“But on the strategic end, this relationship has been burdened with too many expectations, and invested with an inordinately high wattage of emotion.”

Given the state of strategic flux the South Asian region faced at a time of unprecedented challenges and responsibilities, “this is too important and too sensitive a relationship to carry this volume and scale of unregulated hyperbole”, she said.

The good news, she noted, was that many on both sides believed it’s time that this relationship matured into a more consistent, stable and transparent equation, with weight given to mutual respect.

“But that would be the subject best reserved right now for our parliament to decide,” she added, while referring to a parliamentary review in Pakistan which began after Nov 26 and still continues.

“I would take this opportunity to say that the tragedy at Mohmand really served as an end-line trigger that called for a fundamental re-set,” she said. Ambassador Rehman said that it was indeed shocking for the Pakistani nation to see the flag-draped bodies of 24 soldiers martyred in the attack, “at the hands of our allies”.

“In the absence of an immediate apology, this did cause the Pakistan street to erupt with questions about the egregious asymmetry in the calculus of comparative sacrifice between our two nations in terms of blood and treasure,” she added.

“So while the incident left a strong mark on the Pakistani psyche, spurring a re-think of the modalities of how we had been working together, it was not the sole motive for the Pakistani call for a re-think.”

Ambassador Rehman noted that this event itself came on the heels of a long line of bilateral catastrophes in 2011, which started with the arrest of a CIA contractor in Lahore for killing two Pakistani citizens.“For Pakistanis, the notion of territorial sovereignty dominates public space in important ways, simply because the symbol of its subversion is so repeatedly and unfortunately associated with the growing US footprint in Pakistan,” she observed.

“However, make no mistake; to us terrorists represent as much a breach of our sovereignty as state-sponsored unilateralism of any kind.”