WASHINGTON: The US State Department indulged in a damage-control exercise on Thursday, urging Pakistanis not to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement on a proposed gas pipeline from Iran as a threat.

Secretary Clinton told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that the project was “inexplicable” and could invoke US sanctions that would further ‘undermine’ Pakistan’s ‘already shaky’ economy.

“Yesterday Secretary Clinton at the Hill said that Pakistan will face dangerous implications if it goes ahead with this gas pipeline with Iran. Was this some kind of warning to Pakistan? And why was it so?” a journalist asked State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland on Thursday.

“Well, I don’t think what the secretary said was appreciably different than what we’ve been saying for weeks and weeks, publicly, privately, if not months on this subject,” Ms Nuland replied. “You know, this is something that we don’t think is a good idea, and the secretary made that absolutely clear.”

The US official noted that Iran was making “all kinds of offers to all kinds of countries”, to break strict sanctions the United States and  its allies had imposed on Tehran to persuade it to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. “And they often don’t live up to their promises,” Ms Nuland claimed.

The State Department official claimed the US was aware of Pakistan’s energy needs and was working with Islamabad to meet those needs. “And we would just encourage them to think twice about aligning themselves with an ‘unreliable partner’,” she said.

“Can you tell us what kind of implications Pakistan would face when it goes ahead with this pipeline? Because the foreign minister of Pakistan today said Pakistan is going ahead with this pipeline project,” asked another journalist.

“Well, again, you know that we have a variety of sanctions on the books that we would not want to see kick in this instance, which is, you know, among the reasons why we think this is a bad idea and hope it doesn’t move forward,” Ms Nuland replied.