Pakistan, NATO talks stumble on eve of summit

Talks between NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari were canceled Saturday as Islamabad appeared headed for a clash with the U.S. over reopening Afghan supply routes. Both NATO and Pakistani officials insisted to AFP that the last-minute delay in the planned meeting in Chicago was due to the late arrival of Zardari's flight from London. But the cancellation came after U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in an interview that he thought Islamabad was demanding too high a price to reopen the supply routes into Afghanistan closed after U.S. air strikes in November. "This cancelation is due to a scheduling problem," said NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero, on the eve of a two-day NATO summit being held in Chicago which opens on Sunday. "Mr. Zardari's plane was delayed" which meant the talks with the NATO secretary general could not go ahead as planned, she told AFP. A spokesman for Zardari also insisted the Pakistani leader's delayed arrival had squeezed the bilateral talks off the agenda. A meeting with Rasmussen "will be scheduled later if possible," added spokesman Farhatullah Babar, telling AFP that the negotiations on the supply route were "going well." But Panetta told the Los Angeles Times before arriving in Chicago that the price Islamabad was demanding to allow NATO supply trucks to cross its territory into Afghanistan was too high. Pakistan had called for $5,000 per truck, much higher than the $250 it was collecting on average before the routes were closed after the deadly killing of 26 Pakistani troops in U.S. strikes in late November, the LA Times reported. "Considering the financial challenges that we're facing, that's not likely," Panetta told the daily. Thousands of trucks a day are thought to cross the border, meaning that any levies could prove a profitable source of income for the Pakistani government. Zardari accepted a last-minute invitation to join the NATO talks in Chicago amid expectations that Pakistan will lift the six-month blockade. The White House was hoping the issue would soon be resolved, said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes on Saturday. Briefing journalists travelling to Chicago on Air Force One with President Barack Obama, Rhodes said: "Based on the statements they've made, the negotiations going on, we believe it's going to be accomplished. "We're not anticipating necessarily closing out those negotiations this weekend." NATO has also pressed Islamabad to do more to prevent insurgents from taking advantage of the porous Afghan-Pakistani border region to take sanctuary inside Pakistan. "We can't solve the problems in Afghanistan without the positive engagement of Pakistan," Rasmussen told a policy forum here earlier Saturday. "We have to solve these problems," he said, referring to the safe havens used by insurgents in Pakistan to launch attacks on NATO troops across the border.