White House won’t apologise to Pakistan

The White House has ruled out an apology to Islamabad for November 26 attacks by US aircraft that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, saying it is time that the two countries move ahead. “I wouldn’t have anything new to offer on that beyond what we have said, that we deeply regret the incident. We have thoroughly investigated it. We shared the results of that investigation with the Pakistanis,” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told journalists when asked about his reaction to Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s demand for an apology. “We believe there’s a basis for us to move forward and move beyond that particular incident, to take steps to make sure that that doesn’t happen again, to be respectful of Pakistani sovereignty and to be in, frankly, better communication in that areas so that we don’t see repeated incidents on the border,” he said at a conference at the Foreign Press Centre. Responding to another question, Rhodes said a bilateral meeting between US President Barack Obama and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari was never planned on the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Chicago. “On the matter of a bilateral meeting, the president didn’t host any formal bilateral meetings except for the one with President Karzai, given the fact that there was a very busy NATO summit schedule. So it was always our intention to really focus his time on these multilateral meetings,” he said. He said that the meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai was a priority, as Afghanistan was the focus of the summit. President Obama was able to meet on the margins of the meetings with a handful of leaders that included President Zardari, he added. “They met twice around the margins of the ISAF session. These weren’t extensive talks. They were rather brief. But one of them was a one-on-one between President Obama and President Zardari, and the other one was a trilateral discussion amongst President Obama, President Zardari and President Karzai,” Rhodes said. He said that in their conversations with Pakistan, including the president’s conversations, the US has reaffirmed a commitment to work to reset US-Pakistan relationship. “There’s obviously been a period of tension for a variety of reasons,” he said, adding, “We have also been respectful of the process that’s been under way in Pakistan since November that led into the parliamentary review of the bilateral relationship. So we certainly wanted to see that process concluded.” “Since that process concluded, we started to talk at the working level about how to cooperate more effectively on a range of areas, and that includes counterterrorism, that includes supporting a stable Afghanistan and a stable South Asia more broadly. That also includes deepening economic ties between our two countries,” he said.