Slight shift in Obama's Pakistan stance

WASHINGTON (Agencies) - In a slight shift from his campaign rhetoric, US Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama on Sunday hoped that the Pakistani Government itself would take action against any terrorist hideouts on its side of the Afghan border, limiting his controversial suggestion of hunting for terrorists inside its territory to “high-value target”
“What I have said is that if we had actionable intelligence against high-level al-Qaeda targets and the Pakistani Government was unwilling to go after those targets, then we should. Now my hope is that does not come to that, that, in fact, the Pakistani Government will recognise that we have Osama bin Laden in our sights, then we should fire, that we should capture,” he told CBS in an interview.
Obama who visited neighbouring Afghanistan Sunday, however, told the channel that Washington’s strategy should be that if Pakistan does not take action in the event of having actionable intelligence against high-value terror suspects, the United States should.
Conditions in Afghanistan are “precarious and urgent,” Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama warned in an interview aired Sunday as he renewed his call for an immediate increase in US troops there.
“The Afghan government needs to do more, but we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan,” Obama said.
Obama called for at least two more brigades to be sent to Afghanistan. “Now is the time for us to do it. I think it’s important for us to begin planning for those brigades now,” he said.
Obama said Washington needed to take a regional approach to the problem, particularly by engaging Islamabad regarding what he described as a “growing” number of extremist training camps in Pakistan near the Afghan border.
“I think that what we’d like to see is the Pakistani government take out those training camps,” he said. In Kabul, Obama met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been criticised by the Illinois senator for not doing enough to rebuild his war-torn country.
The meeting, which lasted nearly two hours and included lunch at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, covered a range of issues including terrorism and Afghanistan’s vast narcotics trade, Karzai’s spokesman said.
“The discussions were focused on the significant progress that we’ve made but also on the unmet challenges that we still have ahead of us,” Homayun Hamidzada told reporters as Obama and his party headed to the airport.