Obama meets PM Gilani

WASHINGTON - US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who often makes controversial statements about Pakistan, on Tuesday met with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, now on a visit here.

No details of the conversation were given, but Gilani made a brief statement to reporters, saying that Obama, who aspires to be the first black-American president of the United States, supports democracy in Pakistan.

During Obama's recent foreign trip, which also took him to Afghanistan, he  warned Pakistan, saying his administration will strike at al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if Washington gets "actionable intelligence" on the presence of terror groups.   "What I've said is that if we had actionable intelligence against high-value al-Qaida targets and the Pakistani government was unwilling to go after those targets, then we should," he had said.

"Now, my hope is that it doesn't come to that. Pakistani government would recognise that if we had Osama bin Laden in our sights, that we should fire or capture...", the 47-year-old senator from Illinois, said in an interview to CBS News which was broadcast on its 'Face The Nation' programme last week.

Ahead of the prime minister's trip, Obama also suggested in an newspaper interview that the US should confront Islamabad on its funding of mujahideen groups in the valley and the terror camps running under its nose.