WASHINGTON - The Obama administration remains divided over the future of its relationship with Pakistan following the discovery in a garrison city of Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a US raid last week, The Washington Post reported Sunday, citing unnamed senior administration officials. The newspaper said after years of ineffective American warnings over Pakistans ambiguous connections with extremist groups, many US officials are concluding that a change in policy is long overdue. Those warnings are detailed in a series of contemporaneous written accounts, obtained by The Washington Post, chronicling three years of often-contentious meetings involving top officials of both countries. Confirmed by US and Pakistani participants, the exchanges portray a circular debate in which the United States repeatedly said it had irrefutable proof of ties between Pakistani military and intelligence officials and the Afghan Taliban and other insurgents, and warned that Pakistani refusal to act against them would exact a cost. US officials have said they have no evidence top Pakistani military or civilian leaders were aware of Osama bin Ladens location or authorised any official support, but his residence within shouting distance of Pakistani military installations has brought relations to a crisis point. Some officials, particularly in the White House, have advocated strong reprisals, especially if Pakistan continues to refuse access to material left behind by US commandos who scooped up all the paper and computer drives they could carry during their deadly 40-minute raid on bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad. You cant continue business as usual, one of several senior administration officials was quoted as saying. You have to somehow convey to the Pakistanis that theyve arrived at a big choice. People who were prepared to listen to [Pakistans] story for a long time are no longer prepared to listen, the official said. But few officials are eager to contemplate the alternatives if Pakistan makes the wrong choice. No one inside the administration, the official said, wants to make a fast, wrong decision. Every available option - from limiting US aid and official contacts, to unleashing more unilateral ground attacks against terrorist targets - jeopardises existing Pakistani help, however undependable, in keeping US enemies at bay, the Post said. Military success and an eventual negotiated settlement of the Afghanistan war are seen as virtually impossible without some level of Pakistani buy-in, the dispatch said. The fact of the matter is that weve been able to kill more terrorists on Pakistani soil than just about anyplace else, President Obama said last week on CBSs 60 Minutes. We could not have done that without Pakistani cooperation. There have been few high-level contacts with the Pakistanis since the raid. Telephone calls last weekend to Pakistans military chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani by White House national security adviser Thomas Donilon and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were said to be inconclusive at best. Top administration national security officials have held several meetings on Pakistan in the White House Situation Room, and more are scheduled this week. No decision has been made on whether Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will make a previously scheduled trip to Pakistan later this month, the Post said. This is supposed to be a continuation of the strategic dialogue Clinton started with Pakistan last year, said a senior Pakistani official who expressed rising disappointment that the civilian government has echoed the bellicose military response. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat who has served as go-between for the administration during previous clashes with Islamabad, traveled to the region late last week with a message of urgency from the White House and warnings about the unsettled mood of Congress, one US official said. According to the Post, talk has resurfaced in Islamabad of ejecting up to 80 percent of the approximately 120 US Special Forces troops engaged in training Pakistans Frontier Corps soldiers. The issue was first raised earlier this year after a CIA employee shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore. ISI control over visas issued to US diplomats and intelligence officials, eased as a gesture of cooperation last year, has been reimposed, officials said. The feeling among senior military officers is that these Americans have let us down, theyre after us, and involvement with the United States has ruined our army and ... our country, one retired senior officer said. The military view, he said, is that We were a very noble country before we got involved in this stupid, so-called Bush war in Afghanistan. Citing the internal accounts, the dispatch said the Americans tried time and again to convince the Pakistanis to change what former CIA official Bruce Riedel, who authored Obamas first Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review in early 2009, called their strategic calculus that ties with the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban were the only way they could maintain their strategic influence in neighbouring Afghanistan. But the accounts show consistent Pakistani suspicion that the Americans would ultimately betray them in Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan surrounded by an unfriendly government on their western border, allied with India, their historical adversary to the east. A July 29, 2008, Washington meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and his national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, and then CIA Director Michael Hayden, his deputy Stephen Kappes and Anne W Patterson, then US ambassador to Islamabad, illustrates the wariness on both sides. The previous day, a US drone-launched missile had killed Abu Khabab al-Masri, described as al-Qaedas chief bomb-maker and chemical weapons expert, in South Waziristan in Pakistans tribal region along the Afghanistan border. Hayden apologised for collateral damage (news reports said three civilians were killed), and the strike had occurred during Gilanis visit to the United States, according to the dispatch. The CIA director noted that the ISI had not contributed any targeting information. Both sides referred to repeated Pakistani requests that the United States place Baitullah Mehsud, a leader of Pakistans increasingly lethal domestic insurgency, at the top of the hit list. Kappes agreed that Mehsud was a legitimate target, but said that Sirajuddin Haqqani, a North Waziristan-based Afghan whose insurgent network regularly attacked US forces in eastern Afghanistan, was a far higher US priority. Pakistans insistence that it had no intelligence on Haqqanis whereabouts was disingenuous, Patterson said during the meeting, according to the dispatch. The ISI was in constant touch with him, and the madrassa where he conducted business was clearly visible from the Pakistani army garrison in North Waziristan. (Mehsud was killed in an August 2009 drone strike. Haqqani remains high on the US target list.) In a series of December 2008 meetings following the terrorist attack in Mumbai that left nearly 200 people dead - including six Americans - top Bush administration officials told Pakistan there was irrefutable intelligence proof that the Pakistani group Lashkar-i-Taiba was responsible, the dispatch said. A written communication delivered to Pakistan said that it is clear to us that [Lashkar-i-Taiba] is responsible ... we know that it continues to receive support, including operational support, from the Pakistani military intelligence service. As the Obama administration continued efforts to persuade Pakistan - while escalating the number of drone strikes - Pakistans ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, as well as Durrani and other officials, were repeatedly told that the United States would reach a breaking point. In a November 2009 letter to President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama offered a new level of partnership - later buttressed with increased military and economic assistance. But he warned that the existing state of affairs, with Pakistan seeing insurgent groups as proxies for influence in Afghanistan, could not continue.