WASHINGTON - The United States wants a more intensive engagement with Pakistan on wide-ranging issues of interest to the two countries in a bid to put the bilateral relationship back on track, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
“Obviously, we want to get our relationship back on track. We look to the future of our relationship with Pakistan. So we look forward to more intensive engagement with them on a range of issues,” Spokesman Patrick Ventrella said in response to a question at the daily press briefing.
He did not identify the issues of interest to both nations, but referred to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting in a trilateral group with Pakistani and Afghan foreign ministers in Tokyo this month as an example of cooperation. “We continue our intensive engagement with the Pakistanis going forward,” Ventrella said, but he had no specific update on the issue of resumption of strategic dialogue.
The US, he said, had been pleased at the opening of the Pakistani ground lines of communication for transporting NATO supplies into Afghanistan.
US officials, he said, were working with their Pakistani counterparts to clear the backlog of containers, as a result of the closure of the key Pakistani routes about seven months ago. “We are talking about a lot of backlog, a number of containers, very significant amount of material. So, it’s going to take some time to find an efficient way to get them all through.”