Obama policy wins praise in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In an address to a joint session of parliament, President Asif Ali Zardari promised Saturday to ease domestic political turmoil and praised the Obama administration's new policy to Pakistan as "positive change."

In a conciliatory gesture to the opposition party, Pakistan Muslim League-N, Zardari said that he would lift the executive rule he had imposed on Punjab province, the most populous province in Pakistan and the one where the opposition party holds the most seats in the legislature.

The announcement by Zardari was seen as another major concession after the opposition party led huge street demonstrations, forcing the president to agree to the restoration of the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been removed from the bench in 2007.

Assistance welcomed

In phrases that were most likely designed to please Washington, D.C., Zardari said that the country needed to "root out extremism and militancy." He welcomed the new package of $7.5 billion for civilian assistance over five years formally announced by President Obama on Friday.

The increased U.S. aid showed that Washington agreed with Pakistan that the best way to fight extremism was through alleviating poverty, Zardari said.

"It is an endorsement of our call for economic and social uplift as a means to fight extremism," he said.

This was in implicit contrast to the eight years of rule by Pervez Musharraf, a former general, when almost all of the $10 billion in American assistance to Pakistan went to the army.

As he has in the past, Zardari stressed that Pakistan needed to fight the escalating extremism for its own good, a way of deflecting vocal Pakistani critics of the alliance with the U.S. Zardari as much as said the fight against the militants was Pakistan's fight, not America's fight.

"We are fighting militancy and extremism for our own sake," he said.

Afghan leader

Separately on Saturday, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan commended the Obama administration's strategic review, saying it matched the views of his own government.

"It is exactly what the Afghan people were hoping for," Karzai told reporters at a news briefing in the presidential palace in Kabul.

In particular, Karzai said, he was happy to see Obama's recognition that al-Qaida and its allies were still in the region and had their bases and sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas. The Afghan president has been protesting for several years that the battle is fought in Afghan villages while the insurgents' headquarters, bases and training camps in Pakistan are left untouched.

"The sanctuaries of the terrorists, the nest of the terrorists and the training places of the terrorists are not in Afghanistan; it has a regional dimension," he said.

Karzai also welcomed Obama's talk of reconciliation with members of the Taliban who reject al-Qaida, and he called on the United Nations to remove names of former Taliban members from the Security Council sanctions list.

Some 142 members of the former Taliban government of Afghanistan, including some who have reconciled with the Karzai government, remain under U.N. sanctions that ban them from international travel and freeze their assets.

Targeting safe havens

A major point of Obama's new policy toward Pakistan was his declaration that the U.S. wanted to ensure that the safe havens established by al-Qaida and the Taliban in the tribal areas were eliminated.

Zardari did not mention the Taliban or al-Qaida by name and did not address the power of the militants in the tribal areas or in other areas of Pakistan. Rather, he chose to make a stand about the territorial integrity of Pakistan and reinforced the notion that the government would not tolerate a breach of that sovereignty.

"The sovereignty of Pakistan must be protected at all costs," he said. "It will be."

The insistence of Pakistan that no American or other foreign troops can operate from its territory is one of the basic dilemmas facing the Obama administration as it tries to find a way to eliminate the militant threat.

On Friday, the U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, said "the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government: No foreign troops on our soil."

Missile attacks

Because of that prohibition and the unsteady effort by the Pakistani army against the militants, Washington, D.C., has been deploying remotely piloted aircraft, known as drones, armed with missiles against al-Qaida in the tribal areas. The missile attacks have served to strengthen the anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.

Zardari, whose popularity has plummeted in recent months, in part because he is linked by many Pakistanis to U.S. policy, did not mention the missile attacks in his speech.

But Obama hinted Friday that they would continue.

"Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaida and the violent extremists within its borders," he said. "And we will insist that action be taken — one way or the other — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets."

Punjab province

In his announcement that he would withdraw the executive rule in Punjab that he imposed last month, Zardari was effectively handing the province back to rule of the Pakistan Muslim League-N. Zardari is co-chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party, a mantle he inherited from his wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007.

In his speech, he said his party would support the candidate of the Pakistan Muslim League-N as chief minister, a job held until executive rule by Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of the leader of the league, Nawaz Sharif.