US offers up to $5 mln for Pakistani linked to attacks
Thursday, 07 April 2011
U.S. military commander James Mattis met Pakistan's top brass on Thursday with shaky ties again tested by a White House report criticising Pakistan's fight against the Taliban.
General Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command overseeing the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, would meet Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kayani for a "regular, scheduled visit", the U.S. embassy in Islamabad said.
"It's not extraordinary... it's a military to military relationship," said embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez.
As such there remains no clear path to defeating the insurgency in Pakistan, despite the unprecedented and sustained deployment of over 147,000 forces 
But the visit comes after a U.S. report this week criticized the Pakistani military for failing to forge a clear and sustained path to beat Islamist insurgents holed up in the lawless regions bordering Afghanistan.
The United States has long urged Pakistan to do more to combat militants in the tribal belt, which it considers a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, saying such efforts are vital to help end the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan.
The semi-annual White House report to Congress, released Tuesday, noted a deterioration of the situation in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and said operations were not complemented by plans to "hold" and "build" the areas.
"As such there remains no clear path to defeating the insurgency in Pakistan, despite the unprecedented and sustained deployment of over 147,000 forces," the report said.
Mattis is the most senior US official to visit Islamabad since Pakistan released a CIA contractor who shot dead two men in Lahore in January.
The killings and Pakistan's subsequent seven-week detention of Raymond Davis sparked a major diplomatic crisis in the fragile relationship between Washington and Islamabad.
A Pakistani court eventually freed Raymond Davis following the payment of $2 million in blood money to the families of the dead men.
Pakistani-U.S. tensions remain high over an ongoing covert U.S. drone campaign in the border region, which fosters deep anti-Americanism within Pakistan.
A missile strike on March 17 that killed 39 people, civilians among them, led to rare public condemnation by Kayani of the unmanned drone campaign, which continues with the tacit consent of Islamabad.
Ransom
U.S. officials Wednesday offered a reward of up to $5 million for information on Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, head of a Pakistani group linked to al-Qaeda and suspected of launching a 2006 suicide attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
The State Department said Kashmiri "is the commander of the terrorist organization Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), which supports Al-Qaeda" and that the group has led training camps for the launching of several attacks in India and Pakistan.
The group is believed to have ordered the March 2, 2006 suicide bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi that killed four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy, and injured 48 others.
In January 2010, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Kashmiri for terrorism-related offenses in connection with a plot to attack the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark following uproar over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Last August, Kashmiri was placed on a U.S. list as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" and HUJI was labeled a "Foreign Terrorist Organization."
HUJI and Kashmiri have also been added to a United Nations blacklist of individuals and entities linked to the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Kashmiri was born in 1964 in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. He is approximately six feet (1.8 meters) tall and weighs about 200 pounds (90 kilos).
He has black hair and been seen with a thick beard dyed white, black, or red at various times. He has lost sight in one eye, and often wears aviator-style sunglasses. He is missing an index finger, according to the State Department.
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