Foreign Minister of  Saudi Arabia Prince Saud al-Faisal said on Sunday he was heavily concerned with growing insecurity in Pakistan and urged Islamabad to collectively fight militancy. Al-Faisal’s remarks came after he held talks with an Indian leaders in Riyadh.
“Pakistan is a friendly country to us and therefore any time that one sees a dangerous thing in our friendly country, one is not only sorry but worried. We believe it is the duty of all political leaders in Pakistan to unite together, to see that extremism should not find its way to achieve aims in the country. And this can only happen by a united political leadership in Pakistan and we hope that this will be achieved,” al-Faisal told a news conference attended the Indian delegation.
Al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani militants have carried out numerous attacks on members of the security forces over the past couple of years. They stepped up strikes after the army launched an offensive on their main bastion in South Waziristan in October last year.
The Pakistani Taliban, allies of the Afghan Taliban, have lost much ground in the army offensives over the past year. Pakistani action against militants on the border is seen as crucial for efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan, where the US forces are spearheading one of NATO’s biggest offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Security forces have also carried out several other operations aimed at pushing back militants threatening towns and cities such as Peshawar, the main city in the northwest.
Al-Faisal distanced his government from the Taliban insurgents. “There is no relation between Saudi Arabia and Taliban. Relations were abrogated when Taliban gave sanctuary to Al-Qaeda and since that time till today there has been no relationship between Taliban and Saudi Arabia and that indicates the seriousness we give to that issue,” he said. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were among the few states, which recognised Taliban government in Afghanistan, but severed ties after 9/11 when Taliban provided safe havens to Al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabia is also worried about growing penetration and increased leverage of Al-Qaeda in adjoining Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.

Suspected Abu Sayyaf gunmen raided a village in Basilan, killing at least 11 people and injuring 20 others, including a one-year-old girl.
Police said most of the villagers of Poblacion Tubigan in Maluso town were asleep when they were attacked by suspected Abu Sayyaf extremists. The assailants opened fire with automatic arms and torched several houses in the village that also left 10 people wounded, including four children who were last reported in critical condition. Initial reports said the number of victims could increase since many of the villagers were caught in a hail of gunfire from the attackers. The attack came in the wake of the recent killing of Abu Sayyaf leader Albader Parad and the arrest of two key leaders of the extremist group. Government forces had been told to be on alert for reprisal attacks. It was the worst attack on civilians since 2001 when the Abu Sayyaf seized dozens of villagers and later beheaded nine farmers and shot to death another civilian in Lamitan town. The attack also came a day after government troops rescued two Chinese nationals in nearby Sumisip town. The two men were kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf from a plywood factory in Maluso in November. One of the factory workers seized with them was beheaded.

NEW DELHI: India has offered to hold official-level talks with Pakistan, two Indian television stations said on Thursday, resuming a bilateral dialogue suspended after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

New Delhi blames the attacks, which killed 166 people, on Pakistan-based militants and wants Islamabad to act against them.

The TV stations, quoting unnamed official sources, said the talks would be held at foreign-secretary level. They did not say when the meetings might to be held.

Pakistan welcomed the offer.

“There are now signals emanating from India that they are willing to talk bilaterally,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a British news agency. “We welcome this … if it leads to resumption of the composite dialogue.”

Washington sees better India-Pakistan relations as crucial so that Islamabad, not having to worry about its eastern border, can focus on fighting the Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan has been pushing for the resumption of five-year-long peace talks on a range of issues, including the disputed Kashmir region, broken off by India after the attacks.

The NDTV station quoted government sources saying that India would go into the talks with “an open mind” and discuss “all issues on the table without judging the outcome of the discussions”.

The offer to resume talks comes ahead of a visit to Pakistan by India’s minister of internal security for a regional meeting this month.

Palaniappan Chidambaram’s Feb. 26-27 trip is the first high-level visit since the attacks.

Indian foreign ministry officials said Chidambaram would meet his Pakistani counterpart, Rehman Malik, and other officials for talks that may have a narrow focus on what action Islamabad has taken in regard to the Mumbai attacks.

“Any dialogue now will focus on what progress Pakistan has made in dismantling the terrorist network on its soil that was used to attack Mumbai,” a senior government official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“It could be a beginning that could help move things forward.”

U.S. pressure apart, India’s greater willingness for dialogue with Pakistan now could be aimed at boosting the credibility of the civilian government in Islamabad in the face of the Pakistan army and its military intelligence, Indian analysts say.

New Delhi may finally be realising the limitations of its strategy of “coercive diplomacy” as global sympathy for the Mumbai attacks wane and New Delhi begins to be seen as increasingly intransigent, they say.

“India held back the tide of dialogue in the hope that Pakistan would permanently dismantle the infrastructure of terror on its territory and a more fertile ground for bilateral progress results,” Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor, wrote in the Hindu newspaper this week.

“The strategy might have worked up to a point but diminishing returns set in a long time ago.”

WASHINGTON: India has enduring civilizational links with Afghanistan. India will continue to assist Afghanistan in building its institutions and its human resources.

With these two sentences, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday threw down the gauntlet to Washington, Islamabad and perhaps even Beijing and other world capitals that India would not be budged from pursuing its interests in Afghanistan — primarily of preventing the country from turning toxic under Pakistan’s malignant influence and American uncertainty.

He said we are ready to settle all disputes with Pakistan including Jammu and Kashmir row.

“The road to peace on Afghanistan will be long and hard. But given the high stakes involved, the commitment of the international community must be sustained by firm resolve and unity of purpose.”

Singh told Washington’s top policy wonks gathered to hear him at the Center for Foreign Relations, amid a continuing review by President Obama about U.S options in Afghanistan.

The remarks were clearly meant for the US President and his principals who have been bashing heads for several weeks now over next steps in Afghanistan amid charges of dithering on the crucial issue. Singh’s advice ahead of his meeting with Obama on Tuesday — Stay the course; we are going to be there.

Singh offered similar advice in an earlier address to US and Indian business leaders that the international community needs to remain engaged in Afghanistan and any “premature talk of exit will only embolden the terrorists.”

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Mumbai carnage, Singh also told the elite gathering, many of them regional experts keen to see India talking to Pakistan, that “for that to happen Pakistan must make a break with the past, abjure terrorism and come to the table with good faith and sincerity.”

He said his government had invested heavily in normalizing relations with Pakistan and “we are ready to pick up the threads of the dialogue including on issues relating Jammu and Kashmir.”

“We should not harbour any illusions that a selective approach to terrorism , tackling it on one place while ignoring it in others, will work,” Singh added.

Clearly, the Prime Minister too has taken a tough stand in the past few days on Pakistan even as Islamabad as reverted to its maximalist position on Kashmir, falling back on the long-lapsed UN Security Council resolution on the subject. The Prime Minister’s conditional offer of talks followed remarks in a television interview over the weekend in which he despaired about who to talk to in shifty Islamabad, where the civilian dispensation seemed to be overwhelmed by the country’s military.

Even on the nuclear issue, a confident Singh indicated India would not be overawed or intimidated by the Obama administration’s non-proliferation initiatives, welcoming talks on fissile material cut off treaty and while steering clear of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Much of what he said before the policy gathering seemed preparatory to his meeting with the US President tomorrow, their first bilateral encounter.

Singh showed the mildest sign of movement in New Delhi’s stand in the climate change talks saying India will not compromise the right of developing countries to develop and lift their populations out of property, but “we will do more if there is global support in terms of financial resources and technology transfer.”