Germany on Friday welcomed a promise from Pakistan to work “without hidden agendas” in Afghanistan, as it gears up to host a key international conference on the war-torn country.

More than 90 delegations from all over the world will gather in Bonn on December 5, with Afghanistan’s neighbours playing a key role.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle arrived in Pakistan this week in preparation for the conference.

“I welcome the clear commitment by Pakistan that it has no hidden agenda in Afghanistan,” Westerwelle told a news conference alongside Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar after talks in Islamabad.

“We have to work together because stability in Afghanistan is in our interest and in the interest of the world,” he said.

“The commitment of the German government and the international community is crystal clear — we will not forget Afghanistan and this region,” he added.

NATO combat troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and the Afghan government is set to take full responsibility for national security.

The United States and Afghanistan have often accused Pakistan of playing a double game in continuing to support the Afghan Taliban as a means of offsetting the growing power of arch-rival India.

Westerwelle, who also held talks with Pakistan’s powerful army chief of staff General Ashfaq Kayani, called for a political solution in Afghanistan, saying his country believes that military engagement alone will not work.

Earlier this year, Der Spiegel magazine said Germany was helping mediate secret, direct talks between the US and the Afghan Taliban although Western diplomats in Kabul now say these have collapsed.

Peace efforts in Afghanistan were driven further into a dead end by the September assassination of Kabul peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani by a suicide turban bomber.

“Pakistan has no hidden agenda for pursuit of peace in Afghanistan and in the region,” Khar told the news conference.

“We want a stable and peaceful government in Afghanistan which allows us to function peacefully,” she added. — AFP

Pakistan cricket hero turned politician Imran Khan told a huge rally Sunday that his party would help US troops pull out from Afghanistan and bring militancy in the country to an end.

Addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in the eastern city of Lahore he said his Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party would like to have friendly — but not slavish — relations with the US.

“My message to America is that we will have friendship with you but we will not accept any slavery,” he told the crowd.

“We will help you in a respectable withdrawal of your troops from Afghanistan, but we will not launch a military operation in Pakistan for you.” Top US officials including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week visited Pakistan to press for action against Islamic extremists, particularly the Haqqani network, which is blamed for anti-US attacks in Afghanistan.

Witnesses said the rally, one of the largest in the city, was attended by some 150,000 people while organisers put the number at over half a million.

People came in packed buses, trucks, cars and tractors from Lahore and other cities including those in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. Roads were blocked for hours due to heavy crowds.

“Who will save Pakistan? Imran Khan, Imran Khan,” the crowd chanted as Khan arrived at the sprawling Minar-e-Pakistan ground ringed by security forces.

Vowing to end terrorism in the country, Khan said he held a meeting with tribal elders three days ago.

“They all said militancy will end if Pakistan army leaves the tribal areas and US troops quit Afghanistan,” he said.

He said the rugged tribal terrain near the Afghan border is home to one million armed tribesmen.

“They are like our backbone but US drone strikes are forcing them to flee to Afghanistan and they are becoming Taliban in revenge,” he said, adding that his party will work for reconciliation and bring terrorism to an end.

There is widespread anti-Americanism in Pakistan as well as opposition to the drone strikes, although the attacks have never mobilised a widespread public movement.

The Pakistani military is itself battling a Taliban insurgency in the northwest, and more than 4,700 people have been killed in attacks across the country since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in 2007.

Vowing to end corruption, poverty and illiteracy, and to depoliticise the police, Khan said his party would provide justice at village level.

He warned that he would launch a civil disobedience campaign if the country’s rulers did not declare their assets over the next few months.

“We will launch a civil disobedience movement and our youth will shut down cities across the country if you don’t declare your assets,” he said, claiming that President Asif Ali Zardari had secret accounts in foreign banks.

The rally, seen as a show of strength, comes two days after the main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif’s brother Shahbaz, attracted some 30,000 people at an anti-Zardari protest also in the key political battleground of Lahore.

Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) demanded early elections in its political heartland — it controls the Punjab provincial government despite being in opposition at national level.

Party faithful denounced corruption and widespread power cuts, calling on the 56-year-old president, dubbed “Mr Ten Percent” over graft allegations, to step down before the government’s five-year mandate expires in 2013.

Political analyst Shafqat Mahmood said the scale of Sunday’s rally showed Khan had carved out support.

“People including youth, and intelligentsia responded to his call. This shows people want a change,” he said.

“People see a new option in him. How much impact it will have on the next elections is yet to be seen.” — AFP

Pakistan’s former leader Pervez Musharraf warned Wednesday that his country’s spies will need to take “counter-measures” in Afghanistan if US troops leave it unstable or it becomes too close to India.

On a visit to Washington, Musharraf described relations between the United States and Pakistan as “terrible” but defended the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency that US officials have accused of supporting extremists.

Musharraf, who has lived in exile since stepping down in 2008, insisted that his country’s historic rival India was working through intelligence, military and diplomatic contacts to turn Afghanistan against Pakistan.

“Since our independence, Afghanistan always has been anti-Pakistan because the Soviet Union and India have very good relations in Afghanistan,” Musharraf said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“We must not allow this to continue,” he said. “We must not begrudge if Pakistan orders ISI to take counter-measures to protect its own interests.”

Musharraf said Afghanistan could plunge into conflict along ethnic lines after 2014, when the United States plans to withdraw its combat troops from Afghanistan, ending more than a decade of war.

“Are you leaving a stable Afghanistan or an unstable Afghanistan? Because based on that, I in Pakistan will have to take my own counter-measures,” Musharraf said.

The “adverse impact will be on Pakistan, so any leader in Pakistan must think of securing Pakistan’s interests,” he added.

Pakistan helped create the Taliban and was the main supporter of the hardline movement’s former regime. Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, switched sides and allied with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Relations between Washington and Islamabad plummeted in May when the United States launched a secret raid that killed the world’s most wanted man Osama bin Laden in Pakistan’s military city of Abbottabad.

Since then, senior US officials have publicly accused the ISI of closely working with the extremist Haqqani network which has carried out attacks on US targets, including Washington’s embassy in Kabul. — AFP

At least three soldiers and up to 34 militants were killed on Thursday in a gunbattle in Pakistan’s restive tribal district of Khyber along the Afghan border, officials said.

The death toll was announced shortly before US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected in Pakistan for crunch talks aimed at ramping up pressure on Islamabad to do more to eliminate Taliban safe havens on the Afghan border.

The fighting erupted when Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) launched a search operation in the Malik din Khel area of Khyber.

The strategically important Khyber district lies between Peshawar and Afghanistan and is the main route for NATO supplies in Afghanistan.

Mutahir Zeb, the top administrative official of Khyber, said militants from Lashkar-e-Islam (army of Islam) were involved.

“At least 34 militants and three soldiers were killed during an encounter,” a paramilitary statement said. There was no immediate independent confirmation of the death toll as the area is off-limits to journalists and aid workers.

“Security forces responded effectively and have cleared the area of militants,” it said.

Zeb had said earlier that four soldiers had been killed.

Lashkar-e-Islam is the most active militant group in Khyber and led by feared warlord Mangal Bagh. It has loose ideological ties to the Taliban, but operates independently.

Nearly 4,700 people have been killed across Pakistan in attacks blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants based in the northwestern tribal belt since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in 2007.

Around 3,000 Pakistani soldiers have also lost their lives in attacks since 2001, when the country joined the “war on terror”. — AFP

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan’s powerful army chief said in a rare briefing to parliamentarians that the U.S. should focus its efforts on stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan, rather than pressuring Islamabad to step up its war against Islamist militants on Pakistani territory, a parliament member said Wednesday.

Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani’s appearance before two parliamentary defense committees followed increased U.S. pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Haqqani militant network, believed to be based in the country’s North Waziristan tribal area along the Afghan border.

The U.S. has deemed the Haqqani network the most dangerous threat to American troops in Afghanistan and has accused the Pakistan military’s spy agency, the ISI, of supporting the militants — an allegation denied by Islamabad.

“The real problem lies in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan,” Kayani was quoted as saying by a parliament member who attended the three-hour briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was not open to the media.

The Pakistan army said in a statement that the briefing occurred, but did not provide details on the discussion.

Some analysts have accused the U.S. of focusing on Pakistan and the Haqqani network as a way to redirect blame over stuttering efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military has also sought to deflect blame for its failure to crack down on the Haqqanis by saying that NATO and Afghan forces need to do more to prevent militants from crossing over from Afghanistan and attacking Pakistan.

Kayani said his military could launch a full-scale operation in North Waziristan “tomorrow” if someone convinced him that the it was the root cause of problems in Afghanistan, said the committee member.

That represents a shift from the military’s normal explanation for its lack of action in North Waziristan: that its troops are stretched too thin by operations in other parts of the tribal region against Pakistani Taliban militants at war with the state.

Unlike the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Afghan branch of the Taliban usually refrain from fighting the Pakistani army, instead focusing their attacks against Afghan and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Many analysts believe Pakistan has refused to target these groups because they could be important allies in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw.

Adm. Mike Mullen, who was until recently the top military officer in the U.S., claimed last month that the Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of the ISI and accused the spy agency of helping the group carry out an attack against the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Kayani said the ISI has contacts with the Haqqani network that it uses to get intelligence, claiming U.S. and British spy agencies do the same.

Mullen’s comments outraged Pakistani officials and prompted local media speculation that the U.S. would launch a unilateral raid against the Haqqanis in North Waziristan, as it did on May 2 when it killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town.

Kayani said the U.S. should think “10 times” before launching such action because Pakistan was not Iraq or Afghanistan — an implicit reference to the country possessing nuclear weapons with which it could defend itself.

The U.S. has urged Pakistan to shift troops away from its eastern border with archenemy India so that it can commit more soldiers to the fight against the Taliban in the northwest.

Kayani said he could not redeploy these soldiers because of the large number of Indian troops stationed on the border. Relations between the two countries have thawed somewhat in recent months, especially regarding trade, but Kayani said “intentions can change overnight.” — AP

A United States citizen has been shot dead by an Afghan employee at an annex to the US embassy in Kabul used by the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said Monday.

The attack at the Ariana Hotel compound late Sunday also wounded another US citizen, and the gunman was killed in the incident, an embassy spokesman said.

It was the latest eruption of violence to hit supposedly secure sites in Kabul after last week’s assassination of Afghan peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani and a 19-hour assault targeting the US embassy earlier this month.

The US is stepping up pressure on Pakistan to tackle the Haqqani network, a group allied with the Taliban which is blamed for much of the violence in the Afghan capital.

“There was a shooting incident at an annex of the US embassy in Kabul involving an Afghan employee who was killed,” said US embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall. “One US citizen was killed, one was wounded.”

Sundwall said the Afghan employee had carried out the shooting and that he had acted as “a lone gunman.”

“The motivation for the attack is still under investigation,” he added.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Taliban. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said when contacted by AFP Monday that he was looking into what had happened.

The insurgents, who are leading a bloody, decade-long fight against foreign and Afghan government forces, have used attackers with links inside the Afghan security forces to launch previous assaults.

An attack in May which killed six people at a Kabul military hospital is thought to have planned with assistance from inside the Afghan security forces.

Officials from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) say that many “insider” attacks are committed by Afghans suffering from combat stress or following personal disagreements.

The incident took place late Sunday inside the Ariana Hotel compound, an annex to the US embassy.

An Afghan government official speaking anonymously to AFP said the Ariana compound was used by the CIA.

The injured US citizen, whose injuries Sundwall said were “not life-threatening”, was evacuated to a military hospital in Afghanistan for treatment.

The body of the dead American is expected to be returned to the United States soon.

Sundwall declined to comment on whether the building was a CIA facility.

“I’m sure there will be an investigation. We take our security very seriously and it is under constant review,” he said.

In December 2009, seven Americans were killed in a suicide attack on a CIA base in Khost, eastern Afghanistan, carried out by a Jordanian triple agent. — AFP