[Dawn] Prime Minister Gilani stressed upon the need to bridge the existing trust deficit between Pakistan and the United States in the interest of long term strategic partnership between the two countries. I feel more trusting already...
Gilani was talking to a US delegation led by Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, at the PM House in Islamabad on Monday. The US delegation brought up the issue of the alleged Afghan Taliban leadership's presence in North Waziristan and parts of Balochistan.
Levin was talking about Mullah Omar's headquarters being in Quetta, when he's not bussed to Karachi to get him out of the line of fire, and about the Haqqani Network being headquartered in North Wazoo, where they're best friends with all sorts of Uzbeks and Chechens and Arabs. He probably didn't mention the fact that Binny's headquarters are in Pakistain and that the Pak religious parties are openly on the other side, whilst all the the former heads of ISI are in the habit of burping up vicious, barely coherent anti-American statements. If he had, that probably would have led to a discussion of whether the current head of ISI is a nutcase of the same dimension as Hamid Gul or Aslam Beg.
The PM refuted these allegations as misperceptions
"No, no! Certainly not!"
and said that the so-called Quetta Shura did not exist and the Afghan Taliban leaders were not present in Pakistani territory.
If you're gonna tell lies, you should make sure that there's not easily verifiable evidence to the contrary. When you lie out of habit, even when telling the truth would be to your advantage, you're simply destroying all that trust that's necessary to build for the time when you really need the other side to swallow a whopper whole.
He reiterated Pakistan's desire to fence its border with Afghanistan and asked the US to persuade the Afghan Government to do so.
The fencing works so well along the Line of Control, after all.
Senator Carl Levin appreciated Pakistan's critical and vital role as the frontline state against terrorism and lauded the successes by the Pakistani armed forces in Malakand and South Waziristan.