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| Daily News Brief October 23, 2013 |
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Top of the Agenda: Obama, Sharif to Meet in Washington
Pakistani
prime minister Nawaz Sharif will meet President Barack Obama at the
White House today, but few breakthroughs are expected on contentious
issues such as drone strikes or Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban (AP). While officials from both countries hope to reduce bilateral tensions, analysts are skeptical that there will be a dramatic reassessment of the relationship (CSM).
Human rights organizations have renewed their criticisms of the Obama
administration's counterterrorism policies, saying some drone strikes may constitute war crimes, a charge that U.S. officials deny (al-Jazeera).
Analysis
"It certainly would be useful for the Obama administration to press Sharif hard on his country's support for several terrorist groups,
including those behind the killings of American soldiers in Afghanistan
and the Mumbai massacre of 2008. The group backing that slaughter,
Lashkar-e-Taiba, continues to openly operate in Pakistan," writes
Jeffrey Goldberg for Bloomberg.
"Peace
talks, worryingly, could also fail in dangerous ways. In 2004, the
first U.S. drone strike in Pakistan killed Nek Muhammad, an al
Qaeda-linked Taliban commander who had just concluded a peace deal with
the Pakistani army. Rightly or wrongly, [opposition leader Imran] Khan
is far from the only Pakistani pointing to that episode as evidence that the United States aims to pit Pakistanis against each other.
Therefore, Khan argues, rejecting cooperation with the United States is
Pakistan's best course of action," writes CFR Senior Fellow Daniel
Markey for Reuters.
"The United States government can help reduce the dominance of the Pakistani military
by strengthening key civilian institutions, particularly Parliament and
the police. The American government should renew its main civilian
assistance program to Pakistan, which is financed only through 2014,"
writes Michael Kugelman in the New York Times.
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