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US will act on ‘actionable targets’ in FATA: Biden

* Vice president says US working to build Pakistan’s capability to counter insurgency
* FATA had been ‘ungovernable’ for Pakistan

WASHINGTON: Hinting that the United States drone attacks in the Tribal Areas would continue as before, US Vice President Joe Biden said the US would act if there was an ‘actionable target’ in sight.

He said the US was working towards strengthening Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capability, but declined to specifically address the issue of drone strikes against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda targets on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border.

“I cannot speak to any particular attack. I cannot speak to any particular action. It is not appropriate for me to do that,” he said in response to a question in the backdrop of Friday’s drone strikes on North and South Waziristan, which killed 18 people.

Working: “What we are doing is we are in the process of working with the Pakistanis to help train up the counterinsurgency capability of their military, and we’re getting new agreements with them about how to deal with cross-border movements of these folks, so we are making progress,” Biden said.

Referring to US President Barack Obama’s election campaigning, Biden said the president had “said during his campaign and in the debates that if there is an actionable target, of a high-level Al Qaeda personnel, that he would not hesitate to use action to deal with that”.

He, however, praised increased cooperation by Pakistani authorities, calling the coordination ‘good news’.

“The good news is that in my last trip - and I have been to Pakistan and that region many times - there is a great deal more cooperation going on now between the Pakistan military in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Waziristan, North Waziristan - all that area that we hear about being ungovernable,” he said.

FATA: But Biden added that the areas had “been ungovernable for the Pakistani government. That’s where the bad guys are hiding. That’s where the Al Qaeda folks are, and some other malcontents”.

Biden also expressed understanding of the fact that FATA had been historically ungoverned.

According to a Pakistani embassy spokesman, agreement of views on coordination of border monitoring, improvement in intelligence-sharing and bolstering the capacity of Pakistani security forces was a continuous process between the coalition partners.

A senior official in Islamabad on Sunday said the drone attacks were counterproductive to Pakistan’s efforts aimed at curbing extremism.

On Afghanistan, Biden said the new US administration had inherited a ‘real mess’. “What’s happened is that because of a failure to provide sufficient resources, economic, political and military, as well as failure to get a coherent policy among our allies, economically and politically, and in terms of military resources, the situation has deteriorated a great deal,” he said.app

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