At a joint appearance, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and defense secretary Leon Panetta expressed satisfaction over the progress in Afghanistan, but admitted things were not as good in the eastern part of the country.
"The mission, as the President said, is that we have to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida and make sure that it never again finds a safe haven in Afghanistan from which to launch attacks to this country," Panetta said at the National Defense University here.
"I think we've made good progress on that. We are making very good progress in terms of security, particularly in the south and the southwest... We've now got to try to improve the situation in the east," Panetta said.
"But overall the situation is doing much better. We have weakened Taliban significantly, and we're continuing to work on that," he said.
He said the US is working on helping Afghanistan build its army and police and is now focusing on a complete transition to an Afghan controlled security scenario.
"They are right on target in terms of the numbers that we needed to develop... We're going through transition, we're beginning to transition areas. There are others we're going to have to do. We've got to make sure that the Afghan government is prepared to not only govern but to help secure that country in the long run," he said.
He said he believed sticking with this mission the US can achieve its goal of creating a stable Afghanistan that never again has a safe haven for the Taliban or al-Qaida.
Clinton said when the Obama administration came into office they found that the situation in Afghanistan was not very promising.
Panetta, who took over as defense secretary in June after two years of heading the CIA, declined comment on news reports that Pakistan allowed China to inspect the wreckage of an advanced U.S. helicopter lost in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
But at a public forum with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Washington’s National Defense University, the defense chief was unusually candid about U.S. problem issues with Pakistan.
Panetta said Pakistan has "relationships” with the Haqqani network - militants based in western Pakistan who conduct cross-border attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and with Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who have attacked India.
Both groups are listed by the United States as terrorist organizations. Despite complaints that Pakistan has withheld visas for U.S. citizens being posted there, Panetta said the relationship remains essential.
“There is no choice but to maintain a relationship with Pakistan," said Panetta. "Why? Because we are fighting a war there. We are fighting al-Qaida there. And they do give us some cooperation in that effort. Because they do represent an important force in that region. Because they do happen to be a nuclear power that has nuclear weapons, and we have to be concerned about what happens with those nuclear weapons. So for all of those reasons, we’ve got to maintain a relationship with Pakistan.”
Secretary of State Clinton said the Obama administration considers relations with Pakistan to be of “paramount importance.”
She said there have been “challenges” in bilateral ties for decades with valid complaints on both sides, and that she credits the Islamabad government with lately recognizing its shared interest with Washington in confronting terrorism.
“I was very pleased when the Pakistanis moved into [the] Swat [Valley] and cleaned out a lot of what had become a kind of Pakistani Taliban stronghold," said Clinton. "And then they began to take some troops off their border with India, to put more resources into the fight against the Pakistani Taliban. Now, as Leon [Panetta] says, we have some other targets that we discuss with them - the Haqqanis, for example. And yet it’s been a relatively short period of time, two-and-a-half years, when they have begun to reorient themselves militarily against what is, in our view, an internal threat to them.”
The State Department on Tuesday designated a key Haqqani network commander - Mullah Sangeen Zadran - a terrorist under a 2001 White House executive order, freezing any U.S. assets he has and barring Americans from business dealings with him.
At the same time, Sangeen was designated a terrorist by the U.N. sanctions committee, which will subject him to a global travel ban, an asset freeze and an arms embargo.
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