US nixes Pak plea for Indian troop withdrawal

Pakistan is pressing the Obama administration to ask India to reduce troops from its borders in order for Islamabad to spend more
resources to fighting extremists inside its own territory. President Obama isn't buying that, according to US officials.

Instead, Pakistan will be told again that it needs to get out of its India fixation and look within itself when President Asif Ali Zardari meets President Obama at the White House on Wednesday.

Zardari will also be asked to account for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its security amid worldwide concerns about extremists getting close to the weapons.

Zardari's line going into the three-way talks with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai to be hosted by Obama this week was outlined by the country's US ambassador Hussain Haqqani, who told an online forum "It's time for Obama to put in a call to the Indians telling them, 'If you move some of your troops, they'll move theirs."

Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kiyani is said to have made just that promise in a recent meeting with US special envoy Richard Holbrooke. But the White House dismissed the idea, while conceding that there may have been some conversations along those lines.
"I think the President spoke pretty clearly to this last week in underscoring where the threat lies in Pakistan and where it doesn't," Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs said at a White House briefing on Monday. The President, Gibbs said, will reiterate what he told the media at his White House press conference last week, when he essentially maintained that Pakistan's obsession with India as a mortal threat was misguided and the country ought to get over it.