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Obama says Pakistan internal threat grave

By David Alexander and Augustine Anthony

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said Pakistan’s army was beginning to realize that homegrown militants and not India posed the biggest threat to the country’s stability, after Pakistani troops retook a key town from Taliban gunmen.

Obama told a news conference in Washington on Wednesday he was confident about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and that the Pakistani army recognized the dangers of weapons falling into the wrong hands.

“On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally,” he said.

“And you’re starting to see the Pakistani military take much more seriously the armed threat from militant extremists.”

His comments came after Pakistani troops took the main town in the strategically important Buner Valley on Wednesday after they were dropped by helicopter behind Taliban lines. More than 50 militants were killed on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Pakistani military said.

The Taliban’s entry into Buner, just 100 km (60 miles) from the capital Islamabad, from their stronghold in neighboring Swat valley, unnerved many Pakistanis and raised fears in Washington that its nuclear-armed ally was becoming more unstable.

Before the military offensive in Buner, Western allies, who need Pakistan’s support to defeat al Qaeda and stabilize neighboring Afghanistan, were worried the government seemed too willing to appease militants.

The militants’ advance came after the civilian government caved in to demands for Islamic sharia law in parts of the northwest region, not far from Afghanistan.

“I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan, not because I think that they’re immediately going to be overrun and the Taliban would take over in Pakistan,” Obama said.

“I’m more concerned that the civilian government there right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.

Obama is due to hold talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai on May 6-7.

Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani troops are deployed on the eastern border with India, and Islamabad has come under pressure from Washington to move troops to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda militants on its western flank along the border with Afghanistan.

“We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state,” Obama said.

On Tuesday, the Pakistan military used jet fighters at the start of the operation against the Taliban in Buner, then deployed helicopter gunships. One soldier has been killed.

The Pakistani military estimated some 500 militants were in the Buner valley and that it might take a week to clear them out. It has said a few hundred militants in the mountains never posed a real threat to the capital.

But some security analysts say the Taliban could have used Buner as a jumping off point to strike at Tarbela, a major dam that provides crucial water and electricity supplies to a large part of the country, before setting their sights on Islamabad.

In Washington, U.S. lawmakers said they planned to accelerate the flow of more than $400 million in aid to Pakistan to help with counterinsurgency operations. The U.S. is also giving $1.4 billion in economic aid for Islamabad.

(Additional reporting by Junaid Khan, Augustine Anthony and Zeeshan Haider in Pakistan, and Andrew Gray in Washington; writing by Sanjeev Miglani editing by Dean Yates)