ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is negotiating with the United States to buy 14 additional F-16 fighter planes, Pakistan defence officials said on Sunday, following talks aimed at reversing tempestuous ties between the allies.

The United States and Pakistan have agreed to fast-track pending Pakistani requests for military equipment as the two step up security cooperation, Pakistan’s foreign minister said on Wednesday during a high-profile visit to Washington.

A senior Pakistani defence official told Reuters that Pakistan was asking for 14 new F-16 planes.

“Talks are underway and we’re hoping to get them at a low price,” the official, who requested not to be identified, said.

Pakistan is an important US ally in the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The United States has provided F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad and Pakistan’s navy chief was in Washington this month to discuss the handover in August of a refurbished US frigate.

Washington said this month it would deliver 1,000 laser-guided bomb kits to Pakistan within weeks and is considering more weapons sales to help the Pakistani air force crack down on insurgents in the Afghanistan border region.

In early 2010, the United States approved the delivery of 12 Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-16C and 6 F-16D planes, scheduled to begin from June 2010.

This delivery to Pakistan will bring its inventory of the planes to 54. If a new deal is approved, Pakistan’s arsenal of F-16s, including refurbished fighters, will amount to 79, defence officials said. Pakistan has been operating F-16s since 1982.

Another official said Pakistan’s interest in new F-16s was a bid to match India’s firepower.

“Look at the rival (India). How many fighter jets they are purchasing and if you’re getting them at a low price then why not?” he said.

India plans to buy 126 air and ground attack fighters, which will elevate its air force to super-power status, with deployments planned near the borders with Pakistan and China, officials say.

One bone of contention between Washington and Islamabad has been a delay in about $2 billion in military aid owed by the United States to Pakistan under a programme called the Coalition Support Fund.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said a “substantial” amount of the money would be paid by the end of April, with Washington promising the remainder by the end of June.

US drones struck a compound in the restive North Waziristan tribal region of northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least four militants, officials said.

The spy plane fired three missiles at the compound in Tablai Tal area, 30 km north of Miranshah, a key town in North Waziristan.

It could not immediately be ascertained if any foreigners were among the four militants killed in the attack, officials said.

The US has stepped up drone strikes in North Waziristan to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban elements that target US-led allied forces across the border in Afghanistan.

Hundreds of people have been killed in dozens of drone attacks since January.

Four militants were killed and five more injured in a drone attack on Saturday.

WASHINGTON: It has been years since the United States has had good intelligence on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin laden, although he is thought to be in Pakistan, CIA director Leon Panetta said on Sunday.

He also gave a sobering account of the war in Afghanistan, saying the Taliban seemed to be strengthening with a stepped-up campaign of violence, even as U.S.-led forces undermine the Islamist movement with attacks on its leadership.

Progress is being made in the nearly nine-year-old conflict but “it’s harder, it’s slower than I think anyone anticipated,” Panetta said on program of a foreign news channel. He did not directly answer a question about whether the war was being won.

A harsh spotlight was thrown on the U.S. strategy last week when President Barack Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal as his top commander in Afghanistan and replaced him with General David Petraeus.

Now U.S. lawmakers from both parties are demanding more answers about the war’s progress. Some will be putting these questions to Petraeus at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Not since “the early 2000s” have U.S. officials had “the last precise information about where he (bin Laden) might be located,” Panetta said.

“Since then, it’s been very difficult to get any intelligence on his exact location,” Panetta said. “He is, as is obvious, in very deep hiding … He’s in an area of the tribal areas of Pakistan.”

Denying the world’s most wanted man safe haven on the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border has been an aim of Western policy since the September 11 attacks in 2001, when the Taliban in effect spurned a U.S. demand to hand over the al Qaeda chief.

Panetta said the United States still believed it could ultimately “flush out” bin Laden, noting it had already “taken down” more than half of al Qaeda’s leadership.

In recent months, the CIA has ramped up the pace of unmanned drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, targeting not only high-level al Qaeda and Taliban targets but unknown foot soldiers as well.

Taliban militants, Panetta said, “with regards to some of the directed violence, they seem to be stronger. But the fact is, we are undermining their leadership and that I think is moving in the right direction.”

He said a Taliban leader who was dressed as a woman was killed over the weekend in a military operation.

Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the war began in late 2001, with the Taliban stepping up suicide bombings and assassinations, particularly in their Kandahar heartland.

Some 80 foreign soldiers have been killed so far in June, making it the deadliest month ever for international forces. More than 300 troops have been killed this year compared with about 520 for all of 2009.

Panetta said the key to success was not just in U.S. and allied efforts but whether Afghan security forces will be able to take over and maintain stability.

“This is not going to be easy,” he said. “It is going to take the Afghan army and police to be able to accept the responsibility that we pass on to them.”

Panetta said he had not seen any firm intelligence that there was a real interest in reconciliation among al Qaeda, the Taliban or the Haqqani network, a faction of the Afghan Taliban.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

Brand new, U.S.-manufactured, F-16 fighter planes are set to fly in to Pakistan on Saturday for the first time since new F-16s were bought by the country in the early 1980s, in an example of a relationship that has hovered between close proximity to periods of cooling off.

On Saturday, three F-16 fighter planes will arrive in Pakistan as part of an eventual delivery of 18 new F-16 fighter planes that Pakistan ordered from the U.S. in a deal worth US$1.4 billion, according to Pakistan’s air force officials and U.S. officials.

But the history of the supply of F-16s to Pakistan has been troubled. After supplying 40 new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan in the 1980s to boost Islamabad as a frontline state against the occupation of Afghanistan by the former Soviet Union, the U.S. slapped military and economic sanctions against Pakistan in 1990 to punish Islamabad for attempting to manufacture nuclear bombs.

Those sanctions failed to stop Pakistan from continuing with its nuclear weapons development program and carrying out its first set of nuclear tests in 1998.

However, relations between Pakistan and the U.S. were revived after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks forced the two countries to join hands against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In the past decade, Pakistan has been supplied with used F-16 fighter planes by the U.S., to help the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) carry out its operations against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but Saturday’s arrival of the F-16s will be the first time that new planes of this particular type will be inducted since the early 1980s.

“This is a milestone event. We are very pleased to finally see the US share some of its modern age technology with Pakistan,” said a PAF official who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity.

But analysts warned that many Pakistanis still remain skeptical of ties with the U.S. in view of the memories of past sanctions.

“You travel around this country and you realize how emotional this issue continues to be,” Anjum Rahman, a TV show host for Pakistan’s Express TV channel told CBS News. “People still see the suspension of future F-16 deliveries from 1990 onwards “as an era that brings back unfortunate memories.”

On the streets of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city, there are many who remember the Pak-U.S. history of ties in relation to the F-16s.

“In the 1980s, images of the F-16 were painted on so many buses and trucks as Pakistan celebrated the arrival of the world’s most modern jet fighter. Even if the Americans now give us new planes, how will anyone erase the memories of an entire nation?” asked Barkat Khan, an Islamabad school teacher.

While PAF officials are preparing to receive delivery of the new planes enthusiastically, their ability to tackle skepticism on the streets is limited. “We can only perform the best possible service but we can’t tell people, how and what to think,” concluded the PAF official.

Daily Times Monitor

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that will give Islamabad important influence there but is likely to undermine US interests, Pakistani and American officials said, according to the New York Times.

The dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal will almost certainly embolden the Pakistanis in their plan as they detect increasing American uncertainty, Pakistani officials said. Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani preferred McChrystal to his successor, General David H Petraeus, whom he considers more of a politician than a military strategist, say people who have spoken recently with Kayani.

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans.

Proxies: In addition, Afghan officials said the Pakistanis were pushing various other proxies, with Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership, New York Times reported.

Washington has watched with some nervousness as Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha shuttle between Islamabad and Kabul, telling Karzai that they agree with his assessment that the US cannot win in Afghanistan, and that a post-war Afghanistan should incorporate the Haqqani network, a long-time Pakistani asset. Despite McChrystal’s 11 visits to Kayani in Islamabad in the past year, the Pakistanis have not been altogether forthcoming on details of the conversations in the last two months, making Islamabad’s moves even more worrisome for the US, said an American official.

“They know this creates a bigger breach between us and Karzai,” the official said.

Although encouraged by Washington, the thaw heightens the risk that the US would find itself cut out of what amounts to a separate peace between the Afghans and Pakistanis, and one that does not necessarily guarantee Washington’s prime objective in the war, denying al Qaeda a haven, New York Times reported.

The network of Sirajuddin Haqqani – an ally of al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan – has long been Pakistan’s crucial anti-India asset and has remained virtually untouched by Pakistani forces in their redoubt inside Pakistan, in the Tribal Areas on the Afghan border, even as the Americans have pressed Islamabad for an offensive against it.

At a briefing this week at the ISI headquarters, Pakistani analysts laid out a view of the war that dovetailed neatly with the doubts expressed by Karzai. They depicted a stark picture of an American military campaign in Afghanistan “that will not succeed.”

The offer by Pakistan to make the Haqqanis part of the solution in Afghanistan has now been adopted as basic Pakistani policy, said Riffat Hussain, a professor of international relations at Islamabad University, and a confidant of top military generals. “The establishment thinks that without getting Haqqani on board, efforts to stabilise the situation in Afghanistan will be doomed,” Hussain said. “Haqqani has a large fighting force, and by co-opting him into a power-sharing arrangement a lot of bloodshed can be avoided,” he added, according to the New York Times.

The recent trips by Kayani and Pasha to Kabul were an “effort to make this happen,” he said.

As for the Haqqanis, whose fighters stretch across eastern Afghanistan all the way to Kabul, they are prepared to break with al Qaeda, Pakistani intelligence and military officials said.

Deal: The Taliban, including the Haqqani group, are ready to “make a deal” over al Qaeda, a senior Pakistani official close to the Pakistan Army said. The Haqqanis could tell al Qaeda to move elsewhere because it had been given nine years of protection since the 9/11 attack, the official said. But this official acknowledged that the Haqqanis and al Qaeda were too “thick” with each other for a separation to happen. They had provided each other with fighters, money and other resources over a long period of time, the official said.

The Haqqanis may be playing their own game with their hosts, the Pakistanis, Hussain said.

“Many believe that Haqqanis’ willingness to cut its links with al Qaeda is a tactical move which is aimed at thwarting the impending military action by the Pakistan Army in North Waziristan,” he said, according to the New York Times.