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| U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry points while walking away after a news conference with Sartaj Aziz (2nd R), adviser to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on foreign affairs. Photo with courtesy by Jason Reed and Reuters |
Interviewee: Daniel Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor
Courtesy: Council on Foreign Relations
After Secretary of State John Kerry finished up with the first round of Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington, he flew directly to Pakistan for meetings with Pakistani officials. What's behind these talks?
There are a number of different purposes. One is to begin a new dialogue, one that had really been curtailed going back to November 2011, after the friendly fire incident along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border known as the Salala incident, the bin Laden killing in May 2011, and [the incident] before that with Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who killed two Pakistanis in February 2011. So the goal of the Kerry mission was to restart with the Pakistani government what they call the "strategic dialogue," and to try and get the relationship back onto a somewhat more normal track in terms of cooperation. [The mission also aimed] to take advantage of the fact that there's a new government in Islamabad under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and there will soon be a new army chief in Pakistan. Read Interview in Council on Foreign Relations
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