Get grip on ISI, Boucher tells Geelani

NEW DELHI: The US on Sunday repeated that Islamabad will have to do more for containing terror. It asked the Pakistani leadership to get its intelligence network to work towards tackling terrorism that is affecting its neighbourhood.

���Pakistan needs to get everybody lined up in the same direction if they are really going to tackle the terrorist problem,��� reports from Colombo quoting US assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher said. Mr Boucher is in the Sri Lankan capital as an observer at the Saarc summit.

His statement came after US officials vindicated Indian claim of Pakistan���s ISI���s role in the suicide bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul. Mr Boucher, who met Pakistan prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of the Saarc summit, welcomed his assurance to India to probe the Kabul attack.

���Our view is that it is important to have a good intelligence service in Pakistan, but it is also important for that intelligence service to work single-mindedly with other institutions to tackle the terrorist issue that affects so many people in Pakistan and its neighbourhood,��� he said.

Mr Boucher said it was the duty of the government to fight the terror menace. ���No society is able to fight terrorism if it is divided. It takes all the institutions administrative, executive and intelligence to fight this menace,��� he said. The official added that the Pakistani leadership was faced with ���big challenges��� in its endeavour to put its house in order.

The US official said cooperation among the nations of the region was the only way to solve these problems. He said he had a meeting with Mr Gilani in Washington earlier this week and the discussions on Saturday were a follow up to the deliberations they had. Recent US media reports had said that US intelligence agencies had concluded that ISI had helped plan last month���s suicide car bomb attack on the Indian mission in Kabul that killed nearly 60 people.

Meanwhile, a declaration adopted at the end of the two-day 15th Saarc summit vowed to jointly tackle issues like energy security, food security and trade barriers. The summit also saw all member countries recognising terrorism as a serious threat to peace, stability and security of the region.