WASHINGTON, Aug 2: The United States wants Pakistan to defeat Al Qaeda in the battlefield and will not hesitate to use its own forces to achieve this objective, says Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns.

In a detailed review of the US policy towards Pakistan, Mr Burns observed that Al Qaeda had built a safe haven in Pakistan, while the Taliban leadership operated from bases in and around Quetta.

The US policy, as explained by Mr Burns, favours a democratic change in Pakistan, which brings a government that is friendly to Washington and is a “judicious custodian of the country’s nuclear weapons”.

Mr Burns said linking US aid to Pakistan’s performance in the fight against terror was justified because as a friend Washington had the right to expect Islamabad to fight the terrorists who attacked the US on Sept 11, 2001.

He said Pakistani banks were involved in laundering money for Al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits.

There could be no talks with Al Qaeda, which had to be defeated militarily, he said.

The US respected Pakistan’s sovereignty but it would not hesitate to use its forces to target what he called Al Qaeda hideouts inside Pakistan.

“With Al Qaeda, we do not believe that there can be reasoned dialogue, so we would prefer the Pakistani government to take it to Al Qaeda and defeat them in the battlefield,” Mr Burns told C-Span television.

“The US has an enormous stake in what happens in Pakistan because that’s where Al Qaeda is, that’s where the Taliban leadership is, in Quetta,” he said.

He said that a new US law, which required the president to certify on a six-month basis that the Pakistani government was doing all it could and should be doing to fight terrorist groups, was necessary.

Mr Burns said the US did not question President Musharraf’s will to fight terrorists but it thought that the government of Pakistan could and should be more effective in fighting the terrorist groups.

“We share Congress’s concern, but we also want to make sure that we have a stable relationship with Pakistan, so that we retain our influence there,” he said.

Mr Burns claimed that the Taliban had always had refuge in parts of Pakistan. “We were very concerned about that and we still are,” he said. The Pakistani government, he said, had been a good partner, “but as a friend it is permissible to say in public that we hope they will do better because when Al Qaeda has refuge in Pakistan, as it clearly does, that simply is not acceptable.”

Mr Burns said Pakistan should take two immediate steps to fight terrorists: “First, they have got to take stronger military measure in Balochistan against the Taliban and in North and South Waziristan against Al Qaeda to defeat those groups inside Pakistan. Second, there is a lot of financing, of course, money that gets laundered through banks that support these terrorist groups. We have asked the Pakistani government to take stronger measures to try to interdict this kind of laundering of money which is vital to support the operations of these terrorist groups.”

He acknowledged that the Pakistani government has not taken kindly to some of the criticism from the US government over the past two weeks, but “we believe we have to speak plainly”.

The official disagreed with a caller who suggested that the US needed to take out Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to protect Israel and other US allies.

“We need to have stability in Pakistan because… that’s where the fight is, that’s ground zero in the fight against terror.”

Pakistan, he said, also had a nuclear weapons capability “so we hope very much that any future government in Pakistan is going to be stable, is going to be friendly to the US and a judicious custodian of its nuclear arsenal”.

The US had continued to support the Musharraf government “so that the situation that you described, this kind of worst case situation, does not materialise”, he told the caller.

Asked if the US could send its own troops to demolish Al Qaeda bases inside the Pakistani tribal belt, Mr Burns said: “We are going to deal respectfully and, hopefully, effectively with the Pakistani government. They should control what happens inside their own territory. And nearly on every occasion we do want to work with the Pakistani government to try to defeat the terrorist groups.

“But we also said if we had perfect knowledge about location of Al Qaeda, we felt that we could give Al Qaeda a severe blow by US military action; then of course, we wouldn’t hesitate.”