PESHAWAR, May 8: The United States efforts to talk peace with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan mean Washington can no longer expect Pakistan to attack all the militant factions on its side of the border, some of whom Islamabad is also reaching out to, the commander of Pakistan’s forces along the frontier told The Associated Press.

In a sign of the bad blood between Washington and Islamabad, Lt-Gen Khalid Rabbani also accused the US of seeking to make Pakistan a scapegoat for its failure to beat the insurgency in Afghanistan.

“Why do they to raise their fingers towards Pakistan? It is shifting the blame to others,” Gen Rabbani said in his offices in a highly secure section of the main northwestern city of Peshawar. “Is Afghanistan free of Taliban? It has hundreds of thousands of them.”

One powerful faction in North Waziristan is led by a commander called Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who is believed to have signed a nonaggression pact with the government but still funnels fighters into Afghanistan. Gen Rabbani defended the government’s dealings with Bahadur, saying “at the moment he seems to be trying to keep himself out of the trouble”.

Gen Rabbani said US and Nato were in contact with insurgents in Afghanistan to try and “co-opt them into the peace process”.

“Similar things are true on this side of the border as well,” he said. “Is it forbidden for us to do the same?”

Repeating assurances by other top army officers, Gen Rabbani said several times that the army would launch operations in North Waziristan. —AP