WASHINGTON, July 14: US President Barack Obama met Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani at the White House two years ago and offered to work with Pakistan to build trust between the two countries, says a Washington Post report.

During the Oct 20, 2010 meeting, President Obama told Gen Kayani that “trust does not happen overnight, but it has to happen. Otherwise we will be on a collision course,” the Post reported.

The report by the newspaper’s associate editor and foreign affairs columnist, David Ignatius, says it was this trust deficit between the two allies which was responsible for making their relationship “neurotic”. And it was this lack of trust which caused the US to take seven long months to apologise over the Salala incident.

“Why did it take Washington nearly eight months to apologise for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers? But you know the answer: It’s because the US and Pakistan have the most neurotic, mutually destructive ‘friendly’ relationship in the world,” says the opening paragraph of the report.

The delayed apology is a classic illustration of what’s so odd about this relationship, says the report. “The two countries talk about strategic cooperation one month and feud the next. They claim to be allies against terrorism, even as each side’s intelligence service conducts operations the other regards as hostile.”

According to the report, a useful bridge in this ‘neurotic relationship’ was Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's former ambassador to Washington. “He tried to maintain dialogue across the gulf of suspicion — and also tried to represent the frail civilian government, as opposed to the overpowering Pakistani military.”

The two countries seem to be sulking all the time, says the report. “When you look back at the last few years of this relationship, what’s striking is how the two countries always seem to be sulking — feeling unappreciated and ill-used. Since an open breach doesn’t suit either side, they avoid a final rupture. But the bad feeling has hardened to something dark and dense.”

According to Mr Ignatius’s report, during the aforesaid meeting President Obama responded to Islamabad’s complaint that the US was building up its relations with India at Pakistan’s cost and said: “Your intelligence is wrong. You are hearing from the president of the United States that the US wants a strong, stable Pakistan.”

Gen Kayani gave the US president a 14-page memo titled “Pakistan’s Perspective.”

The concluding section of this document said: “Pakistan is being made a scapegoat. ... US is ‘intrusive’ and ‘overbearing’ – wants to micromanage. US is causing and maintaining a controlled chaos in Pakistan. The real aim of US strategy is to de-nuclearise Pakistan.”

But in the final passage of this memo’s Gen Kayani said that despite these concerns: “At the end of the day, we would like to be standing in the right corner of the room.”

Commenting on Gen Kayani’s final passage, Mr Ignatius notes that America would also like to have good relations with Pakistan.

In the same column, Mr Ignatius reports that President Obama also wrote a letter to President Asif Ali Zardari and his message in both communications – with Mr Zardari and Gen Kayani – was “something between a plea and a demand for better Pakistani cooperation against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Mr Obama sent this secret presidential letter to Mr Zardari on Nov 11, 2009, stating: “We must find new and better ways to work together to disrupt (the extremists’) ability to plan attacks against targets in Pakistan, the region and beyond – including the United States – so that we can eventually destroy its networks.”