WASHINGTON, Sept 10: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday that the United States was not trying to send a message to Pakistan by designating the Haqqani network a foreign terrorist organisation.

“It is part of the continuing effort to try to send a message to them — not to anybody else, but to them,” Secretary Clinton told Bloomberg News when asked if the move aimed at sending a message to Pakistan that they’re not doing enough against the Haqqanis.

“We do very intensive analysis before we designate someone as a foreign terrorist organisation … we have reached that conclusion about the Haqqani network and we think it’s the right decision,” she said.

The Haqqanis, she said, had launched some “really incredibly damaging attacks” against US and other targets inside Afghanistan and it’s important that “we use every tool at our disposal to go after them”.

In the same interview, Secretary Clinton also said that her country was “not setting deadlines” for Iran and still believed negotiations was “by far the best approach” to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Economic sanctions, she noted, were building pres-sure on Iran and could work in curbing its nuclear ambitions.