NEW YORK, Jan 19: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has said that the deaths of 18 civilians in American air strikes on a Pakistani village last week pointed to a need for coordination between Pakistan and the United States, so that it would not set back their joint efforts to fight terrorism.

“The incident over the weekend is regrettable and we have condemned it, and we cannot condone the loss of innocent lives,” Mr Aziz said in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday.

“At the same time, let me say that we are committed to fighting terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and that terrorism knows no borders”, he added.

Mr Aziz asserted that the war against terror was based on principles, “so if our objectives are similar, I think we can work together”.

“However the modus operandi and the code of conduct need to be discussed, and while I’m in Washington, we will certainly talk about it,” Mr Aziz said.

“This is one of those events which wasn’t based on entirely correct intelligence, and it will take a while,” he told the Times. “These things are all being looked at, and we know that there are certain areas of the border with Afghanistan where we ourselves are very concerned about the movement of people who are undesirable. We also have some indication of some movement in that area, but our own intelligence couldn’t verify it and then this thing suddenly happened.”

Speaking of the CIA and counterpart Pakistani services, he said, “The liaison is there between the two agencies but as to the exact way of tackling the intelligence, I believe there was a bit of a communication gap.”

Mr Aziz said the deaths had caused resentment in parts of Pakistan and had blunted widespread expressions of gratitude to the United States for the extensive American effort to care for victims of the earthquake in October that killed more than 73,000 people and left half a million people homeless.

He said that an investigation was proceeding to see if Pakistan had received prior notice of the strike and to discover what evidence there was that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, the apparent target of the attack, was in the area.

Mr Aziz told the newspaper that Pakistan had moved 80,000 troops into border areas in the effort to chase down operatives of Al Qaeda and block Taliban militants and foreign fighters from entering Afghanistan.

But he expressed little hope of the imminent capture or killing of Osama bin Laden or al-Zawahiri, saying that they had the resources to move about the tribal areas and beyond without being detected. “Frankly, nobody knows where they are,” he said. “The simple answer is that nobody has a clue.”

The newspaper noted that Mr Aziz has kept a distinctly pro-American stance in his roles as prime minister and, previously, as finance minister, a post he took in 1999 after stepping down from his position as a top official of Citicorp in New York.

Mr Aziz is to see President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials in Washington next week.