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ISLAMABAD : US vice president-elect Joe Biden Friday met Pakistan's leaders to discuss tensions with India and the anti-terror fight in South Asia, 11 days before he takes office with Barack Obama, officials said.
Biden, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sat down with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani at the start of a regional tour with Republican senator Lindsey Graham.
Biden's office said he would tour "southwest Asia" without giving details, citing security concerns, but he himself said earlier this week that he would be visiting Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the politico.com website reported.
"What I hope to accomplish is to get sort of a baseline. This will be my God knows how many trips, I guess my 10th or 11th trip into Iraq and I don't know how many times in Afghanistan and Pakistan," he was quoted as saying.
An aide to the Pakistani president said the Biden-Zardari talks focused on strained relations between India and Pakistan following the Mumbai attacks, as well as Islamabad's ongoing contribution to the US-led "war on terror".
Zardari apprised Biden of "Pakistan's commitment and the measures being taken by the government in the war against militancy, extremism and terrorism," an official statement said.
Biden called Pakistan an "important ally and partner" of the United States, the statement said.
The Delaware senator -- who will surrender his seat to take over the vice presidency -- received a special award from Zardari for his efforts to strengthen democracy in Pakistan, the aide said.
US embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said Biden, who arrived in the country earlier Friday after a visit to Kuwait, would also meet with senior military officials.
A Pakistani foreign ministry official told AFP he would meet powerful army chief General Ashfaq Kayani. The army declined to comment.
Although Biden's office has stressed that he has come to the region in his capacity as a senator, the trip is likely to be seen as carrying more weight, given Obama's plans to shift the focus in the "war on terror" to South Asia.
The US president-elect, who takes office along with Biden on January 20, has outlined a new strategy for the region that emphasises ending the conflict in Afghanistan.
The United States will deploy up to 30,000 extra troops in Afghanistan this year to help quell the Taliban-led insurgency that has gripped that country for seven years and spilled across the border into Pakistan.
Pakistan's lawless rugged tribal areas along the border are home to hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists who fled Afghanistan after the hardline Taliban regime was ousted from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001.
The commander of US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, General David Petraeus, suggested Thursday that ending the conflict in Afghanistan required "a regional approach" including Pakistan, India and perhaps Iran.
"The way forward in Afghanistan is incomplete without a strategy that includes and assists Pakistan," Petraeus said in Washington.
CIA drone aircraft are believed to have launched more than two dozen missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas since August, including one on January 1 that local officials said killed the head of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and his deputy.
Officials believe Usama al-Kini, described as Al-Qaeda's chief of operations in Pakistan, was behind the truck bombing of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel last September, and was connected to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa.
Pakistan has repeatedly protested to the United States that the drone strikes violate its territorial sovereignty, but some officials say there is a tacit understanding between the US and Pakistani militaries to allow them.
On India, Gilani told Biden that Pakistan was prepared to offer as much cooperation as possible to India in the Mumbai investigation, an official in the prime minister's office said.
Gilani said earlier that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency had given India information in response to its dossier of evidence on the carnage in Mumbai.
India has accused "official agencies" in Pakistan of involvement in the attacks in late November in which gunmen killed 165 people. Islamabad has acknowledged that the lone surviving gunman is a Pakistani national.
- AFP /ls
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