ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's army chief said Saturday his forces had “broken the back” of militants after the United States criticized the country's efforts to quell Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked rebels. “The terrorists' backbone has been broken and God willing we will soon prevail,” General Ashfaq Kayani said in a speech at a passing-out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy in northwestern garrison town of Abbottabad. The White House this month criticized Pakistan's efforts to defeat the Taliban in its border regions, in a report immediately rejected by Islamabad. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, subsequently accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of having ties with the Afghan Taliban in the northwestern tribal belt. “Let me assure you that we in Pakistan's army are fully aware of the internal and external threat to our country,” Kayani said Saturday. “In the war against terrorism our officers and soldiers have made great sacrifices and have achieved tremendous success. The people of Pakistan value their freedom and independence more than anything else, and consider no sacrifice too great to preserve it,” he said. A military statement released Thursday, after Mullen's comments, said Kayani had “strongly rejected negative propaganda on Pakistan not doing enough and (the) Pakistan army's lack of clarity on the way forward”. In an interview with private TV channel Geo, Mullen, the highest-ranking officer in the US armed forces, had said: “ISI has a long standing relationship with the Haqqani network – that does not mean everybody in ISI but it is there.” The Haqqani network is an Al-Qaeda-allied organization run by Afghan warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani and based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal district. Meanwhile, Pakistan halted NATO supply shipments to Afghanistan Saturday after thousands of protesters rallied on the main road to the border to demand Washington stop firing missiles against militants sheltering inside the country. The stoppage was temporary and the demonstration was held by a small political party seeking a populist boost, but the events highlighted the vulnerability of the supply route running through Pakistan at a time of tensions between Washington and Islamabad. Much of the non-lethal supplies for foreign troops in landlocked Afghanistan come through Pakistan after arriving at the port in the southern city of Karachi. Militants often attack the convoys, and last September Pakistan closed the border for 20 days to protest a NATO helicopter strike inside its borders. NATO commanders said then that the halt did not affect the war effort. The alliance has been opening new routes into Afghanistan from the north in recent years to try to reduce its dependancy on the Pakistan route, which gives Islamabad leverage when negotiating with the West.
