WH: Pakistan Needs to Do More

The Hill reports:

President Obama is determined to salvage the U.S. relationship with Pakistan even as he seeks more information about Osama bin Laden’s years in hiding in that country, the White House said Monday.

A week after the terrorist behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was killed in a U.S. raid less than an hour’s drive from Pakistan’s capital, U.S. officials are still waiting to talk to bin Laden’s surviving wives.

The U.S. government is “in consultations with the Pakistani government at many levels” about seeing the wives and the other materials gathered from the compound, White House press secretary Jay Carney said at his daily briefing.

“We're going to have those conversations [with Pakistan], and we hope and expect to make progress,” Carney said.

Obama is “very interested in getting access to the three wives … as well as the information or material that the Pakistanis collected after U.S. forces left.”

So far, Pakistan has not allowed the U.S. access to survivors from the compound, where bin Laden and others were killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL team.

Tensions are clearly rising between the two countries. On Monday, the Pakistani government leaked the name of the CIA’s Islamabad station chief — the second time Pakistan has done that — and Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani went to Parliament to blast the U.S. for carrying out a military mission without Pakistan's knowledge in a sovereign country.

In reaction to those developments, Carney sought to diffuse the tension even as he repeated that Obama will not apologize for sending U.S. commandos into the country to get bin Laden.

“We obviously take the statements and concerns of the Pakistani government seriously, but we also do not apologize for the action that we took, that this president took,” Carney said.