At US Summit, Pakistan Vows İron Fist Against Taliban

Portraying the Taliban as a common threat to Islamabad, Kabul and Washington, Pakistan's president says he is committed to joint efforts to counter the threat.

"Our threat is common and our responsibilities should be shared. I am here to assure that we should share this burden with you," President Asif Ali Zardari said on Wednesday as he opened talks with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington.

He also promised to aid Afghanistan in battling the threat of terrorism posed by the al Qaeda and the Taliban-linked militants along the shared border between the two Asian countries.

"We stand with our brother Karzai and the people of Afghanistan against this common threat, this menace, which I have called a cancer," Zardari added.

Earlier three leaders discussed the strategy to defeat the Taliban insurgency which Washington fears threatens the stability of Pakistan, a frontline ally in the war on terrorism, and the future of the nuclear arsenal at its disposal.

The trilateral summit comes as the Pakistani army claimed on Wednesday to have achieved preliminary objectives by launching deadly attacks on Taliban positions in the restive northwestern Swat Valley.

The meeting, meanwhile, was overshadowed by some 150 civilian causalities, the highest toll since the 2001 US-led invasion, sustained in Afghanistan where fresh US-led strikes targeted villages in western parts of the country.