The United States has adopted a "completely new approach" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a top Obama Administration official has said, stressing al Qaeda will be denied a safe haven in the region.
"We have a completely new approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan where we are focused very concretely on disrupting and dismantling and defeating al Qaeda and denying it safe haven in Pakistan," the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told the CNN in an interview yesterday.
"We need to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and its extremist allies. We need to ensure that Pakistan is not operating as a safe haven from which al Qaeda and affiliated terrorists can attack us in the homeland," Rice said.
"We have been very clear that we want to invest what is necessary to achieve that and do it as efficiently and quickly as possible," she said.
"The President has been very clear that we are going to measure our progress every step of the way. He has directed his national security team to put in place measurable metrics, as we call them, on a number of dimensions to be able to ascertain and determine whether we are meeting our goals," the diplomat said.
"We are on track to provide those metrics to Congress as planned in September. We've been consulting with them as we formulate them. So we're confident that we have a new strategy, that will be effectively implemented, that will help us be on course to accomplish the goal of dismantling and disrupting and defeating al Qaeda," Rice said.
