Rice to Press for Reforms in Pakistan

With Taliban activity increasing in Afghanistan, the Bush administration dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to seek increased border cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan and nudge Pakistan toward democracy.

Rice, on her way to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, said she remained confident that President Pervez Musharraf would keep a promise to ease Pakistan away from authoritarianism.

“He laid out several years ago the idea of ... Pakistan as a moderate force in the Muslim world,” Rice told reporters on the first leg of her trip. The aircraft was refueled in Scotland.

“The important point is, there has to be, the world expects there to be, democratic, free and fair elections in Pakistan in 2007,” she said, adding that Islamabad’s leadership was committed to “a course toward moderation, rather than a course toward extremism.”

Rice’s trip is built around a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Group of 8 nations Thursday in Moscow. That session, likely to focus largely on Iran’s nuclear program, will follow the Pakistan stop.

Even as Rice noted the changes in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, she acknowledged renewed fighting along the border with Pakistan.

She said the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan needed to do more jointly to counter “a very difficult and somewhat stubborn problem.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that Pakistan has not done enough to restrict Taliban raids into his country, and Musharraf has said that Karzai has not taken advantage of invitations to provide intelligence.

Rice said the militants lacked a political base or a plan to reconstruct the country.