Pak holds out threat to skip Afghan meet

We hope that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan will participate in the Bonn conference because the conference for us is the most important political event of the year, a ministry spokesman,Janan Mosawi,said.

Pakistans participation is considered vital,officials said,given the leverage that it maintains over some of the Taliban factions fighting inside Afghanistan. A spokeswoman of the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs said no decision had been made,the matter is being examined. Pakistan will revisit its engagement with NATO and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan,Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said. However,it will continue to support a peace process in Afghanistan that is Afghan-led and Afghan-owned.

In Washington,American officials were trying to assess how the attacks had happened. According to preliminary reports,allied forces in Afghanistan engaged in a firefight along the border and called in airstrikes.

Senior Obama administration officials were also weighing the implications on a relationship that took a sharp turn for the worse after a Navy Seal commando raid killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad in May.

NATO was also investigating after saying on Saturday it was likely that NATO-led airstrikes had led to the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers. This was a tragic unintended incident, the groups secretary general,Anders Fogh Rasmussen,said in a statement. We will determine what happened and draw the right lessons.

Pakistans foreign minister,Hina Rabbani Khar,called Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday to convey the deep sense of rage felt across Pakistan,according to a government statement. The border attacks negate the progress made by the two countries on improving relations and forces Pakistan to revisit the terms of engagement,Khar was quoted as saying. Earlier,Pakistani military officials had called the attacks unprovoked acts of aggression by the US.

Pakistan buried the dead soldiers on Sunday as thousands of protesters gathered outside the American Consulate in Karachi. One funeral,led by army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,was held at the Corps Headquarters in Peshawar,the capital of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Province in northwest Pakistan,near the site of the attacks. General Kayani also visited soldiers who were injured in the attacks.

On Saturday,the Pakistani government ordered the CIA to vacate the drone operations it runs from Shamsi Air Base in western Pakistan within 15 days. It also closed the two main NATO supply routes into Afghanistan,including the one at Torkham. NATO forces receive roughly 40 per cent of their supplies through that crossing,which runs through the Khyber Pass,and Pakistan gave no estimate for how long the routes might be shut down.

On Sunday,the state-run news media quoted Rehman Malik,the Pakistani interior minister,as saying that the NATO supply lines had been stopped permanently. Malik said NATO containers would not be allowed to cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The Pakistani government also lodged a protest with Afghanistan on Sunday about the use of Afghan territory against Pakistan,according to government officials. The Afghan government was urged to take steps to ensure such attacks would not be repeated.

Spokesperson Mosawi said that the Afghan government had been contacted by the Pakistani ambassador in Kabul,but would not elaborate and did not respond to questions asking whether the Afghan government had been asked to take steps to limit NATO military activity on the Pakistani border.