Washington: The United States is hopeful of emerging out of the "very difficult period" of its relationship with Pakistan, a top official said Wednesday.

"We have been going through a fairly difficult period with Pakistan that we`re now hopefully emerging from," the State Department spokesperson, Mark Toner, told reporters at his daily news conference. "Throughout that, our counter terrorism cooperation has continued. We want to try to strengthen it. We recognise that we do face these shared threats," he said.
"We need to keep up the fight. We continue to make that case to the Pakistani government that, you know, this is a group that is killing Pakistanis as well as Americans as well as Afghans. So we need to put the pressure on them," he said in response to a question.
He pointed out that the US is going forward in its relationship with Pakistan. "We have the parliamentary review process complete, you know, but going forward we`re going to have a strong and serious discussion on all the issues, including counter terrorism, including the Haqqani network," he said.
Responding to questions related to the Haqqani network, Toner said the US has been raising this issue with Pakistan as was noted by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in Brazil a day before.
She simply said that when she was in Pakistan in the fall that she raised our concerns about the Haqqani network and, frankly, our concern that this is a shared threat; we all need to take action against this network. It`s a threat to Pakistanis, it`s a threat to Afghans, and it`s a threat to, obviously, Americans living in Afghanistan and elsewhere," Toner said.
Toner said the terrorist attacks in Afghanistan over the weekend appeared to bear the hallmarks of an Haqqani network-style attack.
"We`ve seen them obviously carry out one last fall that was coordinated in this kind of fashion. But you know, beyond that, we`re still in the information-gathering stage, we`re still in investigation carried out by Afghan authorities. So we should know more," he said. PTI