Pakistan plans to target Qaeda 'epicenter' in NW: Mullen

President Barack Obama's top military adviser Mike Mullen said that Pakistan's Army has pledged to go after militants the US wants targeted in an area harboring al- Qaeda that has become the epicenter of terrorism. Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said his Pakistani counterpart, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has given assurances he will mount an offensive the U.S. has long called for in North Waziristan along the Afghan border.Muller cited as evidence for his optimism Pakistan's offensives against the Taliban and related groups elsewhere in the country during the past 1 years. He's committed to me to go into North Waziristan and to root out these terrorists as well, Mullen, 64, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's Conversations with Judy Woodruff to be broadcast this weekend. He clearly knows what our priorities are.In an interview that also touched on Iran, China and the burdens facing returning war veterans, Mullen said he hadn't read Washington journalist Bob Woodward's latest book on the administration's strategy debates, Obama's Wars.He countered suggestions in the book that the military limited Obama's options on Afghanistan during a strategy review last year. The military provided its best advice, Mullen said. He said the goal was to defeat al-Qaeda and ensure Afghanistan wouldn't again become a haven for the group as it had been before the US ousted the Taliban from power after the Sept 11, 2001, terror attacks. That's how I approached my best military advice to the president, Mullen said. In addition to the military campaign in Afghanistan, Obama is relying on neighboring Pakistan to help rout al-Qaeda and related groups that threaten troops across the border and may be preparing further attacks in Europe or the US, such as the May 1 car-bomb attempt in New York's Times Square. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation struggling with an economic crisis and newly re-established democratic rule, says its army is stretched by the fight against militants in six tribal agencies and a flood that inundated a fifth of the country in July. North Waziristan is the epicenter of terrorism, Mullen said. It's where al-Qaeda lives.Pakistan has shifted more than 70,000 troops from the country's border with India, its traditional rival, to the northwest, mobilizing a total of 140,000 forces.