Bilateral cooperation has been gradually improving since July when Pakistan unblocked Nato supply lines into Afghanistan. The latest demonstration of normalising ties came earlier this month when the Obama administration notified Congress it would reimburse nearly $700 million to Islamabad for the cost of conducting anti-terrorism operations on the Afghan border.
In an interview to Voice of America, Defence Minister Naveed Qamar said his country hopes the United States will soon unfreeze other promised military aid to keep the momentum going. "Things have improved to quite an extent and I would venture out to say that we are back to where we were sometime back, where there is a constant cooperation between the two countries at various levels, political, military, intelligence and so on," Naveed Qamar said.
Pakistan had been receiving around $2 billion in annual security assistance from the United States, including the military reimbursements, called coalition support funds.
But these payments had been held up because of diplomatic tensions over the US raid that eliminated Osama bin Laden, and the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a cross border Nato air strike in November 2011.
The minister said there is now a better understanding in Washington of his country's reservations about an all-out war against Islamist militants on its soil. Afghan diplomatic sources in Islamabad also agree that there are clear signs Pakistan has stepped forward to help facilitate the political reconciliation process inside the country. These sources believe this readiness appears to be driven by fears of a spill over of the conflict into Pakistan if the political system in Kabul collapsed following the withdrawal of foreign troops.
At the request of the Afghan government, Islamabad had recently released about a dozen Afghan Taliban leaders from its jails to try to speed up the political reconciliation process and has promised to free dozens of remaining prisoners.