Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari called for "serious dialogue" with the United States on Sunday, amid a fierce dispute over US claims that his intelligence agency has links to Islamist militants.
"Democracy always favors dialogue over confrontation," Zardari wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that decried the recent "verbal assaults" of some US officials against Pakistan.
"It is time for the rhetoric to cool and for serious dialogue between allies to resume."
Last week, the top US military officer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen accused Pakistan of exporting violence to Afghanistan through proxies and charged that the Haqqani network, an Al-Qaeda-linked group, was a "veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence.
Expressing regret over the growing tensions between the United States and Pakistan, which have struggled to overcome sharp differences to forge an alliance in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Zardari said it was the militants who had gained the most from the spat.
