Kerry With Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

Remarks With Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif After Their Meeting

Remarks
John Kerry
Secretary of State
The Hague, Netherlands
March 24, 2014

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SECRETARY KERRY: (In progress) – it is to meet with Prime Minister Sharif of Pakistan. We – Pakistan and the United States – have enormous mutual interests. We are both striving to combat extremism, terrorism, deal with the challenge of global energy, as well as to provide for the prosperity of our people and deal with nuclear security. And it’s nuclear security that particularly brings us here to The Hague.

But we are working very, very closely together. I visited with the prime minister in August of last year. We began a strategic dialogue again. We have worked together with our Security, Strategic Stability, and Nonproliferation Working Group. That group is engaged in dealing with issues of nuclear security as well as other challenges. And in addition, we met recently in Washington. Dr. Aziz and I engaged in our strategic dialogue. And we look forward to welcoming Finance Minister Dar, who will be coming to Washington for our finance component of that discussion.

So we are deeply engaged, and I might add that we affirmed recently and we reaffirm that we have great confidence in Pakistan’s nuclear security. They’ve really done an enormous amount of work. I know the prime minister will probably talk about that here at the summit. But we do have important issues of cooperation with respect to the extremism, terror, counterterrorism, and Afghanistan. And we look forward to discussing those issues this morning.

PRIME MINISTER SHARIF: Thank you, John. Thank you very much.

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, sir.

PRIME MINISTER SHARIF: It’s always a pleasure to welcome you, and you’ve been a great friend of Pakistan. Of course, we are very happy to have met here also. And as John has been saying, that there are a lot of challenges – we are meeting these challenges in Pakistan. We have been in office for almost about nine months and we’ve had very constructive discussions with our American friends. I had a very good meeting with President Obama a few months ago in Washington, and we are now following up all that we have discussed and agreed.

SECRETARY KERRY: Good.

PRIME MINISTER SHARIF: Thank you.

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, Nawaz. Thank you.

ENDS

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