US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets Pakistan Parliamentarians at the US embassy in Islamabad on Friday. The United States has called on Pakistan to take action on dismantling militant havens and encouraging the Taliban into peace talks. Kevin Lamarque / Agence France-Presse

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The United States on Friday called on Pakistan to take action within "days and weeks" on dismantling Afghan militant havens and encouraging the Taliban into peace talks in order to end 10 years of war.

Crucially, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to extract recognition from Pakistan that it could do more in clamping down on Afghan insurgents using Pakistani soil to attack US citizens, but it offered no details on how.

The top US diplomat spent Friday locked in talks with Pakistani leaders following a four-hour session late on Thursday in neighboring Afghanistan to quicken an end to one of the US' longest wars.

Accompanied by CIA director David Petraeus and the top US military officer General Martin Dempsey, she increased pressure on Pakistan to take concrete action but also sought to reassure Islamabad of long-term US support.

"We look to Pakistan to take strong steps to deny Afghan insurgents safe havens and to encourage the Taliban to enter negotiations in good faith," said Clinton after talks with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.

The US was looking for operational action "over the next days and weeks, not months and years, but days and weeks because we have a lot of work to do to realize our shared goals", Clinton said.

Relations between Pakistan and the United States deteriorated dramatically over the May 2 US special forces raid, which killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad, and US accusations over the Sept 13 US embassy siege in Kabul.

The former top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, called the militant Haqqani network a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and accused its spies of being involved in the embassy siege.

In response, Pakistani leaders united behind calls to "give peace a chance," but Clinton said that in order to do that, "we have some work to do".

"We asked very specifically for greater cooperation from the Pakistani side to squeeze the Haqqani network and other terrorists ... trying to eliminate terrorists and safe havens on one side of the border is not going to work," Clinton said.

Pakistan has so far refused to open a new offensive against the Haqqani network in its leadership base in North Waziristan, arguing that its troops are too overstretched and that the country has already sacrificed too many lives.

"It's not just military action. There is greater sharing of intelligence so we can prevent and intercept the efforts by the Haqqanis or the Taliban to try to cross the border or to plan an attack," Clinton said.

Pakistan's foreign minister, who attended talks on Thursday involving military, intelligence and civilian leaders from both sides, appeared to give a commitment to do more.

"Do safe havens exist? Yes, they do exist on both sides. Do we need to cooperate? Yes. We can cooperate more and achieve better results," Khar said.

Agence France-Presse