Obama : US does not plan to put troops in Pakistan

US will go after Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan after consulting with Islamabad but does not aim to use combat troops on the ground there, President Barack Obama said in an interview.

"If we have a high-value target within our sights, after consulting with Pakistan, we're going after them," Obama said in an interview broadcast on CBS's "Face the Nation" program.

Asked if that meant putting US troops on the ground in Pakistan, Obama said: "No. Our plan does not change the recognition of Pakistan as a sovereign government. We need to work with them and through them to deal with Al Qaeda. But we have to hold them much more accountable."

Obama made his comments in an interview conducted on Friday, the day he announced a new war strategy for Afghanistan that called for the elimination of Al Qaeda militants he said were plotting attacks on the United States from the rough region along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

The plan called for another 4,000 US troops to help train the Afghan army, in addition to the 17,000 combat troops he ordered to Afghanistan ahead of elections in August. Spending on the conflict is expected to rise 60 percent from the current $2 billion per month, officials said.

"What we want to do is to refocus attention on Al-Qaeda," Obama said. "We are going to root out their networks, their bases. We are going to make sure that they cannot attack U.S. citizens, U.S. soil, U.S. interests and our allies' interests around the world," he said.

The approach seeks to make trust and improve ties with an ally that Washington has at times supported and at times ignored but now sees as critical in the fight against the militant group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, U.S. officials said.

To plant Al Qaeda, Obama said, the United States had to ensure it could not find a base in Afghanistan or Pakistan from which to organize attacks. He said Washington also needed to convince average Pakistanis that the struggle with extremists was not just a U.S. war.

"One of the concerns that we've had building up over the last several years is a notion, I think, among the average Pakistani, that this is somehow America's war and they are not invested," Obama said.