Holbrooke to discuss counterinsurgency in Pakistan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke visits Pakistan this week to assess the government's wider plans to win over areas that have fallen under Taliban influence following its Swat Valley offensive against the Islamist militants, a U.S. official said Monday.

Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, will visit Pakistan from Wednesday to Friday with a delegation that includes officials from the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department said in a written statement.

The United States, which has welcomed the Swat Valley offensive, needs Pakistani action against the militants both to help defeat al Qaeda and to disrupt support for the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

"Ambassador Holbrooke wants to get a sense of how things are on the ground," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters, saying he would examine how Washington can better help the more than 1 million people displaced by the conflict.

Another U.S. official, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said one of Holbrooke's key aims was to ensure that Pakistan has a wider counter-insurgency strategy for winning over the population in Taliban-influenced areas.

Asked about the trip, this official said: "It's looking at the larger counterinsurgency plans.

"It is looking at the military operation as an element in a larger strategy of extending Pakistani government control into that area -- at the political, the economic, the sociological elements so that ... they don't just win the battle but they make progress toward winning the wider war."

The Pakistani military Saturday said that its forces had regained full control of Mingora, which is the main town in the Swat valley and is about 80 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)