In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: Seeking to improve a rocky relationship, President Barack Obama and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday pledged cooperation on the security issues that have strained ties between their nations. But the sources of the long-standing tensions did briefly bubble to the surface. 
  
 President Barack Obama smiles during his meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. In the rocky relationship between... (Associated Press) 
  
 An armored sports utility vehicle carrying Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif drives past a military honor cordon as he arrives at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, for his... (Associated Press) 
  
 Supporters of Pakistan's Islamist party Pasban, rally against US drone strikes on hideouts of militants in the country's tribal areas, in Karachi, Pakistan, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. Pakistan's Prime... (Associated Press) 
  
 Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif arrives at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, for his meeting with President Barack Obama. The White House said that the leaders would discus,... (Associated Press) 
  
 President Barack Obama shakes hands with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at the conclusion of their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. In the... (Associated Press) 
  
 Speaking alongside Obama in the Oval Office, Sharif said he raised the issue of American drone strikes during their two-hour meeting, "emphasizing the need for an end to such strikes." For his part, Obama made no mention of drones, which have stoked widespread resentment in Pakistan where many believe the targeted strikes by the armed unmanned aircraft kill large numbers of civilians. 
  
 Despite the Pakistani concerns, the U.S. has shown no indication it is willing to abandon the attacks, even though the number has dropped in the past couple of years. The Pakistani government secretly supported the strikes in the past, and U.S. officials claim some key leaders still do. 
  
 The Washington Post, citing top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos it had obtained, reported that top officials in Pakistan's government have endorsed the program for years, if secretly, and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts. 
  
 In a story posted Wednesday on its website, the Post reported that markings on the documents indicate that many of them were prepared by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center specifically to be shared with Pakistan's government. The documents, which detailed at least 65 strikes in Pakistan, are marked "top secret" but cleared for release to Pakistan, the newspaper reported. 
  
 Wednesday marked the first time Obama and Sharif have met since the Pakistani leader took office in June. And the mere fact that the talks took place was seen as a sign of progress after a particularly sour period in relations between the security partners. 
  
 Obama acknowledged that there will always be some tension between the U.S. and Pakistan, but said he and Sharif agreed to build a relationship based on mutual respect. 
  
 "It's a challenge. It's not easy," he said. "We committed to working together and making sure that rather than this being a source of tension between our two countries, it can be a source of strength." 
  
 Tensions peaked in 2011 following the U.S. raid inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden and the accidental killing of two dozen Pakistani troops in an American airstrike along the Afghan border that same year. But there have been recent signs of progress, with Pakistan reopening supply routes to Afghanistan that is closed in retaliation for the accidental killing of its troops. And ahead of Sharif's visit, the U.S. quietly decided to release more than $1.6 billion in military and economic aid to Pakistan that was suspended in 2011. 
  
 Washington has warmly welcomed Sharif, who arrived on Sunday for his first visit to the U.S. capital since taking office. He dined with Secretary of State John Kerry and other top U.S. officials and was hosted at a breakfast meeting Wednesday at Vice President Joe Biden's residence. Sharif's wife was also the guest of honor at a tea and poetry reception hosted by first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, the vice president's wife. 
  
 A military honor guard also lined the driveway leading to the West Wing of the White House as Sharif arrived for his meeting with Obama. 
  
 Beyond drones, the other hot-button issues on the agenda for Wednesday's meeting included plans for winding down the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and the longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan. 
  
 Both leaders agreed on the need for a stable and secure Afghanistan after combat missions formally conclude there at the end of next year. The U.S. and Afghanistan are negotiating an agreement to keep some American troops in Afghanistan after 2014, but one unresolved issue _ which is a deal breaker for the U.S. _ is whether American military courts maintain legal jurisdiction over the troops. 
  
 U.S. officials have said the White House is looking to keep fewer than 10,000 troops on the ground after 2014 for counterterrorism and training purposes. Some Pakistani officials fear that a full American withdrawal could increase the flow of extremists across its border with Afghanistan. 
  
 Pakistan's conflict with India over the disputed region of Kashmir was also a central topic of the talks. Hours before Obama and Sharif met, India accused Pakistani troops of firing guns and mortars at at least 50 Indian border posts overnight in Kashmir. Indian troops returned fire, but one Indian guard was killed and six were injured by a shell fired at the Arnia post in the Jammu region, officials said. 
  
 Neither leader mentioned Wednesday's incident. But Obama praised Sharif for seeking to end tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. 
  
 "Billions of dollars have been spent on an arms race in response to these tensions," Obama said. "Those resources could be much more properly invested in education, social welfare programs on both sides of the border between India and Pakistan." 
  
 Sharif said he was committed to cooperation with India, including on Kashmir. 
  
 The Pakistani leader also invited Obama to visit Pakistan, but the U.S. president did not publicly accept the offer. During his first term, Obama had told Pakistani officials that he wanted to visit the country, but those plans were halted by the increased tensions that followed the bin Laden killing. 
  
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 Follow Julie Pace on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC ||||| The Obama administration's aggressive drone program in Pakistan came under renewed attack this week, with Amnesty International suggesting that the United States is engaged in war crimes and visiting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif describing the strikes as a "major irritant" in relations. 
  
 But what is obscured by the public dispute is that there has been, since the administrations of George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf, a secret agreement in place by which Pakistani military and intelligence authorities have approved many of the strikes, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. 
  
 "The exact terms were never shared with civilians but there was a protocol between the Musharraf government and the Americans," says a former senior Pakistani official who would discuss the classified matter only on condition of anonymity. "When the civilian government came in [in 2008], it was informed about it but there was no renegotiation." 
  
 Even so, this official told National Journal that civilian leaders in Islamabad have made sporadic efforts to renegotiate. "Both [former President Asif Ali] Zardari and Sharif have approached Washington to say, 'Can we talk about it?'" 
  
 Sharif said he brought up the issue of drones in his White House meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, "emphasizing the need for an end to such strikes." The Washington Post also reported late Wednesday that it had obtained top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomati c memos detailing deep cooperation between the United States and Pakistan on drone targeting. 
  
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 Because the details are not publicly known, it is not clear to what extent the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus gained approval authority for all drone strikes. In his new book, "Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding," former Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani writes that the Pakistani ISI actually resisted U.S. efforts to keep its own government in Islamabad informed. "The CIA and the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] communicated regularly on the strikes," Haqqani says. "The ISI did not like Pakistani civilian officials finding out anything about their dealings with the United States about armed Predator drones, but the U.S. government wanted the civilian leadership to remain in the picture." The ISI, Haqqani added, was in the habit of "protesting against the drones publicly while privately negotiating over whom the drones would target." 
  
 But the two governments increasingly diverged over the nature of the enemy, with the ISI wanting to protect some of its jihadist allies in the struggle for influence with India and inside Afghanistan, and to target only certain al Qaida-linked groups. Trust between the two sides was badly damaged after the U.S. unilaterally targeted Osama bin Laden in a strike by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad in May 2011, completely surprising Pakistani military and intelligence officials. 
  
 Officials say that a major reason why the Obama administration resisted efforts by Congress to obtain the full range of its classified legal memos justifying so-called targeted killing was to protect the secret protocols with Pakistan and other countries, such as Yemen. 
  
 Last February, a legal expert outside the government who is intimately familiar with the contents of the memos drafted by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel told National Journal that the government-to-government accords on the conduct of drone strikes were a key element not contained in a Justice Department "white paper" revealed by NBC News. He said it was largely in order to protect this information that the targeted-killing memos drafted by Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were even withheld from congressional committees. "That is what is missing from the white paper but forms a core part of the memos," the expert said. 
  
 A Human Rights Watch report this week also criticized the U.S. drone program in Yemen, saying the targeted airstrikes against alleged terrorists have violated international law by killing innocent civilians. But a year ago, the new leader of Yemen – another country with which Washington has signed a secret protocol on drones – publicly endorsed America's use of drones within his borders. "They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you're aiming at," the new Yemeni president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, said at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. 
  
 The Obama administration has consistently maintained that civilian casualties are minimal, and State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf suggested on Tuesday that the reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were inaccurate on that score. "There's a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports," she said. 
  
 Even so the Obama administration, jolted by new waves of anti-Americanism in Pakistan and the Arab world in reaction to the drone strikes, has been engaged in an intense internal debate over how to narrow the program. The administration believes it has removed most of "core al-Qaida" from its central home in Pakistan, and at the same time it's no longer quite as clear that "associated" groups or individuals will seek to target the U.S. homeland or U.S. interests the way bin Laden did. 
  
 Among those expected to influence this effort anew is Jeh Johnson, Obama's nominee to succeed Janet Napolitano as Homeland Security secretary. Administration officials point to a speech that Johnson, then the Pentagon's general counsel, gave in November 2012 setting legal standards for the drone war and laying out criteria for curtailing and even ending it. Johnson said "there will come a tipping point … at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaida as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed." The war would then be expected to end – and with it, much of the drone program, Johnson suggested. 
  
 Meanwhile, however, the Amnesty International report on Pakistan concluded that the "strikes have resulted in unlawful killings that may constitute extrajudicial executions or war crimes." 
  
 Sharif, who is seeking to repair relations with Washington, was somewhat more circumspect in a speech in Washington on Tuesday, noting that Pakistan's political parties have "declared that the use of drones is not only a continued violation of our territorial integrity, but also detrimental to our resolve and efforts at eliminating terrorism from our country." 
  
 He did not mention the secret protocol authorizing the use of drones within his country's borders. |||||
A: 
Though Pakistan has often condemned US drone strikes—this week, PM Nawaz Sharif called them an obstacle in the countries' relationship—officials there reportedly signed a secret deal with the Bush administration regarding the attacks. "The exact terms were never shared with civilians, but there was a protocol between the Musharraf government and the Americans," a former official tells the National Journal. The civilian government that took over in 2008 "was informed about it, but there was no renegotiation." Pakistani officials approved of many drone strikes via that agreement, though it's not certain if all were approved, the Journal notes. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports on top-secret CIA materials that show Pakistan quietly supported strikes, "routinely" receiving briefings on them. The documents also show the CIA regularly asserting that no civilians were killed in the attacks, contrary to reports by watchdog groups. Still, it remains clear that the strikes have been a point of tension between the countries, the Post notes. Yesterday, Sharif met with President Obama during his first trip to Washington as prime minister; speaking at the White House afterward, he said he had "emphasiz(ed) the need for an end" to the strikes. The visit itself is thought to show progress in the relationship, the AP notes.