PAKISTAN SEEKS REBOOT OF TIES, ROLE IN KASHMIR FOR THE US

Pakistan is seeking to reboot ties with the United States, end the “stalemate” of last few years and “remove ambiguities”, the country’s visiting finance minister Ishaq Dar has said ahead of his meeting with a senior member of the Trump administration.

Dar, a key aide of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that he would also ask the help of “common friend”, the United States, to settle the dispute with India over Kashmir, in yet another attempt to seek thirdparty mediation long rejected by New Delhi.

“There seems to be a little bit of a stalemate in the last couple of years,” the minister told the Journal before an upcoming meeting with national security adviser Lt Gen HR McMaster here in DC. “We need to remove any ambiguities that we have between each other as friends.” US-Pakistan relations have been in a downward spiral in recent years starting roughly around May 2011, when al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was found hiding in a residential neighbourhood just miles from an elite military school in Abbottabad.