Pompeo claims US averted nuclear war between India, Pakistan
FORMER US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that he was awakened to speak to his then Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj who told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019 and India is preparing its own escalatory response.
In his latest book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love that hit the stores on Tuesday (24), Pompeo says that the incident took place when he was in Hanoi for the USNorth Korea Summit on February 27-28 and his team worked overnight with both New Delhi and Islamabad to avert this crisis.
‘I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019. The truth is, I don’t know precisely the answer either; I just know it was too close,’ Pompeo writes.
India’s warplanes pounded a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Balakot in Pakistan in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans.
‘I’ll never forget the night I was in Hanoi, Vietnam when - as if negotiating with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons wasn’t enough - India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with a decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir,’ Pompeo says.
‘After an Islamist terrorist attack in Kashmirprobably enabled in part by Pakistan’s lax counterterror policies - killed forty Indians, India responded with an air strike against terrorists inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis shot down a plane in a subsequent dogfight and kept the Indian pilot prisoner,’ he said.
‘In Hanoi, I was awakened to speak with my Indian counterpart. He believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation. I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out (sic),’ Pompeo writes in his book, which wrongly refers to Swaraj as ‘he’.
‘I began to work with Ambassador (then National Security Advisor John) Bolton, who was with me in the tiny secure communications facility in our hotel. I reached the actual leaderofPakistan,(Armychief)General(Qamar Javed) Bajwa, with whom I had engaged many times. I told him what the Indians had told me. He said it wasn’t true,’ Pompeo says.
‘As one might expect, he believed the Indians were preparing their nuclear weapons for deployment. It took us a few hours - and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad - to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war,’ the 59-year-old wrote in his book.
Sushma was not ‘important’
Pompeo also wrote that he never saw his counterpart Sushma Swaraj as an ‘important political player’ but got along famously with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, hitting it off with him in their first meeting itself.
In the book, Pompeo describes Swaraj somewhat disparagingly, using the American slang words ‘goofball’ and ‘heartland political hack’ for her.
Swaraj served as external affairs minister in the first Modi government from May 2014 to May 2019. She died in August 2019.
‘On the Indian side, my original counterpart was not an important player on the Indian foreign policy team. Instead, I worked much more closely with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, a close and trusted confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” Pompeo writes in his book.
A confidant of then US president Donald Trump, Pompeo was the CIA Director in his administration from 2017 to 2018 and then served as the Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021.
‘My second Indian counterpart was Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In May 2019, we welcomed ‘J’ as India’s new foreign minister. I could not have asked for a better counterpart. I love this guy. English is one of the seven languages he speaks, and his is somewhat better than mine,’ he writes.
Commenting on Pompeo’s claims, Jaishankar told PTI, ‘I have seen a passage in Secretary Pompeo’s book referring to Smt Sushma Swaraj ji. I always held her in great esteem and had an exceptionally close and warm relationship with her. I deplore the disrespectful colloquialism used for her.’
In his book, Pompeo also says American neglect of India was a decades-long bipartisan failure.
‘We are natural allies, as we share a history of democracy, a common language, and ties of people and technology. India is also a market with enormous demand for American intellectual property and products,’ he wrote.