Islamabad in uproar over Trump's attack
A tweet by President Donald Trump has Pakistan responding angrily to accusations that it has accepted billions of dollars in aid from the United States while failing to act against terrorist networks within its borders.
Trump, in a tweet Monday, accused Pakistan of deceit and lies and said that Pakistan gives “safe haven to terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help.”
“No more,” Trump warned. Later that day, Pakistan’s foreign affairs minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, dismissed Trump’s Twitter outburst as having “no impor- tance.”
David Hale, the U.S. ambas- sador, was summoned late Monday to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad, the capital, and a diplomatic protest was lodged, Pakistani officials said.
Coverage of Trump’s comments has dominated the Pakistani news media, and an emergency session of the country’s National Security Council was to be held Tuesday to allow top civilian and military leaders to prepare a response. Local news outlets reported that military officials would give briefings about steps taken against militants.
Trump’s post and Paki- stan’s response point to a nose-dive in the relation- ship between the United States and Pakistan, which has become deeply strained in recent months. In several recent high-profile visits, U.S. officials have repeat- edly expressed frustration over Pakistan’s failure to confront terrorist networks within its borders. But Pakistani officials say they have done more than enough.
Privately, Pakistani officials say that the United States has failed in Afghanistan and is looking to blame Pakistan for that failure. Pakistani officials continue to deny that mili- tants, especially those with the Haqqani network, which is allied with the Afghan Taliban and is responsible for many lethal attacks inside Afghanistan, have havens inside Pakistan.
During a news conference last week, Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, the spokesman for Pakistan’s military, warned the United States against taking any unilateral anti-terror- ism action on Pakistani soil.
Pakistan’s military says it is working to build a fence along the Afghan border to curb infiltration. Officials also say that the estimated 2.7 mil- lion Afghan refugees living in Pakistan need to be repatriated because their presence in the country complicates action against Taliban militants. Pakistani officials say fighters from the Taliban and other groups are able to hide in settlement camps by mingling with refugees.
While there was charac- teristic chest thumping on the evening television talk shows, with guests lampooning the U.S. threats, some critics said there was indeed a need for greater introspection in Pakistan.
“There is a need to fill the gaps in our policy,” Muhammad Nawaz Chaudhry, a former Pakistani ambassador, said in an interview. “We cannot take the bilateral relationship to a dead end.”
“We are living in denial,” he added. “The world, especially the United States, is not accepting our narrative.” As an example, Chaudhry pointed to Hafiz Saeed, the founding leader of Lashkare-Taiba, the militant group
behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, who has con
tinued to live openly in Pakistan despite long being one of the most-wanted militant leaders in the region, with a huge U.S. bounty on his head.
After Trump’s tweet Monday, a charity run by Saeed, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was prohibited from collecting donations, according to a government order. But Chaudhry said that the order was just playing to the gallery.
“Rather than becoming belligerent,” he said, “we need to be realistic and go with the world opinion.”