Pakistan, US showdown
Foreign minister Mehmood to ‘have exchanges’ with visiting Secretary of State Pompeo
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s new foreign minister said he will “have exchanges” with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Washington’s cancellation of a $300 million (R4.6m) disbursement for the Pakistani military when he visits Islamabad today.
Adopting a tougher line with an ally that US President Donald Trump considers unreliable, the US halted the disbursement of Coalition Support Funds (CSF) due to Islamabad’s perceived failure to take decisive action against Afghan Taliban militants operating from Pakistani soil.
The US has withheld $800m from the CSF this year.
The latest move comes just as the less-than-one-month-old government of Prime Minister Imran Khan faces a looming balance of payments crisis that could force it to seek a fresh bailout from the International Monetary Fund or other lenders.
“On the 5th, the American (Secretary of State) Pompeo will be arriving, and we will have a chance to sit down with him. There will be exchanges,” Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Sunday night. “We will take our mutual respect for each other into consideration and move forward,” he added.
Qureshi argued that the US was not justified in cutting the $300m because it was intended to reimburse Pakistan’s military for money spent fighting the Taliban and other militants threatening US troops in Afghanistan.
“It is not aid. It is not assistance, which was suspended. This is the money, which we have spent. This is our money. We have spent it,” Qureshi said. “We did it for our betterment, which they had to reimburse.”
Officially allies in fighting terrorism, Pakistan and the US have a complicated relationship, bound by Washington’s dependence on Pakistan to guarantee a supply route for US troops in Afghanistan.
US officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of playing a double game, by covertly providing safe havens for Afghan Taliban insurgents and fighters from the Haqqani network, which is waging a 17-year-old war against Afghanistan’s US-backed government.
Pakistan consistently denies providing safe havens for the militants.
In an editorial on Monday, Pakistan’s English-language Dawn newspaper railed against the Trump administration’s decision to halt the disbursement of funds.
“The US has delivered an abject lesson in how not to conduct diplomacy,” the newspaper decried. It speculated whether Pompeo would try to bully the Pakistani leadership during his visit or play the “good cop” diplomatic role.
Relations between Islamabad and Washington got off to a rocky start last month when Qureshi publicly disputed that Pompeo had brought up the thorny issue of terrorist havens in a phone call with Khan.
The Pakistanis later downplayed the issue after Washington shared a transcript of the call.