US owes $300m, claims Pakistan

WITHHELD: MONEY WAS TO PAY FOR WAR ON TERROR

Islamabad

Pakistan’s new government said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi will “have exchanges” with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Washington’s cancellation of a $300 million disbursement for the Pakistani military when he visits Islamabad tomorrow.

Adopting a tougher line with an ally that President Donald Trump considers unreliable, the United States 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 $800 million from the CSF so far 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 (IMF), or other lenders.

Qureshi told reporters on Sunday night: “We will take our mutual respect for each other into consideration and move forward.”

Qureshi argued that the US was not justified in cutting the $300 million 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 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 troops in Afghanistan.

Relations between the new Pakistani government 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 Pakistani side later downplayed the issue after Washington shared a transcript of the call.