US not mulling any unilateral action: Pakistan
islamabad — US Central Command chief General Joseph Votel has assured the head of Pakistan’s army that Washington “is not contemplating any unilateral action” inside the country, a statement from the Pakistani military said on Friday.
Votel, who spoke to General Qamar Javed Bajwa by telephone “over the week”, also said that the “on-going turbulence” around a tweet by Donald Trump suspending aid to the country was “a temporary phase”, according to the statement.
The statement came after Trump froze up to $1.9 billion in funding to Pakistan, in a move designed to force its military and intelligence apparatus to halt its support for the Afghan Taleban and other groups.
The move, first announced by Trump in a New Year’s Day tweet, sparked indignation in Pakistan, which has long denied the US accusations of militant support, and accused Washington of dismissing the sacrifices it has made in the war on extremism. —
islamabad — Pakistan’s army chief told a top US general the nation “felt betrayed” at criticism that it was not doing enough to fight terrorism, the military said on Friday, after US President Donald Trump accused Pakistan of “lies and deceit”.
US Central Command chief General Joseph Votel told General Qamar Javed Bajwa during a telephone call this week that the United States was not contemplating any unilateral action inside Pakistan, the Pakistani army said in a statement.
Tension between the United States and Pakistan has grown over US complaints that the Afghan Taleban and Haqqani network that target American troops in Afghanistan are allowed to take shelter on Pakistani soil.
Trump’s administration last week announced the suspension of about $2 billion in security aid to nuclear-armed Pakistan — officially a US ally — over accusations Islamabad is playing a double game in Afghanistan.
Islamabad denies this and accuses the United States of disrespecting its vast sacrifices — casualties have numbered in the tens of thousands — in fighting terrorism.
The US aid suspension was announced days after Trump tweeted on Jan. 1 that the United States had foolishly given Pakistan $33 billion in aid over 15 years and was rewarded with “nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools”. It is not clear what prompted Trump’s tweet, which infuriated Pakistani officials and caught the rest of the US administration off guard.
The Pakistani statement on Friday did not directly refer to Trump’s tweet.
“(Bajwa) said that entire Pakistani nation felt betrayed over US recent statements despite decades of cooperation,” the army said, referring to the phone call between Bajwa and Votel.
The Pakistani assertion that Votel said no unilateral action inside Pakistan was being considered may have referred to the possibility of cross-border US drone strikes and other military missions targeting Taleban and other militant figures outside the border area.
In 2016, a US drone killed the then-leader of the Taleban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, prompting protests from Islamabad of a violation of sovereignty. Mullah Mansour was returning from Iran after meeting his family there.
And in 2011, a secret American raid in the military garrison city of Abbottabad killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on American cities that prompted the US-led invasion to topple the Taleban in Afghanistan.
Since Trump took office, there have been several drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region but they have not so far gone deeper into Pakistani territory, though Islamabad believes that is on a menu of punitive actions the US administration is considering.
However, the US military is also concerned that the Pakistani army, which effectively runs foreign policy, might close the air and land corridors on which US-led troops and Afghan forces in landlocked Afghanistan depend for supplies. So far, Pakistan has not done so. —