HANOI: US President Donald Trump was hopeful Thursday of a resolution to an ongoing crisis between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan which has ignited fears of an all-out conflict in South Asia.
Trump, speaking at a press conference in Hanoi after a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he had had ‘reasonably attractive news from Pakistan and India’. “The US has been involved in trying to have them stop,” he told reporters. “We have some reasonably decent news… Hopefully that’s going to be coming to an end,” he added.
The comments were his first since India and Pakistan engaged in a rare aerial engagement in the skies over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir early Wednesday, with Pakistan downing two Indian fighter jets and capturing one Indian pilot. The incident – the latest in a dangerous sequence of events between the two countries – sent tensions rocketing, as major world powers including China, the US and the UN urged restraint.
Islamabad says its incursion across the heavily militarised Line of Control was in response to Indian warplanes bombing Balakot, well inside its territory, on February 26.
The crisis has seen the US thrust into the familiar position of trying to defuse tensions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a statement after calls with his two counterparts, urged restraint from both sides.
But in language that would be carefully parsed, Pompeo described the initial strikes by India as ‘counter-terrorism actions’ and urged Pakistan to take ‘meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil’.
Asad Majeed Khan, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, criticized the statement for not reprimanding India – where Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist base is staunchly anti-Pakistan, faces imminent elections.
“The statement is construed and understood as an endorsement of the Indian position and that is what emboldened them even more,” Khan said.
President Donald Trump has shown no sympathy for Pakistan, last year cutting $300 million in military aid that had been flowing over logistical assistance to US forces in Afghanistan. Trump – who has championed the US right to act as it pleases – said last week that Pakistan had been ‘taking very strong advantage of the United States’ and voiced understanding that India was planning ‘something very strong’.
Trump said Thursday after the nuclear summit with North Korea in Hanoi that the US was working to defuse the conflict. “They’ve been going at it, and we’ve been involved in trying to have them stop, and we have some reasonably decent news, I think, hopefully, that will be coming to an end,” he told a news conference.
Richard Olson, who served as US ambassador to Islamabad from 2012 to 2015, said there was a growing sense among policymakers that militants coming out of Pakistan were ‘really a fundamental problem’. “Defining the issue in terms of counter-terrorism indicates something of a harder line than had been adopted, at least publicly, in the past,” said Olson, now a senior advisor at the US Institute of Peace.
But Pompeo placed calls while heading to the summit with North Korea in Hanoi, his statement coming nearly 24 hours after the Indian strikes.
And while US military officials maintain strong ties with Pakistani and Indian counterparts, the Trump administration has no confirmed defense secretary, ambassador in Islamabad or assistant secretary of state for South Asia – all positions key in a crisis.
Khan, the Pakistani ambassador, nonetheless said there was ‘no other country better placed than the United States’ to play a role owing to its relationships.
Pakistan has increasingly relied on China for diplomatic and economic support, but Beijing holds little sway over India. The United States, France and Britain are asking the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, although China blocked two earlier attempts.
Pakistan banned Jaish-e-Mohammed after a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament triggered an earlier standoff, but the group still operates openly under different names.
Pakistan points out that the culprit behind the latest bombing was a local Kashmiri and says it is happy to hold dialogue with India. “Everybody is tired of hearing, essentially, excuses,” said Alyssa Ayres, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia, adding that Pakistan also offered talks rather than action after the bloody 2008 siege of Mumbai.
Ayres, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the United States could take tougher action including revoking Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally or holding up a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. “I can’t say if Pakistan will respond in the right way. But I do think that we haven’t tried all of the leverage we could,” she said.
Pakistan also has leverage – Afghanistan, where it is facilitating the Taliban’s negotiations as Trump seeks to end nearly 18 years of war. But Olson, the former ambassador, doubted the United States would switch tack over Afghanistan. “Preventing an escalation of a conflict between nuclear-weapons states will take priority over just about anything else – and it should,” he said.