US invites Asim Munir, calls Pakistan a 'phenomenal partner' against terror

Kurilla particularly lauded the Pakistan Army for arresting Mohammed Sharifullah, a senior operational commander of the ISIS-K, who had allegedly played a key role in planning the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 26, 2021, killing 13 US soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians.

New Delhi: Not only has a top United States military commander lauded “phenomenal partner” Pakistan for hunting the Islamic State (Khorasan) terrorists, but President Donald Trump’s administration is set to host the Pakistan Army chief, Asim Munir, whom India accused of provoking the April 22 carnage in Jammu and Kashmir with an incendiary speech.

Just days before both Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are set to attend the G7 summit in Canada, the US State Department also hinted that Washington, D.C., continued to be interested in mediating between India and Pakistan to help resolve the issue of Kashmir, despite New Delhi’s steadfast objection to the role of any third party in settling what it viewed as a bilateral issue between the two South Asian neighbours.

“They are in an active counterterrorism fight right now, and they have been a phenomenal partner in the counterterrorism world,” Commander of the United States Central Command (Centcom), General Michael Kurilla, said about Pakistan. He made the comment while presenting a statement before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. He lauded the Pakistan Army for hunting down the ISIS-K terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

He particularly lauded the Pakistan Army for arresting Mohammed Sharifullah, a senior operational commander of the ISIS-K, who had allegedly played a key role in planning the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate near the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 26, 2021, killing 13 US soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians. He said that the arrest of the ISIS-K operative highlighted Pakistan’s value as a counterterrorism partner of the US.

“That’s why we need…to have a relationship with Pakistan and with India. I do not believe it is a binary switch that we can’t have one with Pakistan if we have a relationship with India,” Gen Kurilla said while answering questions from members of the panel. “We should look at the merits of the relationship for the positives that it has.”

“Opportunity also exists in CASA (Central and South Asia), where we can expand counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan and other Central Asian partners,” the chief of the US Centcom said.

The Trump Administration has also invited Pakistan Army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to attend the US Army Day celebrations on June 14.

Munir had called Kashmir “a jugular vein” of Pakistan on April 16. In a speech at the Overseas Convention of Pakistanis in Islamabad, he had not only defended the “two-nation theory”, which had led to the partition of India and creation of Pakistan in 1947, but had also said that the Muslims should make their children understand their difference from the Hindus.

New Delhi later alleged that his speech, full of communal rhetoric, had provoked a gang of Pakistani and Pakistan-trained terrorists to kill 26 people, mostly tourists, at Baisaran near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22. Munir was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government in Islamabad, soon after India’s military strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan, as well as in areas under the illegal occupation of Pakistan, on May 7, and the retaliation by Pakistan triggered a four-day-long cross-border military flare-up, which came to a halt on May 10.

The Trump Administration’s invitation to the Pakistan Army chief came just days after India’s all-party delegations visited the US and several other countries, conveying the nation’s policy of ‘zero tolerance’ to cross-border terrorism sponsored by Pakistan. The all-party delegation, which visited Washington, D.C., also had a meeting with Trump’s Vice President J D Vance, who, incidentally, had been on a visit to New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra when the terrorists had carried out the attack in J&K on April 22.

Diplomatic setback for India: Congress

The opposition Congress hit out at the government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, calling the US invitation to the Pakistan Army chief “a huge diplomatic setback for India”.

“This is the man who spoke in such incendiary and provocative language just before the Pahalgam terror attacks. What is the US really up to?” Congress’s general secretary, Jairam Ramesh, posted on X, reacting to the reports about the US invitation to the Pakistan Army chief. “This is another huge diplomatic setback for India,” he added, taking a dig at the BJP-led government, headed by Modi.

Notwithstanding New Delhi’s repeated rebuttals, Trump has been relentlessly claiming over the past few weeks that his administration had brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan to stop the conflict between the two South Asian neighbours from turning into a “bad nuclear war”.

He also offered to mediate between India and Pakistan to resolve the issue of Kashmir, prompting New Delhi to make it clear that it was a bilateral issue between the two neighbouring nations with no scope for mediation by any third party.

“What I do know is that I think we all recognise that President Trump, in each step that he takes, it’s made to solve generational differences between countries, generational war,” Tammy Bruce, the spokesperson of the US State Department, told journalists, responding to a question on the dispute over Kashmir. “So, it doesn’t – it shouldn’t — surprise anyone that he’d want to manage something like that (the Kashmir dispute),” she said on Tuesday.