Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan returned home from Washington on Thursday after a visit seen by supporters as a major diplomatic success, saying he felt like he had when he came back after winning the cricket World Cup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
US President Donald Trump’s warm reception of Khan and a delegation including the army chief and the head of the powerful ISI intelligence service was a welcome relief to a government under increasing economic pressure at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said the presence of the army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and ISI head General Faiz Hameed alongside Khan in Washington were a strong signal that US mistrust of Pakistan’s security establishment had eased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By contrast, the US president managed to annoy India, Pakistan’s longtime foe, with an unexpected offer to mediate in the decades-long dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump also caused outrage in Kabul with an apparently throwaway remark that Afghanistan could be “wiped off the face of the earth”.Offering reassurance that Pakistan would help seal a peace agreement with the Taliban to allow U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan, Khan went some way towards rebuilding Pakistan’s image in Washington after years of US suspicions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While there was no announcement that the United States would restore hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance cut off last year, the visit sent a signal that relations had improved significantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States has for years been doubtful about Pakistan’s wholehearted commitment to the U.S.-led war on terrorism, largely because of suspicion that Pakistan sees some militants, including the Afghan Taliban, as useful tools in its rivalry with India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pakistani officials had laid the groundwork for the visit months earlier, with a visit to Islamabad in January by Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump ally who has argued strongly against any precipitous U.S. pullout from Afghanistan.He gave enthusiastic backing to Khan’s government and publicly urged Trump to meet Khan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan returned home from Washington on Thursday after a visit seen by supporters as a major diplomatic success, saying he felt like he had when he came back after winning the cricket World Cup. US President Donald Trump’s warm reception of Khan and a delegation including the army chief and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66679,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66677\/revisions\/66679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}