NEW YORK: Pakistan wants the Trump administration to help resolve its decades-old conflict with India over Kashmir and has offered to help the US stabilise the region as Washington ramps up its fight in Afghanistan.
“We expect the US as a common friend to facilitate, encourage the [Kashmir] issue is resolved amicably, in accordance with UN Resolutions ASAP [as soon as possible],” Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has said.
In an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Dar said Kashmir is a key request for Pakistan. The finance minister, who is in the US these days, also emphasised that Islamabad seeks a reset of its relationship with Washington.
“There seems to be a little bit of a stalemate in the last couple of years,” Dar said.
Dar, who spoke to the newspaper ahead of his meeting with the US National Security Adviser Lt Gen HR McMaster, said, “We need to remove any ambiguities that we have between each other as friends.”
Noting that US relationship with Pakistan was ‘complicated’, Ian Talley – who interviewed the minister – wrote that Washington still sees Islamabad as critical to its efforts in Afghanistan as the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on Islamic State and the Taliban.
In a signal of a shift in US policy in the region under President Donald Trump, the military earlier this month dropped one of its largest non-nuclear bomb on an Islamic State complex in eastern Afghanistan.
The Trump administration is reviewing its policy towards Pakistan, the report said citing an unnamed White House official. In the interview, Dar questioned the effectiveness of the US strategy, however.