US officials urge Trump to end 'toxic' relationship with Pakistan

Renowned Indian lobbyist Ted Poe says Washington should immediately set limits of its indulgence with Islamabad

A US congressman and a former defence official have urged the Trump administration to set the limits of its indulgence with Pakistan and stop treating the nation as an ally.

Congressman Ted Poe, a renowned Indian lobbyist, is head of a congressional committee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade while James Clad was a deputy assistant secretary of defence for Asia in the George W Bush administration.



In a toxic article jointly written by the two for The National Interest magazine, the pair suggested ways in which the US can set the limits of its indulgence with the “nominal ally whose military and security leaders play a lethal double game.”

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  Don’t let the next crisis in South or Southwest Asia deflect our focus.

  
  


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  Don’t rush to shore up Pakistan’s balance of payments via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or other intermediaries, as we’ve done in the past.

  
  


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  Let China pay that, if the Pakistanis wish to mortgage their future in that way. (China’s “one belt, one road” infrastructure plans for Pakistan are running into big problems.)

  
  

Congressman Ted Poe and James Clad argue that “something must change in our dealings with a terrorist-supporting, irresponsible nuclear-weapons state, and it must change soon.”

Claiming that Islamabad deceived America regarding its nuclear-weapons production and exporting extremist terrorism, they said the “US has acquiesced in a toxic relationship with Pakistan for decades.”



Poe and Clad confessed that changing America’s “reactive accommodating stance” towards Islamabad would not come quickly. “But it must change — irrespective of trends in US-India relations… there’s a tendency to think of Pakistan as part of a troubling duality, with India and Pakistan in a death spiral. That’s out of date — and we have our issues with India too,” they said.

In September last year, Peo along with another Congressman Dana Rohrabacher had moved a bill to designate Pakistan as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. The move testified to growing complexity of relations between the two ostensibly major allies in the ‘war against terror.’