During a routine press conference in the White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked when will President Joe Biden will call Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan Niazi, Psaki said, “I don’t have anything to predict at this point in time.”
The press conference took place on Monday (27 September) and the reporter said that while Biden was “mid-meeting” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 24, Khan in his address at the United Nations delivered “some scathing criticism of the US’s actions in Afghanistan. And he’s lamented the lack of direct engagement between himself and President Biden”.
The reporter asked Psaki”Why hasn’t the President used this aggressive diplomacy to answer that call from the Prime Minister of Pakistan to engage directly?”.
Psaki replied: “The President has not spoken with every foreign leader at this point in time; that is absolutely true. But he, of course, has a team — an expert team deployed to do exactly that. “I wouldn’t overread into a leader-to-leader call in that particular regard.”
Imran Khan from the beginning blamed Washington for the Afghanistan mess and its fallout in Islamabad. Even though senior US government officials have spoken to their Pakistani counterparts, Biden has not reached out personally to Khan which he thinks is a personal affront.
During his interview with CNN Khan had given a similar reaction when an interviewer had asked him about Biden’s silence and Khan said: “I would imagine he’s very busy, but our relationship with the US is not just dependent on a phone call, it needs to be a multidimensional relationship.”
At Monday’s briefing, Psaki said: “We have been in touch at very high levels with leaders in Pakistan from the State Department, from the Department of Defence, and from other key components of the administration. We are continuing to work together and work on initiatives where we can, make clear where we have concern.”
Last week Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in New York and has held several phone conversations with him and also the Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has also spoken several times with Pakistan’s Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
When Imran Khan spoke at the UN general assembly on September 24, just after Biden’s Quad summit with Modi and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan and Scott Morrison of Australia, Khan had said, “There is a lot of worry in the US about taking care of the interpreters and everyone who helped the US. What about us?” and then proceeded to give a long list of laundry of US wrongs towards his country and blamed it for the manner in which the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
“The only reason we suffered so much was because we became an ally of the US, of the Coalition, in the war in Afghanistan. There were attacks being conducted from the Afghan soil into Pakistan. At least there should have been a word of appreciation. But rather than appreciation, imagine how we feel when we are blamed for the turn of events in Afghanistan.”
He held the US responsible for Afghan mujahidin training and how the US supported them by giving them weapons when they were fighting the Soviet Union.
Khan also mentioned a meeting he had with then-Senator Biden in 2006 and how he had told him that a military solution was not possible in Afghanistan and urged a political settlement.
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