Pakistan is alarmed at the prospect of India being part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing club and if this development takes place it would hurt US-Pakistan relations as Islamabad is desperate to coordinate a regional response to a growing Afghanistan terror threat.
“It’s a recipe for a new Cold War, a recipe for a new divide, and if you are going to have that, the lines will be drawn,” Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who heads the Senate Defence Committee, told reporters at a private event.
There is proposed legislation in the US Senate that could lead India and several other Asia-Pacific countries into the decades-old intel-sharing agreement between Australia, the UK Canada, New Zealand, and the US as China flexes its muscle in the region.
The Pakistani senator who was dismayed at the development, however, stopped short of saying that if India joined the Five Eyes group, Pakistan would place new limits on what intel it shares with the US.
However, he made it very clear that such a move would invariably hurt US-Pakistan ties with the direct implication and coordination on Afghanistan policy, the report said.
He also said that the US has asked Pakistan not to recognize the Taliban, and this development has forced Pakistan to look for a regional consensus on the issue of legitimising the new government in Kabul, bringing in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Iran, and possibly others.
Sayed said, “Also, we are waiting to see what the (US) does and “I feel they are chastened, more pragmatic. They know this is not the Afghanistan of the 1990s. They do not have a pan-Islamic perspective.
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