- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
US DEPUTY secretary of state Wendy Sherman will travel to India and Pakistan in October. The twin visits by the US state department’s No.2 will come at a time when the nuclear-powered rivals in South Asia have differed on the way forward in Afghanistan where the Taliban stormed back to power last month.
The department announced the upcoming visits by Sherman on Monday (27).
Sherman, who took over in April, will be the first high-level official after Central Intelligence Agency chief Bill Burns to visit Pakistan under the Joe Biden administration. Washington DC has long expressed its disappointment over Islamabad’s role in Afghanistan and its relationship with the Taliban.
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Sherman, 72, will visit New Delhi and Mumbai on October 6 and 7 when she will meet officials and civil society leaders and address the US-India Business Council’s annual “ideas summit”. She will go to Islamabad where she will meet senior officials on October 7 and 8. The state department revealed her itinerary.
The visit will take place at a time when India, one of the closest allies of the western-backed government in Kabul that collapsed in August, has urged the world to pay a closer attention to Pakistan in the Afghan turmoil.
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Pakistan, which has backed the Taliban, was apprehensive as long as the western-backed government ruled Afghanistan, fearing that it would help India to gain a strategic advantage over it. Islamabad also was among the primary backers of the Taliban when they were in power between 1996 and 2001 when their regime was toppled by the US-led invasion post the 9/11 attacks. Pakistan has been accused by the US of keeping the insurgents on Afghanistan soil alive through covert help.
Pakistan though has denied the charges and has played the victim card. Its prime minister Imran Khan said in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post on Monday that his country was being a “convenient scapegoat”.
“In Afghanistan, the lack of legitimacy for an outsider’s protracted war was compounded by a corrupt and inept Afghan government, seen as a puppet regime without credibility, especially by rural Afghans,” he wrote, elaborating on themes in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last week.
Khan urged the world to engage with the Taliban government “to ensure peace and stability”.
President Biden, who met Indian prime minister Narendra Modi recently at the White House, is yet to speak to Khan, although US secretary of state Antony Blinken met Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on the sidelines of UN meetings last week and thanked Islamabad for helping in evacuating Americans from Afghanistan.
Blinken, however, was slammed by the Pakistani leadership after he remarked that the US will assess Pakistan’s role in the last 20 years after the country’s lawmakers, who were angry with Islamabad’s alleged double standards in Afghanistan, confronted him. Khan later called Blinken “ignorant”.
The state department said Sherman will also visit Uzbekistan in Central Asia before her trip to South Asia. Uzbekistan has a border with Afghanistan and the US has been working with regional nations to ensure that it can maintain forces that can be quickly made operational in response to any threats from extremist movements such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State inside Afghanistan following the US’s withdrawal.
Before arriving in Asia, Sherman will hold talks with Russia in Geneva, Switzerland, on Thursday (30). It will be the second meeting of the Strategic Stability Dialogue which was set up during the June summit between Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin with an aim to reduce tensions and talks. The deputy secretary of state will then visit Swiss capital Bern to inaugurate the first U.S.-Swiss Strategic Partnership Dialogue with Swiss state secretary Livia Leu.
