WASHINGTON: India is a global mate while Pakistan is a precious mate in a sensitive region, says the US State Department while explaining its relations with the two South Asian nations.
“India is an inestimable mate, not just in the region but as it relates to a lot of the United States’ participated precedences across the world,” said the department’s star Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel while opining on Washington’s ties with New Delhi.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar “remain in close touch as they need to”.
In response to Dawn’s query on US-Pakistan relations, another State Department functionary said “The United States values our long-standing cooperation with Pakistan and has always viewed a prosperous and popular Pakistan as critical to US interests.”
The sanction explained that internal political changes in Pakistan don’t impact Washington’s desire to maintain its relationship with Pakistan as it “remains unchanged”.
In recent statements, US officers have claimed that they no longer see Pakistan from India or Afghanistan’s perspective.
Rather, they admit Pakistan as an important country of further than 220 million people, with nuclear technology and borders with some crucial nations like India, China, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Also Read: Pak-US Relations: The way they should be
‘New Asian power’
India, still, has been placed in a different league. On Sunday, when India assumed the G20 administration, CNN noted that the group’s “review of Russia shows the rise of a new Asian power. And it isn’t China”, it’s India.
Days before the G20 peak in Indonesia, Secretary Blinken met Mr. Jaishankar in Phnom Penh and said in a tweet that he bandied “ongoing sweats to expand our cooperation and alleviate the goods of Russia’s war on Ukraine” with the Indian minister. “The US supports India’s G20 administration,” he added.
I met Indian External Affairs Minister @DrSJaishankar on the margins of the @ASEAN summit today in Phnom Penh to discuss ongoing efforts to expand our partnership & mitigate the effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The U.S. supports India’s #G20 Presidency. #USIndiaAt75 pic.twitter.com/mLfzNOqJct
The United States is one of the founding members of this group, along with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. China, Russia, India, and others joined latterly.
India will host the coming leaders’ peak of this group of industrialised nations in New Delhi in September 2023.
In its streamlined runner on India, the State Department notes that “the US-India strategic cooperation is innovated on participated values including a commitment to the republic and upholding the rules-grounded transnational system”.
The United States and India “have participated interests in promoting global security, stability, and profitable substance through trade, investment, and connectivity”, the department adds.
In an analogous runner on Pakistan, the State Department says that the United States “works nearly with Pakistan on a wide array of issues ranging from energy, trade and investment, health, clean energy and combating the climate extremity, to Afghanistan stabilisation and counterterrorism”.
The United States “has been one of the largest sources of foreign direct investment in Pakistan and remains Pakistan’s largest import request,” it adds.
In describing its relationship with India, the department stresses the significance of the global part it expects New Delhi to play while Pakistan is seen as an important supporter in combating terrorism and stabilising Afghanistan.
Read More: US-China Tensions
‘Divergent views on China’
In a recent report published by the Hudson Institute, 10 US scholars of South Asian affairs noted that several aspects of the US-Pakistan relationship had changed over the last decade.
“Most importantly, a US- India entente has surfaced, and a peer contest between China and the US is developing,” they added, italicizing how the US desire to contain China had strengthened its ties with India.
The authors also note that “a geostrategic competition with Russia and China that involves Pakistan and Afghanistan may be a seasonable moment to lay the foundations for a sustainable US-Pakistan relationship”.
They suggest that a modest, realistic relationship between the US and Pakistan, one not grounded on inflated prospects on both sides, would involve understanding that Pakistan and the US will continue to see Afghanistan through different lenses but can cooperate to maintain peace in that country and palliate its people’s suffering.
Either, stations towards India at both the elite and popular situations in Pakistan will, at best, change sluggishly.
Also, public opinion in both the United States and Pakistan acts as a constraint on bilateral relations.
They say there’s little the United States can do to induce Pakistan to change its overall strategic math, which is grounded on Pakistan’s understanding of its security terrain.
They also admit that “the US and Pakistan have divergent views on China”.
