ISLAMABAD: The State Department has been taking surprisingly long to reuse the agrément of Pakistan’s minister-designate to the United States, Masood Khan. The detention has started an print of a pause in the process.
Mr. Khan, who served as Azad Kashmir’s chairman till last August, was nominated as minister to the US in November. He’d preliminarily served as Pakistan’s endless representative to the UN in Geneva and New York and as minister to China.
Mr. Khan was to replace the gregarious minister of Pakistan in Washington Asad Majeed Khan.
The request for agrément for Masood Khan had been transferred to the State Department in the alternate week of November, a Pakistani diplomat said.
The agrément is the blessing of a designated diplomat by the entering state.
Typically, the State Department took four to six weeks to issue agrément for Pakistani ministers in the history, a former foreign clerk said.
“ This time they’re taking surprisingly long,” another diplomat said.
The detention has happed at a time when ties between the two abettors have turned decreasingly frosty due to the geopolitical terrain.
The US interest in Pakistan has waned after it pulled out of Afghanistan. Also, Washington looks at ties with Pakistan from the prism of its strategic competition with China, although Islamabad has constantly said that it wasn’t part
of any camp politics.
Indian lobby in Washington is looking at the detention as an occasion for itself and is trying to scuttle Mr. Khan’s appointment on the rationale of his advocacy for the Kashmiri freedom struggle.
“ While I’m encouraged that the State Department has reportedly placed a pause on approving Masood Khan as the new minister from Pakistan, a pause isn’t enough. I prompt you to reject any political credentials presented to you by Masood Khan and reject any trouble by the Government of Pakistan to install this jihadist as Pakistan’s minister to the United States,” Scott Perry, a solon, wrote to President Biden.
People in FO believe that the detention was because of Mr. Khan’s last position as the chairman of AJK.
FO Spokesman Asim Iftikhar didn’t respond to a query transferred to him on this issue.
An American diplomat, who has preliminarily worked in Pakistan and is presently in Washington, played down the situation as conceivably a procedural matter.
He said the detention was presumably due to the State Department operating on maximum telework because of Omicron. Also, he said, Mr. Khan’s credentials had been submitted at the cusp of the vacation season which was the slowest period of the entire time.
The US had at the end of October nominated Donald Blome as the new envoy to Pakistan. Islamabad has formerly issued his agrément.
