WASHINGTON: The pullout of Nato colors from Afghanistan has created new openings for Pakistan and the United States to make a more broad- grounded relationship, according to the country’s US minister Asad Majeed Khan.
In a discussion with members of the American Association of Foreign Services Worldwide (AASFW) and retired politic and consular officers, Ambassador Khan said that the two countries had numerous common interests to make this broad-grounded relationship.
The association hosted the Pakistani envoy before this week for a discussion on US-Pakistan relations. “ Our engagement with the US has frequently been hardly framed, mandated either by short- term security interests or the imperative to deal with a common challenge,” he said in his address.
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“ We want to break out of this pattern. Now that the US military charge is over, we want to take our relationship beyond counterterrorism and Afghanistan, which of course would remain precedences.” The minister said that for Pakistan, the United States remained an important mate as “ our largest import request and a major source of foreign remittances.”
Pakistan, he said, was one of the largest English-speaking countries in the world, which has erected an artistic affinity between the two countries and that’s why “ talented youthful Pakistanis continue to gravitate towards American council premises and Silicon Valley incubators.
Ambassador Khan refocused out that there was also a large and politically engaged Pakistani American community that served as a ground between the two countries.
