Former US foreign minister under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, claims in a book published Tuesday that India and Pakistan came to the brink of a nuclear confrontation in 2019 and that the US then avoided escalating.
“I don’t think the world really realizes how the India-Pakistan rivalry could have come so close to escalating into a nuclear clash in February 2019,” Mike Pompeo writes in his book, “Never Give an Inch” (“ Never give an inch”). one inch”).
India launched airstrikes in February 2019 on Pakistani territory in retaliation for a suicide attack that killed 41 Indian militiamen in Kashmir. Pakistan retaliated by shooting down an Indian plane and capturing the pilot.
Mike Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was awakened by an urgent phone call from a senior Indian official.
“He thought the Pakistanis had started preparing their nuclear weapons for an attack. India, he informed me, was studying its own response,” wrote the man who also headed the CIA under Donald Trump.
“I asked him not to do anything and to give us a minute to try to figure it out.”
Diplomatic work with both countries
Mike Pompeo then writes that American diplomats managed to convince both the Indians and the Pakistanis that neither country was preparing for a nuclear attack.
“No other country could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible result,” he added.
Mike Pompeo says he spoke to “the real leader of Pakistan,” referring to Pakistani army chief of staff Qamar Javed Bajwa.
At the time, the head of US diplomacy publicly supported India’s right to defend itself.
India and then Pakistan tested atomic bombs in 1998, prompting then US President Bill Clinton to call Kashmir “the most dangerous place on earth”.
Source: BFM TV
