US Central Command chief General Joseph Votel told General Qamar Bajwa during a telephone call this week that the United States was not contemplating any unilateral action inside Pakistan, the Pakistani army said in a statement.
Tension between the United States and Pakistan has grown over US complaints that the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network that target American troops in Afghanistan are allowed to take shelter on
Pakistani soil.
Trump’s administration last week announced the suspension of about $2bn in security aid to nuclear-armed Pakistan - officially a US ally - over accusations Islamabad is playing a double game in Afghanistan.
Islamabad denies this and accuses the United States of disrespecting its vast sacrifices - casualties have numbered in the tens of thousands - in fighting terrorism.
The US aid suspension was announced days after Trump tweeted on January 1 that the United States had foolishly given Pakistan $33b in aid over 15 years and was rewarded with “nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools”.
It is not clear what prompted Trump’s tweet, which infuriated Pakistani officials and caught the rest of the US
administration off guard.
The Pakistani statement yesterday did not directly refer to Trump’s tweet.
“(Bajwa) said that entire Pakistani nation felt betrayed over US’ recent statements despite decades of co-operation,” the army said, referring to the phone call between Bajwa and Votel.
The Pakistani assertion that Votel said no unilateral action inside Pakistan was being considered may have referred to the possibility of cross-border US drone strikes and other military missions targeting Taliban and other militant figures outside the border area.
In 2016, a US drone killed the then-leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, prompting protests from Islamabad of a violation of sovereignty.
And in 2011, a secret American raid in the military garrison city of Abbottabad killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks on American cities that prompted the US-led invasion to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Since Trump took office, there have been several drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region but they have not so far gone deeper into Pakistani territory, though Islamabad believes that is on a menu of punitive actions the US administration is considering.
However, the US military is also concerned that the Pakistani army, which effectively runs foreign policy, might close the air and land corridors on which US-led troops and Afghan forces in landlocked Afghanistan depend for supplies. So far, Pakistan has not done so.
