Decision to halt Pak military aid not taken lightly: US NSA

WASHINGTON: US National Security Adviser (NSA) John Bolton has said that the Trump administration’s decision to suspend military assistance to Pakistan was not taken lightly.

In an apparent address to a local think tank, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, Bolton had said that the decision was taken before he joined the administration but, “It was done knowing fully well that Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state, and the risk that the government could fall into the hands of terrorists that would get control of those nuclear weapons was particularly serious,” some local and foreign media outlets including Al Jazeera claimed.

Bolton was quoted in these reports saying that US wanted Pakistan to cooperate, and to convey the very message the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Islamabad. “We hoped and expected that Pakistan would cooperate fully in the war against terrorism, which they had committed to do,” reports said.

However, the full speech he delivered at the think tank talked about Pakistan just once and that too in reference to US Navy Seals mission that killed Osama bin Laden. He had announced US policy towards the International Criminal Court at the think tank on Monday. “The ‘crime of aggression’ could become a pretext for politically motivated investigations,” he said in his speech adding, “was the mission of US Navy Seals that killed OBL in Pakistan a crime of aggression? What about the US and coalition strikes in Syria to protect innocent children from chemical weapons?”

Since the beginning of this year President Trump halted military aid to Pakistan alleging that the county was not taking action against terrorist outfits inside its territory. Just a week before Secretary Pompeo landed in Islamabad to hold meeting with the new government officials, the Pentagon asked Congress to allow it to use the funds, set aside for Pakistan, now for other purposes.