WASHINGTON: Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo wrote in a book published Tuesday that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 and that US intervention prevented escalation.
\n\u201cI do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019,\u201d the likely future presidential contender wrote in \u201cNever Give an Inch,\u201d his memoir of his time as Donald Trump\u2019s top diplomat and earlier CIA chief.<\/p>\n
India in February 2019 broke the precedent by launching airstrikes inside Pakistani territory after blaming a militant group there for a suicide bombing that killed 41 Indian paramilitary soldiers in the flashpoint Kashmir region. Pakistan shot down an Indian warplane, capturing the pilot.<\/p>\n
Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was woken up with an urgent call from a senior Indian official. \u201cHe believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation,\u201d Pompeo wrote. \u201cI asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out,\u201d Pompeo said.<\/p>\n
Pompeo said that US diplomats convinced both India and Pakistan that neither was preparing to go nuclear. \u201cNo other nation could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome,\u201d Pompeo wrote.<\/p>\n
Pompeo, who wrote that Pakistan \u201cprobably enabled\u201d the Kashmir attack, said he spoke to then-army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.<\/p>\n
Pompeo at the time publicly defended India\u2019s right to act. In his book, Pompeo spoke highly of India and, unlike officials in New Delhi, made no secret of his desire to ally with the South Asian democracy \u201cto counteract Chinese aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pompeo writes extensively in the book of his diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, which included preparing three meetings between the young totalitarian leader and Trump.<\/p>\n
He recalled a chilling first conversation as he flew into Pyongyang in March 2018 on a clandestine trip as CIA director. \u201cI didn\u2019t think you\u2019d show up. I know you\u2019ve been trying to kill me,\u201d Pompeo quotes Kim as telling him. \u201cI decided to lean in with a little humor of my own: Mr. Chairman, I\u2019m still trying kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Pompeo described a budding understanding with Kim as the Trump administration offered incentives to lower tension. Pointing to Kim\u2019s smoking habit, Pompeo wrote that he told Kim he would take him to \u201cthe nicest beach in Miami and smoke the best Cubanos in the world. He told me, \u2018I already have a great relationship with the Castros.\u2019 Of course, he did.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for their substantive conversation, Pompeo said Kim spoke candidly on concerns about China, usually viewed as North Korea\u2019s main ally.<\/p>\n
Told that China believes North Korea wants US forces out of South Korea, \u201cKim laughed and pounded on the table in sheer joy, exclaiming that the Chinese were liars.\u201d Kim \u201csaid that he needed the Americans in South Korea to protect him from the CCP, and that the CCP needs the Americans out so they can treat the peninsula like Tibet and Xinjiang,\u201d Pompeo wrote, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n
Pompeo became known for his hawkish stance on China, controversially accusing Beijing of spreading the \u201cWuhan virus.\u201d He said that Trump told him with an epithet that Chinese President Xi Jinping \u201chates you\u201d and asked Pompeo to \u201cshut the hell up for a while\u201d as the United States needed health care equipment from China.<\/p>\n
Pompeo has not ruled out running against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, although early polls show little support for Pompeo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo wrote in a book published Tuesday that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 and that US intervention prevented escalation. \u201cI do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,54,23,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","category-islamabad","category-national","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112447,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112445\/revisions\/112447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/112446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}