Mike Pompeo: US averted India-Pakistan nuclear war

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“No other country could do what we did,” he assures

The former head of American diplomacy during the presidency of Donald Trump, Mr Mike Pompeoargues in a book released Tuesday in the US that India and Pakistan were on the brink of nuclear war in 2019 and that escalation was averted thanks to Washington’s efforts.

“I don’t think people realize that the rivalry between India and Pakistan had come so close to nuclear war in February 2019,” says Mr. Pompeo in his book Never Give an Inch.

In February 2019, India launched air strikes on Pakistani soil, in retaliation for the kamikaze attack that claimed the lives of 41 paramilitaries in the Indian part of Kashmir. Pakistan shot down an Indian airliner and captured the pilot.

Mr Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for then-President Trump’s summit with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Unrecounts how he was awakened by an urgent phone call from a senior Indian official.

“He believed that the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons to proceed with a strike. India, he informed me, was considering what retaliation it would take,” continues the former CIA director under Trump.

“I asked him not to do anything and to give us some time to try to clear things up.”

Always according to Mr. Pompeo, American diplomats then managed to convince Islamabad and New Delhi that there was no preparation for a nuclear attack on either side.

“No other country could do what we did,” he assures.

The head of US diplomacy at the time had publicly supported India’s right to defend itself.

India and then Pakistan conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1998, prompting then-US President Bill Clinton to declare Kashmir “the most dangerous place in the world”.

This Himalayan region, claimed by India and Pakistan, has been the scene of armed conflict since the bloody separation of the Indian colony from the British Empire in 1947.

“Try to assassinate me”

Mr. Pompeo’s book also refers at length to relations with North Korea and to the preparation of the three summits of Mr. Trump and Kim.

He says he met secretly with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in March 2018, when he was still director of the CIA.

“I didn’t think you would come. I know you are trying to assassinate me,” he writes that the leader of North Korea told him.

Deciding to “play a bit of humor”, he says that he replied “Mr. President, I’m always trying to assassinate you.”

Mr. Pompeo further claims that Kim Jong Un told him he was concerned about Chinese aspirations, to the extent that he “needed the Americans in South Korea to protect himself” from China’s CCP.

Referring to the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggiwho was murdered and dismembered in 2018 by a firing squad inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, Mr. Pompeo has doggedly defended the relationship with Saudi Arabia, going so far as to boast that in defiance of the Washington Post and the New York Times, went to Riyadh a few days after the assassination.

Mr. Pompeo also mocks the journalistic work of the deceased, who according to him was named by the American media as something like “Saudi Bob Woodward who was martyred for courageously criticizing the Saudi royal family”, when he was nothing more than an “activist” who supported the “losing team”.

The journalist’s widow, Hatice Cengiz, said on Twitter that she was “horrified” by Mr Pompeo’s treatment of the case in his book, without a trace of “respect” and “humanity” for someone who was “so brutally murdered”.

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