India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war following the 2019 Pulwama suicide attackas former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has written in his new bookNever Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love which hit stores Tuesday.
“I don’t think the world adequately knows how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to boiling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019. In truth, I don’t know exactly the answer either, I just know it came too close,” he wrote. Pompeo, who was CIA director in the Donald Trump administration from 2017 to 2018 and then served as secretary of state from 2018 to 2021.
Indian war planes attacked Balakot in Pakistan on February 26, 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans on February 14, 2019. Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group claimed responsibility for the attack.
According to news reports, Pompeo claimed in his book that he had been told by his then “counterpart”, Sushma Swaraj, that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019 and that India was preparing its own escalatory response.
India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war after the 201 Pulwama suicide attack9
He said he learned of the seriousness of the situation when he was woken up on the night of February 27, during the US-North Korea summit in Hanoi, to talk to his Indian counterpart.
“I’ll never forget the night I was in Hanoi, Vietnam, when – as if negotiating with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons wasn’t enough – India and Pakistan started threatening each other over a decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir.” , wrote.
“After an Islamist terror attack in Kashmir – likely fueled in part by Pakistan’s lax anti-terror policies – killed forty Indians, India responded with an airstrike targeting terrorists inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis shot down a plane in a subsequent dogfight and held the Indian pilot prisoner,” he wrote.
He was referring to balakot air strike carried out by the Indian Air Force on February 26, after which Pakistani aircraft entered Indian airspace on February 27. The PAF and IAF jets are they engaged in dog-faced combat and Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman’s plane was shot down. India also claimed that it had shot down a PAF F-16 aircraft.
Pompeo wrote that he woke up to talk to his “Indian counterpart” who “believed the Pakistanis had begun preparing their nuclear weapons for an attack.” He said the Indian side informed him that New Delhi “was contemplating its own escalation.” And he added: “I asked him not to do anything and give us a minute to sort things out.”
He refers to his Indian counterpart as “he”, however the position was held by the late Sushma Swaraj. Therefore, it is not clear who she spoke to that night.
He also mentioned that the “original counterpart [por parte india] was not a major player in the Indian foreign policy team” and that he “worked much more closely with national security adviser Ajit Doval”.
He further wrote that then-US national security adviser John Bolton, Kenneth Juster, then-US ambassador to India, and other senior officials helped him de-escalate tensions between the two nations.
Following the call, Pompeo and NSA John Bolton contacted the Pakistani side. “I contacted the real leader of Pakistan, General [Qamar] Bajwa, with whom he had spoken many times. I told him what the Indians had told me. He told me it wasn’t true,” she wrote.
“As expected, he [Bajwa] he believed that the Indians were preparing their nuclear weapons for deployment. It took us a few hours – and extraordinarily good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad – to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war.”
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The Foreign Office has yet to comment on Pompeo’s claims, according to reports.
Sushma Swaraj called a “silly
According to the PTI news agency, Pompeo also described Swaraj as a “goofball and political pirate of the heart”, adding that he was much more comfortable with S. Jaishankar, who succeeded the former foreign minister in the second government of Modi in 2019.
“My second Indian counterpart was Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In May 2019, we welcomed ‘J’ as India’s new Foreign Minister. I couldn’t have asked for a better counterpart. I love this guy. English is one of the seven languages he speaks, and his is somewhat better than mine.
Pompeo described Jaishankar as “professional, rational and a fierce defender of his boss and his country.” “We hit it off immediately. At our first meeting, I lamented, in a very diplomatic speech, that his predecessor had not been particularly helpful,” he wrote, according to PTI.
Indian war planes attacked Balakot in Pakistan on February 26, 2019 in response to the Pulwama terrorist attack which killed 40 CRPF jawans on 14 February 2019
“He (Jaishankar) told me that he understood why I had problems with his predecessor, a goofball and a politician of the heart. Beware, I am a political pirate! I replied jokingly. He laughed and told me that, if true , he would be the first Midwestern politician to have been an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Well played, J,” Pompeo wrote.
In response to the book, Jaishankar told PTI: “I have seen a passage in Secretary Pompeo’s book where Sushma Swaraj ji is referred to. I have always held her in high esteem and have had an exceptionally close and warm relationship with her. I’m sorry for the disrespectful colloquialism used to refer to her.”
Note: This article was updated with passages on Sushma Swaraj after publication.
Article republished from The Wire as part of an agreement between both parties to share content. Link to the original article:https://thewire.in/diplomacy/us-nuclear-war-india-pakistan-2019-pulwama-attack-mike-pompeo
