According to a latest report catered by Reuters, Pakistan’s foreign ministry on June 26, 2023 summoned the US embassy’s deputy chief of mission to express concern over a statement by US President Joe Biden and Bharatiya Prime Minister Narendra Modi that called on Pakistan to ensure its territory was not used as a base for militant attacks. 

The statement from the United States and Bharat was released after a meeting between the two countries’ leaders at the White House on June 23, 2023.

“It was stressed that the United States should refrain from issuing statements that may be construed as an encouragement of India’s baseless and politically motivated narrative against Pakistan”, Pakistan’s foreign office said in a statement.

“It was also emphasized that counter-terrorism co-operation between Pakistan and the US had been progressing well and that an enabling environment, centered around trust and understanding, was imperative to further solidifying Pakistan-US ties”.

Whatever Pakistani side may say, it is a proven fact that these latest actions do not stand in favor of Pakistan’s terrorist agenda, while Islamabad has been funding and patronizing Islamist militancy groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) etcetera.  

LeT is the Islamist group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which more than 160 people were killed, while Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed responsibility for a 2019 bombing in Jammu & Kashmir that killed 40 Bharatiya paramilitary troops.

For decades, while the United States has been considering Pakistan as its key ally in countering militancy, Islamabad has always played the role of a backstabbing ally of Washington.

Pakistan has been using a significant portion of military hardware and funds it has been receiving from the United States towards funding terrorist outfits both inside Afghanistan as well as South Asian region, including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Bharatiya states, including Jammu & Kashmir. For these factors, to most of the counterterrorism and geopolitical analysts – when discussing the various inconvenient friendships of convenience in which the United States is entangled, they say – by depending on Pakistan, the US actually has not only been committing blunder, it also risks the entire region and the world towards notoriety of terrorism and militancy.

Pakistan has been consistently facing economic juggernauts since its creation in 1947 alongside a series of social challenges which is combined with domestic political instability and continuous threats posed by its military establishment to democracy. Pakistani democracy is mostly seen as a system directly controlled by its mighty military establishment – including Pakistani spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). While Pakistan is still facing acute economic hardship – which according to my assessment is responsible for the country’s extreme focus on harboring terrorism – most of its South Asian neighbors, including Bangladesh and Bharat as well as Asian neighbors such as China are gradually achieving economic prosperity with upliftment in various sectors.

In the joint statement, Bharatiya Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden said: “The United States and India stand together to counter global terrorism and unequivocally condemn terrorism and violent extremism in all its forms and manifestations.  President Biden and Prime Minister Modi reiterated the call for concerted action against all UN-listed terrorist groups including Al-Qa’ida, ISIS/Daesh, Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Hizb-ul-Mujhahideen. 

They strongly condemned cross-border terrorism, the use of terrorist proxies and called on Pakistan to take immediate action to ensure that no territory under its control is used for launching terrorist attacks.  They called for the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai and Pathankot attacks to be brought to justice”.

This joint statement contains information based on strong evidence, where Pakistani state machinery and its intelligence agencies – instead of denying fact should not indulge into their decades-old culture of denial. Pakistan needs to abandon its terrorist agendas targeting Bharat and other nations in the region and reboot its policy of continuing as a terror-patron nation as well as backstabber to its allies such as the United States.