File photo of former US National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. (Retd) HR McMaster. | Photo Credit: AP
Former US National Security Adviser Lt Gen (retd) HR McMaster has said that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has “unquestionable collusion” with terror groups. He revealed that the White House faced resistance from the State Department and the Pentagon over providing security assistance to Islamabad during the tenure of then-President Donald Trump.
Despite Mr Trump’s directive to cut off all aid to Pakistan until it stopped providing safe havens to terrorists, Lt Gen (retd) McMaster in his latest book ‘At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House’ has said that then Defence Secretary Jim Mattis was planning to give Islamabad a military aid package that included armoured vehicles worth over $150 million.
However, Lt Gen (retd) McMaster writes in his book, which hits bookstores this week, that the aid was stopped after his intervention.
He wrote, “It was also difficult to persuade State and Defense to comply with Trump’s instructions to halt certain activities. I learned that contrary to the South Asia strategy, which called for suspending all aid to Pakistan with a few exceptions, when Mattis visited Islamabad in the coming weeks, the Pentagon was going to deliver a military aid package that included armored vehicles worth more than $150 million.”
Lieutenant General (Retired) McMaster said that as soon as he learned about this, he called a meeting with Mattis, Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Gina Haspel and other senior officials.
He said, “I first mentioned that the President (Trump) had clearly stated on multiple occasions that aid to Pakistan will be suspended until they stop supporting terrorist organisations that are killing Afghans, Americans and coalition members in Afghanistan… We all heard Trump say, ‘I don’t want any money going to Pakistan’.”
The former NSA wrote that Mattis noted the possibility that Pakistan could retaliate in some way, but others, including Ambassador David Hale, who joined in via video from Islamabad, did not share these concerns.
Mattis reluctantly halted that shipment of aid, but others continued, leading Trump to tweet on New Year’s Day, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan over $33 Billion in aid over the last 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit while treating our leaders like idiots. They provide safe haven to the very terrorists we are pursuing in Afghanistan but get very little aid. No more!”, he wrote.
“Pakistan was not changing its behavior, and, almost as a humiliation, the government released Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, on the eve of Mattis’s visit. Moreover, a recent hostage-taking incident in Pakistan had exposed the undeniable complicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence with the terrorists,” McMaster writes.
Reports at the time criticized the president’s tweets as capricious and devoid of coherent policy, he said. But the aid freeze was a key part of the South Asia strategy Trump approved at Camp David in August, he said.
“The lunch the President hosted with the Vice President, Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, and me on December 14 helped me understand why it was difficult to implement Trump’s guidance on Pakistan or to foster cooperation on contingency plans for North Korea,” says Lt. Gen. (ret.) McMaster.