[Mr. Abbasi, 58, became prime minister in August as a fallback choice after his predecessor, Mr. Sharif, decided to leave his brother and preferred successor, Shehbaz Sharif, in a powerful chief minister’s post in Punjab, rather than move him to the capital, Islamabad.]
By Mark Landler
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Prime
Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan at the Council on Foreign Relations
in
New York on Wednesday. Credit Jeenah Moon/Reuters
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Pakistan’s new leader, stung by President
Trump’s threat to crack down on his country for harboring terrorists, insisted
on Wednesday that Pakistani military forces had uprooted all the sanctuaries
used by Islamic extremists along its rugged frontier with Afghanistan.
“We have regained control of the area,” the
prime minister, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, said in an interview with The New York
Times. “There are no sanctuaries anymore. There are none at all. I can
categorically state that.”
The prime minister’s blanket denial of
Pakistan’s role as a safe haven could augur a turbulent period in its relations
with the United States. The success of Mr. Trump’s new strategy for Afghanistan
depends on Pakistan playing a more constructive role by depriving militants of
the ability to plot and carry out attacks from across the Pakistani border.
“This is a new context,” said President
Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, in a separate interview with The Times. “It
provides a new context for Pakistan to seize the opportunity for engagement.”
If the Pakistanis did not do more, he said, “there will be consequences.”
But Mr. Abbasi’s claim, during his first
visit to the United Nations General Assembly, suggested a familiar chasm
between how Pakistani and American officials view Pakistan’s responsibility for
destabilizing Afghanistan. He also denied that Pakistan possesses tactical
nuclear weapons — a statement that runs counter to American intelligence
assessments.
In the closing days of the Obama
administration, the United States negotiated with Mr. Abbasi’s predecessor,
Nawaz Sharif, to try to persuade Pakistan not to deploy these weapons, which
American officials said are designed for use on the battlefield against an
invading Indian army, and were therefore more at risk of falling into the wrong
hands.
“We do not have tactical nuclear weapons,”
Mr. Abbasi said. “We have short-range nuclear weapons,” which, he said, were
not designed for battlefield use and were under the same command and control
safeguards as the rest of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
Mr. Abbasi, 58, became prime minister in
August as a fallback choice after his predecessor, Mr. Sharif, decided to leave
his brother and preferred successor, Shehbaz Sharif, in a powerful chief
minister’s post in Punjab, rather than move him to the capital, Islamabad.
In the interview, Mr. Abbasi said the United
States did not appreciate the inroads made by Pakistani soldiers against safe
havens used by the Pakistani Taliban.
“The general perception in Pakistan was that
our efforts were unappreciated, and today, we are being scapegoated,” he said.
“We are active partners in the war on terror. No less than that.”
On his visit to New York, Mr. Abbasi has
confronted the chilly new reality of Pakistan’s relationship with the United
States. Although he met on Tuesday with Vice President Mike Pence, he did not
get a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Trump, instead chatting with him at a
reception.
During the George W. Bush and Obama
administrations, Pakistani leaders met regularly with the president. Mr. Obama
set up an ambitious strategic dialogue with Pakistan that the Trump
administration has not continued. In announcing his Afghanistan policy, Mr.
Trump made clear that the days of cultivating Pakistan as a partner were over.
Pakistan, he said, has “sheltered the same
organizations that try every single day to kill our people. We have been paying
Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the
very terrorists that we are fighting.”
“That will have to change,” he said. “And
that will change immediately.”
The president did not specify what punitive
measures he had in mind, but other officials have talked about holding up aid
or stripping Pakistan of its status as a major non-NATO ally.
The White House recently named Lisa Curtis,
an analyst at the Heritage Foundation with a history of strong views on
Pakistan, as director for South and Central Asia on the National Security
Council.
A report she wrote last February with Husain
Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, called for the new
administration to “avoid viewing and portraying Pakistan as an ally.” If
Pakistan did not take steps to show its commitment to America’s
counterterrorism goals, Mr. Trump should strip it of its non-NATO ally status
in six months.
Ms. Curtis and Mr. Haqqani stopped short of
recommending that Pakistan be put on the government’s list of state sponsors of
terrorism — as some lawmakers have demanded — at least during the Trump
administration’s first year because, they said, it would be too destructive to
the relationship. But they said Mr. Trump should keep it as an option for later
on.
“Pakistan has a long history of denial,” Mr.
Haqqani said in an interview. “That is more an attempt to deal with a problem
of which there is demonstrable proof by managing the narrative.”
David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
