In a strong repudiation of the claim by former Pakistan Ambassador Husain Haqqani that President Barack Obama had in 2009 offered to “nudge” India on Kashmir, a former White House staffer has said the envoy was reading too much into a letter that Obama had sent to his then Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari.
In his recently-released book, “Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding”, Haqqani asserted that Obama had offered Zardari a quid pro quo by promising to nudge India on Kashmir if only Pakistan terminated its support to Al-Qaeda, lashkar-e-Tayyeba and the Taliban.
Reacting to the claim, Anish Goel, who served as Senior Director for South Asia at the National Security Council during Obama’s first term, has accused Haqqani of “misreading” the purport of the letter.
In remarks to PTI, Goel said: “The language was carefully crafted to reiterate long-standing US policy that while the United States would not insert itself into bilateral issues in South Asia, it strongly encouraged both sides (India and Pakistan) to come together and resolve their differences on their own.”
“To imply that the letter offered anything more than that, particularly as a quid pro quo to Pakistan, is a misreading of the intent and purpose of the letter,” said Goel, a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a missile scientist who has worked on a US Air Force-NASA project before working with Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and then with the State Department’s South Asia Bureau.
Haqqani, in his book, had written that the then US National Security Advisor James Jones had travelled to Islamabad in November 2009 to personally hand over the letter containing Obama’s secret offer to Zardari. Pakistan, however, spurned the “grand bargain” that included the offer of a long-term strategic partnership, Haqqani wrote.
“It appears that Ambassador Haqqani is reading too much into the letter from President Obama to President Zardari”, Goel noted in his comment, stressing: “It has been a consistent policy of the Obama Administration to encourage India and Pakistan to resolve all their issues bilaterally.”