Meeting trump as PM would be ‘bitter pill’ to swallow: Imran Khan
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ISLAMABAD: PTI chairman Imran Khan said Saturday that should he become prime minister, he would meet with President Donald Trump but that it would be a ‘bitter pill’ to swallow.
In an interview with Voice of America, he said: “You cannot insult a country of 200 million people by blaming, scapegoating them for the disaster in Afghanistan. It was very insulting of him [Trump], the way he treated Pakistan. … He has treated Pakistan like a doormat. I just don’t think that that was very fair.”
He said that Trump had made Pakistan a scapegoat on US’s failure to defeat Taliban.
About his views on Pakistani foreign policy, he was asked whether he would be willing to sit down with Trump to try to mend relations between the two countries, he said the United States is a super power and every country would want to work with it. “I will dread it, but I will have to swallow the bitter pill and meet him. Whether we would be able to communicate, I am not so sure, but of course we, countries, have to work with the United States.”
Pakistan’s often troubled relations with the United States have plunged to new lows since Trump, in a New Year Day’s tweet, accused Islamabad of knowingly harboring insurgents battling US troops in Afghanistan. He also suspended nearly $2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan.
Khan said Pakistan had nothing to do with the violence. He insisted Pakistan should have supported the US campaign against terrorism but it should not have deployed tens of thousands of troops to the country’s tribal regions on the Afghan border to fight its own people.
