Maleeha Lodhi tells why Pakistan-US relations are at losing end
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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations Maleeha Lodhi on Monday said United States lacked balance in its approach towards South Asia, which had resulted in some relation breach.
“In recent years, we in Pakistan, have felt that the United States lacked balance in its approach toward South Asia, and as a result we lost something in the relationship,” she said while addressing the members of Washington-based think tank, World Affairs Council.
She said the lack of balance was best represented by the nuclear deal — the civilian nuclear deal that the former US president George Bush administration concluded with India — which was a discriminatory nuclear policy towards the region and had consequences for it.
Lodhi also said that the US needed to proactively pursue a “negotiated peace in Afghanistan”, as a decade and a half of war there has shown that continued conflict is not an option for the future.
She said that, “We have to find a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, which is the consensus at the United Nations and the consensus of the international community.
I know the United States has declared its support to this goal in the past, but that may not be enough, it needs to be proactively involved in order to achieve and accomplish this goal.”
She also said the United States was in a unique position to defuse the rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the decades-old Kashmir issue as it has good relations with both India and Pakistan.
