WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said that he was “honoured” to meet Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir for talks at the White House.
Field Marshal Munir has now become the first serving chief of army staff to have a face-to-face meeting with a sitting US president. The occasion also marked the first time a serving Pakistani army chief had been formally received at this level, without holding political office or governing under martial law.
The meeting, which began around 1pm local time and lasted two hours, came hours after the US president shot back at Indian PM Narendra Modi’s claim that the United States had not played any role in defusing tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in May of this year.
Previous military rulers — such as Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Gen Ziaul Haq, and Gen Pervez Musharraf — met US presidents only after they had assumed the role of head of state.
Barack Obama did briefly “walk in” on a White House meeting with then-COAS Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, but that too was not a formal engagement.
When questioned about the meeting in an interaction with the media later, Trump said, “I was honoured to meet him (Field Marshal Munir) today.”
Asked whether the talks included the current Iran-Israel conflict, Trump said: “They (Pakistan) know Iran very well, better than most, and they’re not happy about anything. It’s not that they’re bad with Israel. They know them both, actually, but they know Iran better.
“He (Field Marshal Munir) agreed with me. The reason I had him here was that I wanted to thank him for not going into the war [with India]. And I want to thank PM Modi as well, who just left a few days ago. We’re working on a trade deal with India and Pakistan. These two very smart people decided not to keep going with a war that could have been a nuclear war. Pakistan and India are two big nuclear powers.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump was hosting Field Marshal Munir after he called for the president to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for preventing a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, Reuters reported.
But insiders suggested that the meeting was not arranged through routine diplomatic channels, but rather was the outcome of “unorthodox efforts” by a group of advisers, businessmen, and other influential figures.
Diplomatic sources in Washington said this initiative had been cooking for months and kept under wraps until the White House released President Trump’s official schedule on Tuesday.
Sources said that deepened counter-terrorism cooperation, engagement with crypto-linked influence networks, and targeted lobbying via Republican-aligned firms in Washington helped Pakistan secure the meeting.
The working lunch saw senior aides from both sides in attendance. Insiders viewed the meeting as a milestone — perhaps a signal of a new phase in US-Pakistan relations.
Former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari also hailed the meeting as a positive development for strengthening Pakistan-US relations.
The PPP leader, who recently led a high-powered delegation to Western capitals to convey Pakistan’s perspective on the military stand-off with India earlier this year, also pointed to the timing of the meeting as being quite significant.
Trump ‘snubs’ Modi on mediation
Tuesday’s phone call between Modi and Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, which the former attended as a guest, was the two leaders’ first direct exchange since the May 7-10 conflict.
Giving a readout of the call, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri claimed the Indian PM had told the US president the May ceasefire was achieved through talks between the two militaries, and not US mediation.
“Talks for ceasing military action happened directly between India and Pakistan through existing military channels, and on the insistence of Pakistan. Prime Minister Modi emphasised that India has not accepted mediation in the past and will never do,” he said.
Misri also said that Trump expressed his support for India’s fight against terrorism and that Modi told him ‘Operation Sindoor’, under which it launched the cross-border strikes, was still on.
A White House official said on Wednesday that Trump had spoken with Modi a day earlier, without providing details of the call.
But later in the day, while speaking to reporters on the White House lawns, Trump insisted that he was the one who stopped the war.
When asked about his meeting with Pakistan’s army chief, he said: “Well, I stopped a war … I love Pakistan. I think Modi is a fantastic man. I spoke to him last night. We’re going to make a trade deal with Modi of India. But I stopped the war between Pakistan and India.”
Referring to Field Marshal Munir, Trump continued: “This man was extremely influential in stopping it from the Pakistan side. Modi from the India side and others. They were going at it — and they’re both nuclear countries. I got it stopped.”
Last month, Trump had said that the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours agreed to a ceasefire after talks mediated by the US, and that the hostilities ended after he urged the countries to focus on trade instead of war.
Reacting to Vikram Misri’s remarks, Mr Bhutto-Zardari tweeted: “Indians are just really very sore losers at this point
