The former head of US diplomacy under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, says in a book published on Tuesday that India and Pakistan were on the verge of a nuclear confrontation in 2019 and that the United States then averted climbing.
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“I don’t think the world really realizes how the India-Pakistan rivalry could have come so close to boiling over into a nuclear clash in February 2019,” Mr. Pompeo writes in his book, “Never Give an Inch.” (“Never give an inch”).
India launched airstrikes in February 2019 in Pakistani territory in retaliation for a suicide attack that killed 41 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir. Pakistan retaliated by shooting down an Indian plane and capturing the pilot.
Mr Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said he was woken up by an urgent phone call from a senior Indian official.
“He thought the Pakistanis had started preparing their nukes for a strike. India, he informed me, was studying its own response,” writes the man who also led the CIA under Donald Trump.
“I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to try to figure it out.”
Mike Pompeo then writes that American diplomats managed to convince both Indians and Pakistanis that neither country was preparing for a nuclear attack.
“No other country could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome,” he added.
Mike Pompeo says he spoke with “the real leader of Pakistan”, in reference to the chief of staff of the Pakistani army, Qamar Javed Bajwa.
At the time, the head of American diplomacy publicly supported India’s right to defend itself.
India and then Pakistan tested atomic bombs in 1998, causing then US President Bill Clinton to say that Kashmir was “the most dangerous place in the world”.
Kashmir is a Himalayan region claimed by India and Pakistan. It has been the scene of several wars for its control since the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947.