Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed in his latest book ‘Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love’ that the world was not fully aware of how close India and Pakistan came to a nuclear war in February 2019.
According to Pompeo, he was in Hanoi for the US-North Korea Summit when he was awakened to speak to his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj, who informed him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike, and India was preparing its own escalatory response.
He writes that he does not know the full extent of what occurred, but that it was "too close."
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The incident in question was India's airstrikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Balakot in Pakistan, in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans. Pompeo writes that he and his team worked overnight with both New Delhi and Islamabad to avert the crisis, and that it took a few hours of "remarkably good work" by their teams on the ground to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war.
The former Secretary of State goes on to say that the night in question was a reminder of the importance of American leadership in preventing global conflicts.
“I’ll never forget the night I was in Hanoi, Vietnam when – as if negotiating with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons wasn’t enough – India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with a decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir,” Pompeo said in the book.
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“After an Islamist terrorist attack in Kashmir- probably enabled in part by Pakistan’s lax counterterror policies – killed forty Indians, India responded with an air strike against terrorists inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis shot down a plane in a subsequent dogfight and kept the Indian pilot prisoner,” he wrote.
“In Hanoi, I was awakened to speak with my Indian counterpart. He believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation. I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out (sic),” Pompeo added.
At that time Sushma Swaraj was India's External Affairs minister and it seems Pompeo has mistakenly referred to Swaraj as “he”.
The Indian Government is yet to comment on Pompeo's claims.
