US-Pak redux has implications on ties with India & QUAD

India has conveyed its serious concern to the US State Department on Ambassador to Pakistan Donald Blome's recent visit and his comments on Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) at the highest bureaucratic level.

The Modi government has also objected to the USD 450 million upgrade package for Pakistani F-16 fighters, announced by the Pentagon last month, at the top political level.

In a span of one month, the Biden administration first triggered a strategic point by announcing the F-16 package and then triggered a political point with its Pak ambassador calling what is an occupied territory as a so-called liberated or "Azad" zone.

To complicate bilateral matters further, US issued a travel advisory on Friday for its citizen travelling to India on count of crime and terrorism.

The advisory specifically advised its nationals not to travel to Jammu and Kashmir due to "civil unrest and terrorism" and within "10 km of the India-Pak border due to the potential for armed conflicts."

Clearly, the US, egged on by Pakistan and UK behind the scenes, is revisiting its Kashmir flash-point theory and next will advocate a dialogue between India and Pakistan.

With Ambassador Blome having earlier served as political counselor in Afghanistan, his undiplomatic statement cannot be dismissed as an inadvertent mistake.

He clearly knew exactly what he was doing and what it would do to India-US ties.

While it is understandable that the US is rewarding Pakistan for sending weapon and ammunition supplies to Ukraine via British C-130 J transport aircraft and the Romania route, Washington's disregard for the impact of the two triggers on Indo-US ties is quite inexplicable and may have long term undesired consequences.

Fact is that F-16 is not merely a single-engine fourth generation fighter aircraft that the US has sold to Pakistan since the early 1980s, it is also the barometer of US-Pakistan relationship.

The sinusoidal graph of US-Pakistan bilateral relations can be clearly understood using F-16 fighter sales as a reference point.