New Delhi: India may not like it, but the US is as much its ally as is Pakistan.
It was confirmed again by a top American general.
General Michael E Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, said that the US needs to have relations with both India and Pakistan because of the Pakistani military’s role in countering the threat from Islamic State-Khorasan Province.
General Kurilla’s comments, made during a hearing by the House Armed Services Committee, come at a time when India is leaving no stone unturned to highlight and expose Pakistan’s support for cross-border terrorism in the aftermath of the deadly April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.
Kurilla, who will be retiring this year, stressed on the role of Pakistani military and army chief Asim Munir in combating ISIS-Khorasan, also known as IS-KP.
“That’s why we need to have a relationship with Pakistan and with India. I do not believe it is a binary switch that we can’t have one with Pakistan if we have a relationship with India,” Kurilla said during his testimony before members of the panel.
“We should look at the merits of the relationship for the positives that it has,” he added.
Kurilla noted that ISIS-K, based in Afghanistan, is one of the most active terrorist groups involved in “external plots globally”, including against the US. The Afghan Taliban, he said, has gone after the ISIS-K and pushed a substantial number of the group’s fighters into tribal areas on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
“Through a phenomenal partnership with Pakistan, they have gone after ISIS-Khorasan, killing dozens of them. Through a relationship we have with them, and providing intelligence, they have captured at least five ISIS-Khorasan high-value individuals,” Kurilla said.
Kurilla informed the House Armed Services Committee that Pakistan extradited Mohammad Sharifullah aka Jafar, one of the key individuals behind a suicide attack at Kabul airport in August 2021 that killed 13 American military personnel during the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.
“The first person… the chief of army staff Munir called was me and said, ‘I’ve caught him, I’m willing to extradite him back to the US, please tell the secretary of defence and the president’,” Kurilla revealed.
He described Pakistan as “a phenomenal partner in the counter-terrorism world” and said Islamabad was going after the ISIS-Khorasan with “limited intelligence” that the US is providing.
He also said that Pakistan has witnessed around 1,000 terrorist attacks since 2024, which killed about 700 security personnel and 2,500 civilians — a narrative which Pakistan has been trying to propagate to the world to counter India’s claim that Pakistan still breeds and backs terrorists on its soil.
What General Kurilla stated won’t be music to New Delhi’s ears. There has been no immediate response from Indian officials on Kurila’s comments, even though Indian officials, including External Affairs minister S Jaishankar, continue to insist that victims of the Pahalgam attack and the perpetrators of the terrorist assault cannot be treated at par.
