IndiaTheNews NewsRoom: Mike Pompeo claims – India and Pakistan had come close to nuclear war

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made a sensational disclosure claiming that after India’s air strike in Balakot, Pakistan had prepared to launch a nuclear attack on India and India was also fully prepared to retaliate. Was ready. Let us tell you that Mike Pompeo has claimed in his new book that he woke up from his sleep to talk to the then Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack in February 2019 in the wake of the Balakot surgical strike. Is doing and India is preparing for its retaliation.

In his new book Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, which hit the market on Tuesday, Pompeo said the incident occurred while he was in Hanoi for the February 27-28 US-North Korea summit and his The team worked through the night with both India and Pakistan to defuse the crisis. Pompeo writes in his book, “I don’t think the world knows exactly how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to a nuclear attack in February 2019.” I don’t even know the exact answer, I just know it was very close.

Let us remind you that in February 2019, Indian warplanes destroyed a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. Was. Mike Pompeo said, “I will never forget that night when I was in Hanoi, Vietnam.” In relation to the decades-long dispute over the Kashmir region on the border, they had started threatening each other, which added to our troubles.

He wrote, “Woke up in Hanoi to speak with my Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj. He wrote that Sushma Swaraj believed that the Pakistanis had started preparing their nuclear weapons for the attack. I told them not to do anything and give us some time to fix everything.

In addition, Mike Pompeo has said that he never saw his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj as an “important political figure” but had struck up a good friendship with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in their first meeting. In his book, Pompeo has described Sushma Swaraj in derisive terms and has also used derisive words like goofy etc. in common language about her. Let us remind you that Sushma Swaraj was the External Affairs Minister of India from May 2014 to May 2019 in the first term of Narendra Modi’s government. He passed away in August 2019. Mike Pompeo writes in his book, “On the Indian side, my original counterpart Sushma Swaraj was not a key figure in the Indian foreign policy team. Instead, I worked more closely with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, a close and confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Let us also remind you that a confidant of the then US President Donald Trump, Pompeo was the CIA Director in his administration from 2017 to 2018 and then Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021.

Mike Pompeo said, “My other Indian counterpart was Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In May 2019, we welcomed “Jay” as the new External Affairs Minister of India. I couldn’t have asked for a better counterpart. I like this person. English is one of the seven languages ​​he speaks and he is better than me.” Pompeo described Jaishankar as “professional, logical and a great defender of his boss and his country”. He said, “We became instant friends. In our first meeting I was complaining in very diplomatic language that his predecessor Sushma Swaraj was not particularly helpful.”

Pompeo has also said in his book that America’s neglect of India was a decades-old failure on both sides. “We are natural allies because we share a history of democracy, a common language and people-to-people ties,” he said, adding that India is also a market for American intellectual property and products in high demand. Because of these factors as well as its strategic location in South Asia, I made India the base of my diplomacy to counter Chinese aggression. Let us tell you that Mike Pompeo is also exploring the possibility of contesting the 2024 presidential election.

On the other hand, commenting on Pompeo’s claims, Jaishankar said, ‘I have seen a passage in Minister Pompeo’s book referring to Mrs. Sushma Swaraj ji. I have always held him in high regard and had very close and cordial relations with him. I condemn the derogatory term used for him.”