Pahalgam massacre: The US urges India, Pak to find ‘responsible solution’
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After rebuking Pakistan for long, the US State Department said on Sunday that Washington was in touch with both New Delhi and Islamabad and urged them to work towards what it called a “responsible solution” as tensions between the two neighbors escalated after the last week’s terrorist attack at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir that killed at least 26 tourists.
Speaking with reporters while leaving for The Vatican to attend Pope Francis’s funeral mass, US President Donald Trump said last week that “I am very close to India and I’m very close to Pakistan, and they’ve had that fight for a thousand years in Kashmir….even if tensions between two South Asian countries have been ongoing “for 1,500 years,” I am confident that they would find a solution.”
Pakistan has lost each of the four wars it thrust on India in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999.
As the two distant neighbors inch towards a potential, all-out war, the US State Department’s first reaction, a balancing act, assumes importance. For, in public, the US earlier expressed support for India after the attack but has not criticized Pakistan.
“This is an evolving situation and we are monitoring developments closely. We have been in touch with the governments of India and Pakistan at multiple levels,” the media reported the US Department as saying on Monday.
“The United States encourages all parties to work together towards a responsible resolution,” the spokesperson added.
Washington “stands with India and strongly condemns the terrorist attack in Pahalgam,”, the US said, reiterating comments similar to recent ones made by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance who was in India when the attacks took place last week.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed to pursue the attackers to “the ends of the earth” and publicly declared that those who planned and carried out the Kashmir attack, and their supporters, “will be punished beyond their imagination.”
After the last week’s attack, India and Pakistan unleashed a raft of measures against each other, with Pakistan closing its airspace to Indian airlines and India suspending the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) that regulates water-sharing from the Indus River and its five tributaries, among others.
After four years of relative calm, the two countries are currently exchanging fire across the Line of Control in J&K.
A little-known terror group, The Resistance Front (TRF), claimed responsibility for the attack in a social media message. Indian security agencies say Kashmir Resistance, also known as TRS, is a front for Pakistan-based globally banned outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen.
