Pakistan on Tuesday said the U.S. President Donald Trump has accepted Prime Minister Imran Khan’s invitation to visit the country. The visit, if made, will make Mr. Trump the sixth U.S. President after George W. Bush to visit the South Asian nation after a gap of over a decade.
George Bush visited Islamabad in March 2006 when Pakistan was under the military rule of the then President Pervez Musharraf.
Addressing a press conference in Washington, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister F.M. Qureshi said the matters pertaining to the Trump’s visit will be agreed upon soon, Pakistani news channel Geo News reported.
The U.S. President has accepted the offer to visit Pakistan upon the invitation extended by Prime Minister Khan, the report said.
Earlier on Monday, the U.S. President, while responding to a question posed by a journalist on whether he would like to visit Pakistan, responded that Mr. Khan had not extended him any invitation but, if given, he would definitely accept it.
“Well, I can’t say that yet because, so far, he has not extended me an invitation,” Mr. Trump said amid laughter.
“And after today’s meeting, maybe he won’t. But I have a feeling he might. Yes, I’d love to go Pakistan at the right time,” he said.
Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower was the first of the five American Presidents to visit Pakistan in 1959, followed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Richard Nixon in 1969, Bill Clinton in 2000 and Bush in 2006.
The Pakistani premier is currently on a three-day visit to Washington. He met Mr. Trump at the White House on Monday, a meeting which Islamabad hopes would reset the strained bilateral ties between the two nations.
Ties between the U.S. and Pakistan strained after Mr. Trump, while announcing his Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August 2017, hit out at Pakistan for providing safe havens to “agents of chaos” that kill Americans in Afghanistan and warned Islamabad that it has “much to lose” by harbouring terrorists.
COMMents
SHARE