Officials from the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said that Chief of the Army Staff General Asim Munir left for his first trip to the United States on Sunday.
The military’s press office said in a short statement that General Munir is “planned to meet senior military and other US government officials.”
This trip comes after top US officials went to Pakistan last week. A senior official in the Biden administration who deals with refugee problems went to Islamabad for four days. This was the first of several trips by American officials to the country as relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan get worse.
Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in the US, Julieta Valls Noyes, stayed in the federal capital until Thursday.
The US Special Envoy for Afghanistan, Tom West, began his trip to Islamabad on December 7, the last day of her stay. Elizabeth Horst, who is in charge of Pakistan as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, came here on December 9 after his trip.
A lot of American officials are visiting at a time when Pakistan is trying to get rid of all illegal Afghans, tensions are growing with the Afghan Taliban over the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the general elections are coming up in February.
“The United States and Pakistan are still talking about a lot of different issues.” In order to move these talks forward, there are also exchanges of visits, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, said in a statement.
The October 31 deadline has passed, so Pakistan is now cracking down on Afghans who are living in the country illegally. Since then, the US has been in touch with Pakistan to make sure that Afghans who were not allowed to come to the US were not hurt.
DC says that there are about 25,000 Afghans in Pakistan who are ready to be allowed to come to the US. They were Afghans who worked with the US in Afghanistan during its war. But now that the US has pulled out, they are stuck in Pakistan while the visa process is finished.
The US and Pakistan have been working together to find a way to keep these Afghans from being sent back to Afghanistan. Aside from these Afghans, there are also worries that other people, like singers, artists, journalists, and others, may be kicked out.
The US doesn’t want these weak Afghans to be touched either. In the first phase, Pakistani officials made it clear that Afghans who don’t have any legal standing are being sent back. They said that their cases would be looked at carefully.
There has been a lot of tension between Pakistan and the Taliban government because Kabul has failed to take strong action against the TTP. It is thought that the US was afraid that any worsening of relations between Pakistan and the Taliban government would make Afghanistan less stable.
