WASHINGTON: The United States has said that only Nuclear Suppliers Group can allow or deny the membership to Pakistan and Pakistan should put the case in front of all the members of NSG instead of seeking individual authorization to join NSG.
In the beginning of current week, Pakistan wrote letters to the officials and lawmakers of United States to urge them for supporting Pakistan’s bid for joining NSG that is an exclusive club for controlling access to sensitive nuclear technology.
Deceptively neither India nor Pakistan is likely to join the NSG in the near future as New Delhi failed to win over China while Islamabad failed to persuade Washington to back its bid.
The 48-nation NSG held a special meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Thursday to consider applications from the two South Asian nations, both of whom possess atomic weapons and have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
On Thursday afternoon, when it became obvious that China will not allow India to join the NSG, a spokesman for the US State Department urged Pakistan to present its application before the entire group.
“That’s a collective decision reached by the members of the group,” said the spokesman, Mark Toner, when asked why the United States was not backing Pakistan’s application.
“India is also pursuing membership into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, but certainly, if Pakistan wants to pursue that, that’s something for all the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to consider,” he added.
After meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Singh Modi, US President Barack Obama announced that US strongly supports India’s bid in order to join NSG, on Tuesday.
Toner said President Obama had also discussed India-Pakistan relations with Prime Minister Modi in Tuesday meeting.
“Our bilateral relations with India and Pakistan are separate and stand on their own merits, and so it’s not prudent for us to view our security cooperation in the region in kind of a zero-sum game — or zero-sum terms,” he added.
“I think it’s important for the countries of the region that they all have constructive security relationships with each other. And that’s Pakistan, that’s India, and it’s also Afghanistan.”
Pakistan’s counterterrorism operations, he said, continued to be “an area of collaboration and cooperation” between Washington and Islamabad.
In reply to another question, Toner said a US delegation was currently in Pakistan to discuss the current situation in Afghanistan. A recent US drone strike that killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour would also be discussed during this visit, he added.
“They will talk about some of the recent activities that included the strike that took out the Taliban commander — and our on-going concerns about security along the Pakistan-Afghan border, and more broadly our desire to see an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process,” said the US official.
“We do believe that that is, ultimately, the way to bring about peace and to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan, and that remains an area of focus. But we’re also going to, obviously, talk about other areas of cooperation on counterterrorism with Pakistan.”
