Former minister Kasuri’s new book: ‘US Senators asked how Pakistan would react if India launched aerial strike on JuD’

Besides McCain and Graham, then a Member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke was also present there. Holbrooke did not speak on the matter, possibly to maintain “plausible deniability”, Kasuri said.

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“It was bipartisan, Richard Holbrooke was representing the Obama administration… I was no longer the foreign minister. I received a call from an American diplomat that so-and-so is coming, we’d like you to talk to him first… we sat in a corner and Holbrooke was mum,” Kasuri said in the interview.

“Senator McCain… says to me ‘We’re asking you something in view of your experience as former foreign minister because you know the Army, and also since you’re a civilian you know the public reaction. Supposing… there’s a limited strike on Muridke’,” recalled Kasuri, who was foreign minister between 2002 and 2007.

When Kasuri asked what McCain meant, he replied, “Supposing there’s an aerial strike.”

To this Kasuri replied: “Are you trying to prevent a war?” McCain then said: “We think that may well prevent a war.”
Kasuri said he told the Senators that the Pakistan army would give a measured response within five minutes. “…it would be measured and comensurate to the severity of the attack… You give me an assurance that the Indian Army will not react.”

The Senators asked, “If they did, what will be Pakistan’s reaction?” “Everything could spiral out of control,” Kasuri recalled as saying.

“The public response will be so great that the Pakistan army would be de-legitimised in the eyes of its own people if it does not respond,” he told them.