Exclusive: Pakistan Calls on Trump To Help Prevent Nuclear War With India

Pakistan’s envoy to the United States has asked President Donald Trump to step in and help ease soaring tensions with neighboring India as he simultaneously strives to solve conflicts in Europe and Middle East.

“If we have a president who is standing for peace in the world as a pronounced objective during this administration, to establish a legacy as a peacemaker, or as someone who finished wars, defied wars and played a role in de-confliction, resolving the disputes, I don’t think there is any higher or flashier flash point, particularly in nuclear terms, as Kashmir,” Pakistani Ambassador Rizwan Saeed Sheikh said in an exclusive interview with Newsweek.

“We are not talking about one or two countries in that neighborhood who are nuclear capable. So, that is how grave it is.”

India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, as does China, which neighbors both nations and also administers a far eastern stretch of the Kashmir region. The disputed Himalayan territory is at the core of the decades-long feud between New Delhi and Islamabad that took another deadly turn last week after Islamist militants killed 26 people, most of them Hindu tourists, in the town of Pahalgam.

The attack coincided with a visit by Vice President JD Vance and his family to India, where they met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Indian officials have responded by downgrading diplomatic and military ties with Pakistan, measures met in kind by Islamabad. Clashes have since erupted along the Line of Control that divides India and Pakistan, whose defense minister and information minister have alleged indications of an imminent strike being planned by India.

With the stakes appearing to grow higher by the hour, Sheikh argued that the Trump administration would need to pursue a more comprehensive and sustained initiative than witnessed in past U.S. attempts to defuse crises that have erupted between the two South Asian archrivals.

“So, I think with this threat that we are facing, there is a latent opportunity to address the situation by not just to focus on an immediate de-escalatory measure, or a de-escalatory approach,” Sheikh said, “but to try and get this out of the way in a fashion that there is something more durable and lasting in terms of a durable solution of the Kashmir dispute rather than allowing the situation to stay precarious and pop up again and again at the next drop of a hat on this side or that side.”

‘A Rapidly Evolving Situation’

While his administration has expressed unequivocal condemnation for the attack in Pahalgam and total support for India’s counterterrorism efforts, Trump has voiced a balanced approach to the broader India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir.

“Well, I’m very close to India and I’m very close to Pakistan, as you know. They’ve had that fight for 1,000 years in Kashmir. Kashmir’s been going on for 1,000 years, probably longer than that. And it was a bad one yesterday, that was a bad one,” Trump told reporters Friday on Air Force One, later adding, “they’ll get it figured out one way or the other, I’m sure of that.”

Clashes between rival powers in Kashmir indeed date back for more than a millennium, but the modern conflict between India and Pakistan can be traced to the 1947 partition amid the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from its colonial holdings across a once-united Indian subcontinent. The two newly independent nations immediately went to war for control over Kashmir and have since fought two three more large-scale conflicts, mostly recently in 1999.

Two decades later, amid ongoing unrest along the Line of Control, a deadly attack claimed by the Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group against a convoy of Indian commandos set the stage for the last major cross-border confrontation in 2019. India conducted airstrikes against alleged separatist camps in Pakistan, drawing retaliatory fire that downed at least one Indian jet and offers for mediation from the first Trump administration.

The decision later that same year by Modi to rescind India-administered Kashmir’s special autonomous status further raised tensions, leading to an uptick in clashes across the Line of Control that largely subsided after a 2021 truce. Indian security forces have continued to battle separatists in recent years, though the Pahalgam attack marked the bloodiest of its kind against civilians in Kashmir in a quarter-century and the deadliest throughout the country since the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

In the immediate wake of the attack, U.S. officials expressed solidarity with India in its fight against terrorism, while avoiding any references to Pakistan or announcing any shifts on Washington’s largely neutral position on the broader Kashmir issue.

“As President Trump and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio have said, the United States stands with India and strongly condemns the terrorist attack in Pahalgam,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Newsweek on Monday. “We pray for the lives of those lost, and for the recovery of the injured, and call for the perpetrators of this heinous act to be brought to justice.

“This is a rapidly evolving situation, and we are monitoring developments closely.”

Speaking to reporters the following day, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said that Trump administration officials are “monitoring the developments across the board in that region” and also “at multiple levels…are in touch with the governments of India and Pakistan.” Rubio is expected to speak with both sides this week.

Newsweek has reached out to the Indian Embassy to the U.S. and the Indian External Affairs Ministry for comment, as well as to the U.S. State Department for additional comment.

All Cost, No Benefit

Indian External Affairs Minister Vikram Misri alleged last week that the attack in Pahalgam had “cross-border linkages.” The Resistance Front, which claimed responsibility for the slaying, bears alleged links to the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, which Pakistani officials have argued is now defunct.

The announcement followed a long-standing trend of Indian accusations linking Pakistan to insurgency in Kashmir. Despite Pakistani denials of any involvement in cross-border attacks, analysts from both sides have told Newsweek that the current crisis has the potential to lead to a military escalation, with Pakistani conventional and nuclear forces now on high alert.

After a second meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security held since the massacre, the Agence France-Presse and Reuters reported Tuesday that Modi had granted the Indian Armed Forces “complete operational freedom to decide on the mode, targets and timing of our response to the terror attack,” citing unnamed government sources.

Sheikh, for his part, emphatically rejected any involvement of Pakistan in the Pahalgam attack, arguing that the fallout of such an operation could only serve to harm rather than benefit Pakistan’s interests. This was particularly the case, he said, as the country gradually begins to uplift itself from deep economic woes while still facing its own raging insurgency in areas such as Balochistan.

“Pakistan is focusing on a matter of a deliberate, considered, pronounced shift of our foreign policy, a pivot from geopolitics to geoeconomics,” Sheikh said. “We are focused on the geoeconomics side of our geography and our foreign policy. We are currently economically ascendant. The only thing that we need in terms of the broader region in such a pursuit and such a setting, is basically peaceful neighborhood. We need a peaceful neighborhood.

“So, we would not even be the last ones to think of this kind of adventurism, because it’s currently not any way near, not even on the radar, it is not just even on the horizon for us in terms of our national thought process right now. So, that is where we are, and this is so outlandish, so far-fetched, to blame Pakistan for this.”

He said that Islamabad was awaiting evidence from New Delhi to prove a link between the attack and Pakistan. At the same time, he floated his own theory of a potential “false flag operation” having been conducted to intentionally lay the blame on Pakistan, though he acknowledged he could not yet back up the claim.

“When I am saying that it can be a false flag operation, I have no evidence. So, I’m making that allowance, but we have no evidence that this is a false flag operation,” Sheikh said. “But there is enough circumstantial evidence, there is enough history, or there is enough immediate backdrop and setting that suggests at least, to be able to entertain that possibility and not discount it in any way.

“But of course, since we are seeking evidence of any such thought or any such allegation or accusation ourselves from the Indian side, we would be also responsible enough to look for such evidence. Nothing as of now, but it cannot simply be discounted.”

‘Rather Die With Dignity’

Sheikh saw the Kashmir issue as the root cause of the troubles between India and Pakistan, which hold opposing views of the territory’s status. New Delhi considers Kashmir to be a part of its territory, while Islamabad calls for a lasting settlement.

“Until and unless that final settlement is made and the resolutions dictates the prescribed solution is allowed to play out, we will all keep having these problems,” Sheikh said. “That’s why we insist on now the United States and others playing a role in this situation and getting the de-confliction part activated.

“The dispute should be resolved. If that dispute is resolved, I think in that region that houses one-fifth of humanity can live in peace. All the other issues between Pakistan and India are not major issues.”

Pakistan was also less inclined toward conflict, he said, since it is “a smaller country” than India, its massive population of 250 million people dwarfed by the roughly 1.4 billion populations of both India and China. He also argued, however, that Islamabad would at the same time continue to uphold its core beliefs regarding Kashmir and defend its territorial integrity in the event of a conflict erupting.

“We do not want to fight, particularly with a bigger country,” Sheikh said. “We want peace. It suits our economic agenda; it suits our nationhood. It suits every objective that we have currently. But we want peace with dignity.

“We would not want to do it, but if it is imposed, then we would rather die with dignity than survive with indignity.”

A War for Water

While much of the fight for Kashmir has traditionally revolved around the land dispute, water has become an increasingly crucial aspect of the feud. India’s decision to suspend the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, an agreement that manages the flow of the Indus River basin that runs between the two nations, has especially fueled concerns in Pakistan of an attempt to halt water entering the country.

India has not indicated any imminent plans to divert water from Pakistan, nor is it believed that India currently possesses the infrastructure to do so. But the targeting of the treaty, which survived three India-Pakistan wars, comes after various disputes over management of the six rivers that both nations depend on for their development, with Pakistan particularly vulnerable because of its downstream position and reliance on hydropower and agriculture.

“We don’t know what it implies,” Sheikh said, “but if there is even an attempt, or a semblance of an attempt, to stop or hold—which is physically actually impossible, but still—if there is a design to hold the water back for an agrarian economy, which has not just been agrarian in the past four or five or 10 years, it has been agrarian for millennia, then it’s a declaration of war, and then all bets are off if it’s about food security of 250 million people.

“If you threaten me with this kind of a situation which is existential, what is your expectation of response?”