The United States on Wednesday said it was “regrettable” that the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation meeting had to be postponed, PTI reported. The bloc had also not lived up to the potential of other regional groupings like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said Senior Director for the National Security Council at the White House Peter Lavoy.
Saarc had not been able to provide a platform to countries the way Asean had to nations with “similar frictions, similar border disputes, ethnic concerns and other problems”, Lavoy said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He added that the lack of such a platform had a negative effect on the relationship between countries in the region.
Lavoy had also empathised with India’s need to respond to the September 18 Uri attack, and said that every country had the right to defend itself. He was speaking about the surgical strikes the Indian Army said it had carried out across the Line of Control on September 29. The US diplomat said the Uri attack was an act of “cross-border terrorism from Pakistan coming across into Indian territory”. While India believes that Pakistan was involved in the attacks, the Nawaz Sharif government has denied the charges and called them baseless.
Ties between India and Pakistan have worsened after the Uri attack, with New Delhi backing out of November’s Saarc summit in Islamabad citing the increase of cross-border militancy as the reason. The Pakistan government had postponed the summit on September 30 after Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka also pulled out of the meet. On October 2, Nepal – the chair of the bloc – said the environment was “not conducive” to host the association’s 19th summit in Islamabad.
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