ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) central leader Khurram Dastgir Khan Wednesday alleged that the long list of diplomatic and foreign policy “blunders” by Prime Minister Imran Khan and his government has dealt disastrous damage to Pakistan and its international interests.

Speaking at a news conference, Dastgir said the day Imran Khan came into power, he had portrayed Pakistan as a weak, inconsequential, and indecisive country. He said Imran Khan has reduced the multifaceted decades’ old relationship with China to a transactional relation.

“Imran’s inexperience, immaturity and incompetence in understanding diplomatic phenomenon led him into announcing that just because India congratulated him on his victory; it wanted negotiations and a fruitful dialogue. His blunderbuss statement that Narendra Modi is the only hope for the solution of the Kashmir dispute and his over-excitement with the Kartarpur Corridor issue was seen as a sign of weakness and were rewarded with Balakot followed by the annexation of Occupied Kashmir,” he added.

“The sofa-chair diplomacy that followed cemented his inability to handle such matters even further where he and his foreign minister compromised Pakistan’s and Kashmir’s interest by not making an aggressive diplomatic push by visiting and meeting foreign leaders to garner support against India’s actions,” he further alleged. Instead, he added that they resorted to phone calls and interviews “which is the weakest action possible”. “All this compromised Pakistan’s support against annexation and it was able to get very limited support,” he added.

He pointed out Imran’s “disastrous” statement regarding Pakistan Army and intelligence training al-Qaeda, which was untrue. “His [Imran] needless rambling about Iran being a victim of terrorists coming from Pakistani soil; his undermining of Pakistan’s foreign policy by stating there is no border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and that the Durand Line was just a creation of the westerners. But above all Imran Khan’s megaphone foreign policy made a mess of the delicate balance maintained by Islamabad regarding the relations with the GCC countries and other critical Muslim strategic partners like Turkey, Malaysia, Iran, and others,” he maintained.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021