Trump accepts Imran Khan's invitation to visit Pakistan: Qureshi

Pakistan on Tuesday (July 23) said US President Donald Trump has accepted Prime Minister Imran Khan’s invitation to visit the country.

The visit, if made, will make Trump the sixth US president after George W Bush to visit the South Asian nation after a gap of over a decade.

Bush visited Islamabad on March 2006 when Pakistan was under the military rule of the then president Pervez Musharraf.

Addressing a press conference in Washington, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister F M Qureshi said the matters pertaining to the Trumps visit will be agreed upon soon, Pakistani news channel Geo News reported.

The US president has accepted the offer to visit Pakistan upon the invitation extended by Prime Minister Khan, the report said.

Earlier on Monday, the US president, while responding to a question posed by a journalist on whether he would like to visit Pakistan, jibed that Khan had not extended him any invitation but, if given, he would definitely accept it.

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“Well, I can’t say that yet because, so far, he has not extended me an invitation,” Trump said amidst laughter.

“And after today’s meeting, maybe he won’t. But I have a feeling he might. Yes, I’d love to go to Pakistan at the right time,” he said.

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower was the first of the five American presidents to visit Pakistan in 1959, followed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Richard Nixon in 1969, Bill Clinton in 2000 and Bush in 2006.

The Pakistani premier is currently on a three-day visit to Washington. He met Trump at the White House on Monday(July 22), a meeting which Islamabad hopes would reset the strained bilateral ties between the two nations.

Ties between the US and Pakistan strained after Trump, while announcing his Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August 2017, hit out at Pakistan for providing safe havens to “agents of chaos” that kill Americans in Afghanistan and warned Islamabad that it has “much to lose” by harbouring terrorists.

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