Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-chief of

Currde Affairs Magazine. I am privileged to be joined today by the journalist Wakos Ahmed.

He is a Pakistani journalist who is the former web editor of Daily Pakistan and the Business Recorder,

and he has written for The Intercept and also,

most recently, for DropSight News, where Lucas has just co-published a piece with Martaza Hussein

and Ryan Grim on the U.S. Pakistani relationship entitled for Mutual Suspicion to Political Embrace

How the US Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Pakistan.

And in the course of this reporting, they have published for the first time the text

of a fairly important diplomatic cable kind of infamous that explains a lot about

the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which we will get into. And so, welcome to current affairs.

Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Nathan. Well, let's go back in time a little bit because your piece that you've co-reported with

Mataza and Ryan looks at sort of the last five years or so of the U.S. Pakistani relationship, and you look at what that relationship

was like under Donald Trump I, under Joe Biden, and then in the second Trump administration.

So let's maybe go back to the beginning of this period, and you can tell us a little bit about where things stood when Donald Trump was leaving office and Joe Biden was coming in.

Yeah. So when Donald Trump was leaving, if you remember that time, the main thing that was happening was these Afghan negotiations and Trump was looking

forward for his, like, to fulfill his campaign promise of withdrawing completely from Afghanistan.

Nobody had seen how logistically that would look like because there was a lot of equipment

in Afghanistan. There were soldiers. So it was anticipated that it could go

bad and it could wrong. So there were negotiations going on. The Doha Accord, which is now called,

happened during this time. And the supposed withdrawal was supposed to happen much earlier.

It was supposed to happen early, much earlier.

It was supposed to happen during the end of Trump administration.

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