My viral interview with Pakistan’s defence minister

Also this week: Trailing Trump in Saudi Arabia, and talking to the truth tellers.

When Islamist militants launched a terrorist attack in India-administered Kashmir on 22 April, killing 26 tourists, India immediately blamed Pakistan. India has long accused its neighbour and nuclear-armed rival of funding and supporting terrorism. Pakistan’s response? Deny, deny, deny. Three days after the attack, I interviewed Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif. I prepared questions about accusations of Pakistan’s role as a state sponsor of terrorism, expecting that he would dismiss them. What transpired was a shocking admission by Asif. He not only accepted that Pakistan has had a long history of using terrorist groups as proxies but stated that his country had been doing the “dirty work” of the United States and Britain as far back as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The interview went viral. Yet throughout he maintained Pakistan had nothing to do with the actual attack in Kashmir, describing it as a false-flag operation and claiming that it was in fact Delhi that had orchestrated it.

Taking the win

Almost two weeks later, the Indian army issued a statement saying it had successfully struck terrorist camps in Pakistan. According to the Pakistani government, more than 30 innocent civilians had been killed. I read that the headquarters of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed had been destroyed in Pakistan’s Bahawalpur. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl had written about Pakistan’s terrorism industry from Bahawalpur in early 2002 with the headline “Militant groups in Pakistan thrive despite crackdown”. Only a few weeks later, Pearl was abducted from Karachi and beheaded. I think about Pearl’s articles and how they could easily have been written today, despite Pakistan claiming to have clamped down on terrorist groups.

As fears grew that miscalculations would lead to all-out war, the White House finally stepped in. On the social media site Truth Social, Donald Trump declared the two sides had agreed to a ceasefire. Both nations claimed victory and the situation is under control for now. It remains unclear who gained and who lost, and what exactly was achieved. What’s evident is that certain red lines were crossed and this moment sets a new baseline for the next crisis in the region.

Friends like these

There was uncertainty initially about whether there would be a US intervention to diffuse the crisis. In 1999, it was Bill Clinton who put pressure on Pakistan’s then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to pull back from the brink. Trump is now portraying himself as the saviour. However, while Pakistanis welcome the idea of American involvement, India is a great power and doesn’t want other great powers in its backyard. The “art of the deal” foreign policy usually screws over your friends. Will this have lasting implications for the India-US partnership, which has been a rare bipartisan success story of the last 25 years?

Riyadh’s makeover

Trump’s focus then shifted to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where he has made his first foreign diplomatic tour of his second presidency. What I’ve found striking about being in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, is the level of transformation this country has been through. In just a few years the kingdom has taken huge steps towards modernity, and what once felt unthinkable – me sitting with male colleagues or contacts at a coffee shop – is now the norm. No more morality police. For Trump, the focus of his trip to the Middle East was economics and security – big investments and big deals. But, with growing tensions between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and a push for face-to-face talks between Zelensky and Putin, geopolitics won’t be far from the agenda. In the fast and furious Trump presidency, the world appears to be in his reality television show.

Reporters assemble

In London on 7 May, leaders in journalism gathered for the annual Truth Tellers Summit hosted by the editor and author Tina Brown, in honour of her late, great husband Sir Harry Evans. The event featured Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, who was inadvertently added to a group chat by Trump’s officials planning air strikes in Yemen. I was hosting a panel discussing the human rights abuses of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator, with two investigative journalists. As journalists debated how to cover our changing world – and noted the threats faced by reporters from Gaza to Ukraine and the US – one thing was clear: we must adapt and evolve with it.

Yalda Hakim is lead World News presenter for Sky News