NSA Ajit Doval to go on four-day US tour to discuss on terrorism

Doval will be away from Tuesday to Sunday, with Thursday and Friday scheduled for official engagements. South Block officials said Doval will meet his US counterpart HR McMaster for the first time as well as defence secretary James Mattis.

Updated on: Mar 19, 2017, 22:35:05 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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National Security Adviser Ajit Doval will leave for a four-day tour to Washington this week to discuss the stability of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in the backdrop of a Taliban resurgence and rise of the Islamic State in Nangarhar province as well as to share notes on developments in China and West Asia.

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will visit the US for a four-day trip starting March 21. (HT File Photo)

Doval will be away from Tuesday to Sunday, with Thursday and Friday scheduled for official engagements. South Block officials said Doval will meet his US counterpart HR McMaster for the first time as well as defence secretary James Mattis, with a possibility of President Donald Trump dropping by during official meetings at the White House. The NSA’s visit and meeting with his US counterpart were fixed when foreign secretary S Jaishankar visited Washington earlier this month.

After Doval, minister for defence and finance Arun Jaitley is expected to attend the IMF-World Bank spring meetings in Washington from April 21 to 23. US secretary of state Rex Tilerson will be in India for a bilateral strategic and commercial dialogue along with other ministers from the Trump administration.

Dates are being discussed for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with President Trump in Washington. Modi will meet Trump at a G20 meeting in Hamburg on July 7-8, after which he will embark on his maiden two-day visit to Israel.

South Block sources said Doval will call for the US to enhance its military presence in Afghanistan, with China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran foreseeing a larger role for the Taliban to take on the rise of the Islamic State. Last month, Afghanistan and India were at odds with the China-led group as both felt the Taliban was detrimental to the stability of the regime in Kabul.

New Delhi feels the Islamic State of Wilayat Khorasan is being propped up by Pakistan and Iran’s agencies to accord credibility to the Taliban. Other West Asian nations are worried about Iran’s role in the region and in Afghanistan, a fact conveyed to Doval by his counterparts during a visit to Kuwait last week.

With both Mattis and McMaster having battlefield experience in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, Doval will discuss the recent spate of terrorist attacks in the region, with Pakistan’s Punjab emerging as the new theatre of terror. India is worried about Islamabad, with terror groups such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan taking on the Pakistani Army and hitting at soft targets in Punjab and Sindh.

The role of China in pushing for an economic corridor to the Gwadar port as well as its ever-expanding interests in South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka and Maldives, will also be in sharp focus during the meetings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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