WASHINGTON: The United States may soon stop tagging Pakistan with Afghanistan, as the State Department moves closer to shutting down the office that linked the two neighbouring countries.

The office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) lost its two key officials on Friday and the Trump administration does not seem inclined to find replacements.

Soon after reporting the two departures, the US media said the administration also wanted to announce the closure of SRAP’s office by Friday afternoon but delayed the announcement.

Later, the State Department confirmed that Friday was the last day for both acting SRAP Laurel Miller and her deputy Jonathan Carpenter. And on Friday afternoon, the SRAP staff held an impromptu farewell, believing their office would soon be merged with the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the State Department.

By Friday evening, various media outlets started criticising the move, saying that SARP had successfully dealt with a very intricate situation in one of the world’s most sensitive regions and should have been allowed to continue.

The reports caused State Depart­ment spokeswoman Heather Nauert to clarify that while the acting SRAP and her deputy had completed their tenures, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had not yet decided what to do about SRAP.

She said the State Department would “maintain the Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs offices, which currently report to the Office of the Special Representative, to address policy concerns and our bilateral relationship with these two key countries”.

In 2009, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton created the office to lead US diplomatic efforts in Afgh­anistan and Pakistan because the Obama administration believed that the two countries were inextricably linked and ought to be dealt with together.

A US government agency reported in 2011 that “SRAP rightly takes pride in being innovative, entrepreneurial, and fast-moving” and has “accomplished more in a shorter time than traditional regional bureaus (at the State Department) generally can”.

But its merger with the South Asian bureau, if true, will fulfil Pakistan’s demand that it should be treated separately instead of being tagged with Afghanistan.

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2017