Ex-Trump aide says India-Pakistan crisis alarmed White House.

WASHINGTON -- The February 2019 India-Pakistan conflict alarmed the White House so much so that officials held an emergency meeting soon after PAF shot down an Indian plane and spent hours calling their counterparts in the region to defuse the crisis, reveals the memoir penned by an ex-Trump aide.

The author, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, describes how on Feb 27 senior US officials held a late-night meeting on the brewing crisis, although they had just concluded lengthy discussions with President Donald Trump on Afghanistan.

`I thought that was it for the evening, but word soon came that Shanahan and Dunford wanted to talk to Pompeo and me about a ballooning crisis between India and Pakistan,` Bolton writes in The Room Where It Happened to be released on Tuesday as the Trump administration failed to persuade a federal court to ban it.

The participants he mentions by their last names were Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, the then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Francis Dunford and the acting US Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

`After hours of phone calls, the crisis passed, perhaps because, in substance, there never really had been one. But when two nuclear powers spin up their military capabilities, best not to ignoreit,` Bolton added.

The 2019 Indo-Pakistan military standof f followed a Feb 14 militant attack on an Indian paramilitary convoy on the JammuSrinagar National Highway. Over 40 Indian troops and the perpetrator were killed in the attack.

The bomber was a local Kashmiri, Adil Ahmad Dar, who was unhappy with India`s policies and had no link to any Kashmiri...

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