Donald Trump attacks Pakistan on Twitter

Donald Trump has launched an extraordinary verbal attack on Pakistan, accusing its government of “lies and deceit” in accepting billions of dollars in US aid.

The US President also accused Pakistan of providing a “safe haven to terrorists”, alluding to the support it reportedly provides to terror groups such as the Taliban-allied Haqqani network.

The US is reportedly considering withholding $255m (£188m) in aid that has already been delayed since August, “as a show of dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s broader intransigence toward confronting the terrorist networks that operate there”, The New York Times reports.

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The Pakistani defence minister Khurram Dastgir Khan turned the criticism back on Trump, claiming the US has given Pakistan “nothing but invective & mistrust”, and claiming US officials “overlook cross-border safe havens of terrorists who murder Pakistanis”.

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai welcomed the tweet from Trump, the BBC reports, saying the message “on Pakistan’s duplicitous position over the past 15 years is vindication that the war on terror is not in bombing Afghan villages and homes but in the sanctuaries beyond Afghanistan”.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad were heightened in October when Pakistan refused to allow the US access to a captured militant from the Haqqani network.