WASHINGTON, 28 September 2021, (TON): The State Department announced “US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will travel next month to Pakistan and India, bitter rivals that have clashed on the way forward in Afghanistan.”

Sherman, after CIA chief Bill Burns, will be one of the first high-level officials under President Joe Biden to visit Pakistan.

The State Department said “Sherman will meet senior officials in Islamabad on October 7-8 after an earlier visit to New Delhi and Mumbai on October 6-7, when she will meet officials and civil society leaders and address the US-India Business council's annual ideas summit.

The trip comes as India, one of the top allies of the Western-backed Afghan government that collapsed last month, urges the world to pay closer attention to Pakistan's role in the turmoil.

Despite being exposed for funding a long-running disinformation campaign against Pakistan last year, India continues to use its rumor mills to alter global opinion about its arch-rival in the region.

Details gathered by The Express Tribune show that more than 40 news items have been produced by mainstream Indian media outlets during this month alone. Each one of them paints Islamabad in a negative light — particularly blaming it for the situation in Afghanistan.

While the spread of unverified information about Islamabad is a permanent feature in New Delhi’s playbook, it churns out more misinformation around key global events.

The current surge in misleading news items has been timed around the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul and the subsequent withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.