Foreign Office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar said on Saturday that the US government had conveyed its agrément to the appointment of Sardar Masood Khan as the ambassador of Pakistan to the United States.

The agrément, in diplomatic parlance, is an agreement between two states to receive and facilitate members of a diplomatic mission.

"He (Khan) would assume his responsibilities in Washington, DC in due course of time," the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that Khan was a seasoned diplomat who had served Pakistan with distinction and honour.

The statement from the FO spokesperson has come amid speculations centring on delay in the agrément of Pakistan’s ambassador-designate to the US, which has created an impression of a pause in the process.

The Pak­istan embassy in Washington submitted Masood Khan’s name to the State Department in November and the host government usually takes two to three months to approve the papers.

However, a former foreign secretary told Dawn that normally, the US State Department took four to six weeks to issue agrément for Pakistani ambassadors in the past.

“This time they are taking unusually long,” another diplomat said while speaking to Dawn.

The delay has happened at a time when ties between The US and Pakistan have turned increasingly frosty due to the geo-political environment.

The US interest in Pakistan has waned after it pulled out of Afghanistan. Moreover, Washington looks at ties with Pakistan from the prism of its strategic competition with China, although Islamabad has repeatedly said that it was not part of any camp politics.

Moreover, a Republican lawmaker, Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania has written a letter to President Joe Biden, urging him to reject the nomination of the new Pakistani envoy.

In the letter, Perry also claimed that the State Department had placed a “pause” on Pakistan’s request for approving Khan’s nomination.

“While I am encouraged that the State Department has reportedly placed a pause on approving Masood Khan as the new Ambassador from Pakistan, a pause is not enough. I urge you to reject any diplomatic credentials presented to you by Masood Khan and reject any effort by the government of Pakistan to install this ‘jihadist’ as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States,” Perry wrote.

The State Department, however, refused to get involved in the controversy.

“As a matter of standard diplomatic practice, we do not comment on the status of agrément requests from foreign governments,” a State Department spokesperson said when asked to confirm or deny Perry’s claim.

According to a Dawn report, Indian lobby in Washington is also looking at the delay as an opportunity for itself and is trying to scuttle Khan’s appointment on the pretext of his advocacy for the Kashmiri freedom struggle.

The report said people in the FO believe that the delay was because of Khan’s last position as the president of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

The report added that an American diplomat, who has previously worked in Pakistan and is currently in Washington, played down the situation as possibly a procedural matter.

He said the delay was probably due to the State Department operating on maximum telework because of Omicron. Moreover, he said, Khan’s credentials had been submitted at the cusp of the holiday season which was the slowest period of the entire year.

However, another report by Dawn said earlier this week that Pakistan hoped that the State Department would approve and return the agrément over the country’s new envoy for Washington in the next two or three weeks.

It quoted an embassy official as saying that Khan's “agrément is under process and the State Department will approve and send it back soon, perhaps in the next two to three weeks.”

After the approval of his agrément by the US, Khan will replace the outgoing ambassador of Pakistan in Washington, Asad Majeed Khan.

Khan joined the Foreign Service in 1980 and served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and International Organisations in Geneva, to China and to the UN in New York before his retirement. Khan also served as the president of Azad Kashmir.