The US supports direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on issues of concern, a senior Biden administration official said on Wednesday.

“As we have long said, we support direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on issues of concern. That has long been our position,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told the media on Wednesday.

Miller’s remarks came two days after Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered to hold talks with India to address all serious and outstanding issues.

On India’s ties with Pakistan, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said that it is not possible for India to have normal relations with the neighbouring country until the policy of cross-border terrorism is abrogated. “We can’t allow terrorism to be normalised; we can not allow that to become the basis for getting us into discussions with Pakistan. To me it is a fairly common sense proposition,” Jaishankar had said in June.