After hinting at tougher stand on Pakistan, Donald Trump's envoy visits Islamabad

US President Donald Trump`s national security adviser HR McMaster has described Afghanistan as a "modern-day frontier" between "barbarism and civilisation".

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Islamabad: US President Donald Trump`s national security adviser HR McMaster has suggested that Washington may take a stronger line on Islamabad.

A day after making the comments in Afghanistan, he arrived in Islamabad on Monday on an unannounced visit.

McMaster in an interview to Afghan television channel ToloNews had said - "As all of us have hoped for many, many years, we have hoped that Pakistani leaders will understand that it is in their interest to go after these groups less selectively than they have in the past" - as per The Times of India.

"The best way to pursue their interests in Afghanistan and elsewhere is through the use of diplomacy, and not through the use of proxies that engage in violence," McMaster had added.

At the same time, describing Afghanistan as a "modern-day frontier" between "barbarism and civilisation", he had said that the stakes were high in the war-torn country.

"What's clear in Afghanistan is the stakes are high. This is really the modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilisation," said McMaster had told ABC News.

"So with those high stakes in mind, recognising that the Taliban groups that we're fighting here, that the ISIS groups that we, really the Afghan forces are really fighting and we're just enabling them - in the eastern part of the country, are a threat to all civilised peoples, he had said on his first visit to the country as President Donald Trump's envoy.

"So really what we do from this point on is going to depend on the decision that the President makes," he had maintained, as per PTI.

McMaster had arrived in Kabul yesterday, days after the American military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on Islamic State group hideouts in eastern Afghanistan, killing nearly a hundred militants.

(With Agency inputs)