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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (3957)	10/10/2001 12:45:17 AM
From: Lola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

India won't attack: US tells nervous Pakistan CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK WASHINGTON: The United States is reassuring a jumpy Pakistan that India will not take advantage of Islamabad's precarious position to launch an attack on it. The Bush administration has been in almost daily contact with the two sides to calm Pakistani nerves and Indian edginess at what it perceives as US coddling of Pakistan. Fears that New Delhi will use the current crisis and Pakistan's deepening vulnerability to settle the problem of terrorism afflicting India has been haunting Islamabad since the crisis erupted nearly a month ago. The anxiety, which US officials say has no basis, led Pakistan's military ruler Pervez Musharraf to ask India to lay off and make veiled threats despite New Delhi's assurance that it has no intention of taking advantage of the situation and make Pakistan's difficult position even harder. Administration officials acknowledge India has made public statements to this effect - and also given Washington private assurances - but that does not appear to have calmed Pakistan. Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to the region later this week is aimed at shoring up Pakistan's shaky military regime and boosting the morale of a country that finds itself in a terrible crisis. India has however used the opportunity to make a strong case about the all-round ill-effects of Pakistan using terrorism as a state policy, leading to a significant re-orientation on the issue both in Washington and Islamabad. The Bush administration has now signaled that India has a legitimate grievance, and the resulting pressure on Pakistan has led to various steps, including Gen. Musharraf's phone call to Prime Minister Vajpayee on Monday in which the Pakistani leader for the first time acknowledged a massacre in Kashmir as terrorism. The military regime has also cracked down on fundamentalist leaders preaching violence and effected crucial changes in the administration aimed at weeding out hard-line elements. In Washington, the Bush administration has repeated the pledge that its fight against terrorism will not stop with the ouster of the Taliban regime or the death of Osama Bin Laden. President Bush's assurance to Prime Minister Vajpayee that Washington was actively working on adding Jaish-e-Mohammed to list of terrorist outfits is evidently just the first step in addressing India's concerns. On Monday, the administration echoed the Indian government's view that there is no "good terrorism or bad terrorism," a thinly-veiled reference to the Pakistani position referring to the terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir as a freedom movement. India has acknowledged that the state is wracked by unrest but said the issues can be resolved peacefully through talks if Pakistan stops fomenting violence. The question arising now is when is an opportune moment to talk and under what circumstances. India's position that it will talk only when the violence subsides was endorsed by the previous Clinton administration till the Vajpayee government itself changed tack and hosted the Agra summit without an explicit repudiation of violence by Pakistan's military establishment. New Delhi now appears to have reverted to its old position. Gen. Musharraf's suggestion that Washington should intervene to help find a settlement to the Kashmir issue has not found any resonance here so far. The administration is still pre-occupied with the Afghan situation, though Secretary of State Powell wrote in a Newsweek column that the current situation in which both Pakistan and India had joined the coalition against terrorism "may present an opportunity for both countries to explore new ways of thinking about stability on the Subcontinent." Indian officials however say both countries come from different directions while joining the coalition. India's support is predicated on principles while Pakistan's support is opportunistic.