December 12, 2001	Wednesday	Ramazan 26, 1422

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ISLAMABAD, Dec 11: Pakistan said on Tuesday that it was ready to hold dialogue with India on all issues and to improve environment for talks if there were any hurdles in the way.

At a news briefing, the foreign office spokesman emphasized that to remove any perceived hurdles too, the two sides needed to resume talks.

Spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan was commenting on a reported Indian official statement that the present vitiated environment might not allow the Indian prime minister and the Pakistani president to hold any bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Nepal early next month. President Musharraf, he recalled, had gone to Agra on the same mission for holding dialogue on all contentious issues.

The director-general of Inter-Service Public Relations, Maj-Gen Rashid Qureshi, rejected the Indian assertion that Pakistan’s interference in occupied Kashmir was causing hurdles in talks. What was happening there was a manifestation of Kashmiris’ reaction to the Indian oppression, he said.

Referring to an Indian offer to the All Parties Hurriyat Conference for holding talks, the FO spokesman said the APHC leaders had clearly stated that there could be no talks on Kashmir without the association of Pakistan as a party to the process.

The Pakistan government officials had held talks earlier in the day with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan, during his brief stay in Islamabad. The talks were focussed on the Bonn agreement and the formation of new administration in Kabul on Dec 22.

The spokesman outrightly rejected foreign speculations and reports that Islamabad and Kabul were not likely to have friendly relations after the political change in Afghanistan, and recalled that the ties between the two nations were firmly rooted over centuries.

He was confidant that Islamabad and Kabul would have close friendly relations in the future as well and reminded that since the change the top Afghan leadership had held cordial telephonic conversation with Pakistan leaders about the emerging situation. In reply to a question, Gen Qureshi blamed the Indian media and establishment for spreading false and fabricated news about the post-Taliban developments in Afghanistan and the alleged involvement of Pakistan army and helicopters in Afghanistan in the midst of the ongoing international anti- terrorism campaign. Such canards, he regretted, were being picked up by some prestigious American newspapers and the same were finding their way back to Indian media as original American reporting which, he added, was very unfortunate.

The ISPR chief said that the intelligence questioning of two former employees of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission were being shared with the United States intelligence investigators. The Americans, he added, were also working on the activities of the two scientists who reportedly operated an NGO in an “agricultural programme” in Afghanistan.