May 19, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 6, 1423

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LAHORE, May 18: Two former foreign ministers are of the opinion that India is not in a position to go for any military action against Pakistan, its belligerent mood and bellicose statements notwithstanding.

“Even a small incident on the Line of Control (LoC) may lead to further escalation of tensions between the two nuclear powers, and in the prevailing situation when Pakistan is playing a key role in international coalition’s action against Khost, Afghanistan, the world powers will not like New Delhi to go for any move against Islamabad which deflected attention from the real target,” Gohar Ayub Khan argued while talking to journalists here on Saturday.

However, he said, the Pakistan government should not allow itself to be complacent.

He said the military government should take all political parties, without any exception, into confidence on the border situation.

He pointed out that the Indian troops had been deployed at borders for the past several months which was an attempt to browbeat Pakistan.

Indian prime ministers and ministers for defence and external affairs had been consistently saying that they would take action against Pakistan and not withdraw their troops to peace time locations unless their demand for an end to ‘cross-border terrorism’ was met.

In such a situation, Mr Khan said, a small attack by India on some Pakistani territory could not be ruled out, although the invader would then try to withdraw within hours.

Sardar Assef Ahmad Ali, who worked as foreign minister in the Benazir Bhutto cabinet, likened India’s aggressive posturing as a gunboat diplomacy targeted at forcing Pakistan to change its policy on Kashmir.

However, he believed that the arm twisting would yield no results. In his opinion whatever change was effected in the Kashmir policy in the form of action against some militant groups was dictated by Pakistan’s national interests.

He ridiculed Indian demand that Pakistan should end ‘cross-border terrorism’ when 700,000 troops had been deployed at the border.

He said it was not possible for Pakistan to check it despite all its efforts or, logically speaking, it would also have to deploy 700,000 troops.

Mr Ali said India would not gain anything out of this deployment and any adventurism would trigger retaliation from Pakistan.

In his opinion since both the countries were nuclear powers, this factor would prevail and bring the two countries under augmented pressure to exercise restraint.

He said it was strange that whenever some American dignitary visited Pakistan, India staged some drama to pin the responsibility on its neighbour.