May 29, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 16,1423

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WASHINGTON, May 28: The United States State Department here did not have a direct reaction to Gen Pervez Musharraf’s speech of Monday, but it reiterated on Tuesday that it welcomed the general’s commitment not to allow Pakistani territory to be used for cross-border infiltration.

A senior administration official, however, stressed that such positive statements needed to be coupled with positive actions.

The senior official also said the US continued to urge a reduction in tensions between India and Pakistan, and wished the leaders of the two countries to carefully consider their statements and actions. He indicated that impassioned rhetoric would not be helpful to reducing tensions.

Meanwhile, two close observers of the India-Pakistan scene, former US ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley and Teresita Schaffer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, believe that if Gen Musharraf can establish that cross-border infiltration has really been stopped, as the Pakistani leader claimed in his speech, then India would have to respond to get a political process going.

Ms Schaffer thought India was going to wait before taking any action to make sure that Gen Musharraf was serious in whatever he did. If it was proved to be serious, then it would be “quite important that India begin to respond because that’s how you can get a serious policy change to be sustained”.

Mr Oakley, who was appearing with Ms Schaffer on a public broadcasting discussion on Gen Musharraf’s speech late on Monday evening, said New Delhi was going to be under “terrible pressure to begin to do something serious about Kashmir”. But he pointed out that the Indians had Kashmir state elections coming up and Pakistan too was scheduled to hold general elections in October, and any dialogue would probably have to wait till later in the year.

Both Ms Schaffer and Mr Oakley referred to the domestic dilemmas confronting Gen Musharraf. Ms Schaffer said the difficulty was that people with a sectarian agenda in many cases overlapped with those whose principal agenda was in Kashmir. “And it’s not clear whether you can tackle just half of that problem. I think this is something Musharraf is probably just coming to terms with.”