WASHINGTON, April 12: The US on Tuesday disagreed with the observation that Washington did not take Islamabad into confidence while signing a nuclear deal with India.
“We have provided Pakistan with information on the civil nuclear initiative with India,” a State Department official told Dawn when asked to comment on a statement issued in Islamabad that the information the US shared with Pakistan initially did not match exactly with the final shape the agreement took.
“No, we were not told about step-by-step approach,” Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam told reporters in Islamabad on Monday. “We were told that such a deal was on the cards and, in fact, the initial information about what this deal would look like is slightly different from what has come out finally,” she said.
Commenting on her statement, the State Department official said: “This is a very complicated initiative, involving a lot of details and we have kept Pakistan informed.”
But even US lawmakers are saying that the Bush administration did not keep them fully informed about the deal, finalized during President Bush’s visit to New Delhi last month.
In her briefing, the Foreign Office spokesman had also said that instead of negotiating an India specific agreement, the US should have offered civilian nuclear technology to both India and Pakistan.
But the State Department official disagreed. “As we have said, we believe that there are very different sets of energy situations for India and Pakistan,” he said.
In an interview to Dawn before leaving for his South Asia trip last month, President George W. Bush also had rejected the suggestion that Washington should make a similar offer to Pakistan. Instead, he urged Pakistan to look for alternative sources of energy and later sent his energy secretary to Islamabad to explore the possibilities of helping Pakistan develop non-nuclear energy.
The US media reported earlier this week that Pakistan is now making a similar arrangement with China to counter the Indo-US nuclear agreement. The reports said that Pakistan may sign a deal to share civil nuclear technology with China when President Gen Pervez Musharraf visits Beijing in June.
Commenting on these reports, the State Department official said such an arrangement would require the approval of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, just as the US deal with India does.
The US is currently trying to persuade the NSG to approve its deal with India and is encouraging member nations to offer nuclear cooperation to New Delhi.
