WASHINGTON, Dec 12: A former US presidential candidate and a close associate of President-elect Barack Obama will soon visit Pakistan to discuss anti-terrorism strategies. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, will also visit India and Afghanistan.

Mr Kerry will become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next month.

The Obama team, in a bid to show respect to the outgoing Bush administration, said Mr Kerry was not going as an emissary because “there’s only one president at a time”.

But Brooke Anderson, a spokeswoman for Mr Obama, said the president-elect “will be very interested to hear about the trip from Senator Kerry, whose insight he values greatly”.

Diplomatic observers in Washington noted that the trip coincided with the Obama team’s efforts to formulate a comprehensive strategy for South Asia before he took oath on Jan 20.In his speeches during and after the election, Mr Obama referred to South Asia as the first front in the “war against terror” and promised to formulate a new strategy to win this front.

Mr Kerry noted that the Mumbai terrorist attack was “latest reminder of the region’s fragile security situation” and underlined the need for a successful US strategy for South Asia.

While Mr Obama’s team is busy sounding out experts on its policy for the region, the Pentagon is preparing its own report.

Gen David Petraeus, the new head of the US Central Command, is expected to submit the report to the Pentagon and to Mr Obama before his inauguration.

And as Mr Petraeus and other US generals have already indicated, the Pentagon may propose, and Mr Obama may accept, to send at least 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

In a recent policy paper, Mr Obama’s top South Asia adviser, Bruce Riedel, advocates normalising relations between India and Pakistan as a prerequisite for bringing peace to Afghanistan.

He also emphasises the need to resolve the Kashmir dispute, arguing that this will free the Pakistani military to focus on the fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban.

This line of argument is based on the theory that bringing more pressure on Pakistan to fight terrorism without easing tensions with India may cause the new democratic set-up in Islamabad to collapse. And yet another military rule will strengthen extremist forces.

There’s also a fear that too much pressure, particularly from both eastern and western borders, could cause the collapse of the Pakistani state and if this happens, it could have two possible outcomes: either the Pakhtun areas of Pakistan would become totally lawless or merge with Afghanistan, giving the Pakhtuns an absolute majority there.

Both scenarios are unacceptable to the US as it does not want to deal with a radicalised Pakhtun population either in Afghanistan or in a lawless region with no central authority.

Hence there’s a realisation in Washington that it needs to play a pro-active role in reducing tensions between India and Pakistan and encourage them to resolve the core dispute of Kashmir.

Media reports that the incoming Obama administration regards South Asia as a ‘priority zone’ has encouraged South Asian experts in the United States to release dozens of policy papers on the subject. Each paper contains some interesting points.

Lisa Curtis, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, suggests appointing a US envoy for South Asia who does not focus on Kashmir alone but has a wider agenda.

Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia adviser to the State Department, urges the incoming US administration to assure Pakistan and Afghanistan that it’s not in a rush to withdraw from the region.

Such an assurance, he argues, would encourage Pakistan to take the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda more seriously.

Michael Krepon, a co-founder of the Stimson Centre, notes that ad hoc US crisis management worked satisfactorily in the past but now the United States needs a long-term approach, “learning more systematically from past crises on the subcontinent”.

Stephen Cohen, who has authored several books on South Asia, says that the US cannot deal with Afghanistan without dealing with India and Pakistan.

“But it will be simplistic to say let’s solve Kashmir and everything will be good in Afghanistan... That’s going too fast and too much,” he adds.