NEW DELHI: India cautiously welcomed Washington’s plans to defeat a resurgent Al-Qaeda Monday and said Premier Manmohan Singh would meet President Barack Obama in London this week to discuss the strategy.

Singh, who shared warm ties with former president George W. Bush, will hold his first face-to-face talks with Obama Thursday on the fringes of a Group of 20 summit in London, a senior Indian government official said.

India ‘welcomed the very clear US expression of will’ to defeat the ‘forces of extremism in Afghanistan and their roots in Pakistan,’ Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told reporters here.

‘The situation in the South Asian region including Pakistan and Afghanistan will certainly come up’ in the talks, he said.

‘India has a direct interest in the success of this international effort.’ He condemned an assault Monday by gunmen on a Pakistani police academy in Lahore that left at least 20 dead and that analysts say echoed a recent commando-style raid on Sri Lanka’s cricket team in the Pakistani city.

‘The government of India are deeply saddened and shocked,’ the foreign secretary said. ‘Terrorism is a threat to the entire region.’

Last Friday, Obama put Pakistan at the center of the fight against Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network with a new strategy to commit thousands more troops and billions of dollars to the Afghan war.

Menon was cool, however, about Obama’s plans to ‘pursue constructive diplomacy’ to improve relations between India and Pakistan, at loggerheads over their six-decade dispute about the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

‘Our views are quite clear on how the India-Pakistan process has been most successful when it has been bilateral,’ without any external prodding, he said.