NEW YORK, Jan 2: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has ordered the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to cut off backing for Islamic militant groups fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir, the New York Times said quoting senior government officials.

“The decision has been made to cut off support to all non-indigenous groups in Kashmir,” Pakistan officials told the paper in Islamabad, adding that President Musharraf believed the policy change would cause a scaling-down of the freedom struggle, but will not be its end.

The paper quoted the officials as saying that said Pakistan would continue to provide moral and political support to groups with local roots that are not part of the Islamic holy war that has links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

The officials told the paper that such groups, however, would not get military training and weapons and would also be required to purge all non-Kashmiri Muslims, including Arabs and Chechens, from their rank.

The paper quoted the officials as saying that Musharraf felt that lowering the level of freedom movement was not too high a price to pay for protecting the country against attack by India, whose conventional forces far outnumber Pakistan’s.

Gen Musharraf’s move comes at a critical moment in relations between India and Pakistan, when the two nuclear-armed nations have massed forces along their border and prepared for a possible war.

The NYT said that the western diplomats who had been in contact with Gen Musharraf during the crisis, described the decision to end the Muslim militant groups’ role in the Kashmir fighting as his boldest step yet to defuse tensions that had gripped the region in the aftermath of attack on the Indian parliament.

Over the last 72 hours, the tensions had begun to ease slightly, with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and other Indian leaders shifting from threats of war toward more modulated statements stressing their preference for a peaceful outcome, the paper said. But the diplomats noted that a succession of Pakistani leaders had found that ordering the intelligence agency to change course, especially when it involved Islamic militant groups, had not always succeeded, the paper said.

The diplomats told the paper that the ISI, operating in the shadows, with few controls on its spending, had long been a rogue agency, capable of continuing support for groups that it had formally disavowed, as it did for at least a few weeks after Gen Musharraf ordered an end to support for the Taliban in September. Since then, Gen Musharraf had appointed a new ISI chief, but even he had acknowledged privately that getting complete control of the agency would take some time, the paper said.

Still, the diplomats told the paper that they saw Gen Musharraf’s latest action as a turning point in the crisis, and said he appeared to have settled on the move after telephone calls that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made last week to Gen Musharraf and Mr Vajpayee in which Mr Bush urged both leaders to turn toward a negotiated end to the crisis.

The diplomats said the American leaders’ message to India had been that Gen Musharraf had started Pakistan on a “process” of curbing Islamic militancy that would meet India’s demand for an end to terrorist attacks by Pakistan-based groups. But India had also been told, the diplomats said, that the Pakistani leader needed time so as not to be seen to be “doing India’s bidding” under threat of war. Indian leaders, the diplomats said, had been reminded of the message Gen Musharraf had been spreading in Pakistan for many months, the paper said.

“Although he has been careful not to offer concessions over Kashmir, a 50-year-old wound that arouses deep feelings in this nation of 140 million Muslims, he has been telling Pakistanis that the country has to rid itself of the scourge of Islamic militancy and its corollary, terrorism, if it is not to alienate foreign investors,” the paper said.