RAWALPINDI: The Foreign Office here today [Feb 19] declined to offer any comment on President Richard Nixon’s annual foreign policy report until it has received its full text and carefully examined it. However, a good deal of interest seems to have been caused in informed diplomatic circles here by President Nixon’s remarks that over the decade of the 1970s “US, India and Pakistan and their friends should work together to avert further wasteful and dangerous conflicts” in South Asia.

According to indications available here, Mr Nixon’s statement will receive wholehearted support in Pakistan if it means to suggest that the US in co-operation with other friends was ready to help India and Pakistan settle their basic disputes peacefully and avert further wasteful and dangerous conflicts.

Pakistan has in fact always offered to enter into meaningful discussions with India to settle these disputes. On the question of Kashmir, which has been the main cause of conflict between the two countries, Pakistan had even offered to submit itself to the findings of the international court of arbitration, if India agreed. Only last month, while requesting the Indian Premier “to take concrete steps” to resolve these disputes, President Yahya Khan had reiterated “that on our part we shall continue to look for peaceful solutions of all our disputes and differences.”

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2020