ISLAMABAD, May 19: Pakistan should not suspect growing relations between India and the United States as something driven by religion. It was simply in the interest of America to be friend to the world’s biggest democracy and the important South Asian free market, said a leading US scholar.

Dr Philip Gordon, a senior fellow for US Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution and a former director of European Affairs at National Security Council under US President Bill Clinton, said this while speaking at a roundtable here on Saturday.

Diplomats and students of politics and international relations participated in the event organised by the Foreign Services Academy.

In response to a volley of questions by some retired diplomats over the recent historic bond of friendship between the US and India after the Cold War in which the former offered nuclear energy for civilian purposes to the latter, Mr Gordon said: “It is in America’s own interests to have good relations with such a free market. It does not mean we give preference to India over Pakistan, but the US foreign policy can’t revolve merely around a single country no matter how important that country is.”

He said many people in Pakistan look at the present India-US relations with glasses of religion and consider it as America’s anti-Islam agenda, which was wrong. Such an impression could not be substantiated as the war on terror had nothing to do with Islam as religion, he added.

He was more candid and straight when it came to the question of Taliban. He said Taliban could not be termed as representatives of Pakhtuns and giving them any chance to re- emerge would not only put the security of the region at risk but, in fact, the whole world.

He said the US had not sidelined Pakhtuns in Afghanistan and in fact Afghan President Hamid Karzai was a Pakhtun.

Taliban have been tested in Afghanistan and we have seen how regressive such people could be when in power. We had tried our best to separate Taliban from Al-Qaeda but it proved futile, he observed.

Ironically, none of the dozen veteran diplomats who had gathered around a huge wooden table could convince Dr Gordon that Taliban were a legitimate part of Afghan crisis. Some indirect points by the US scholars towards Pakistan’s policy of strategic depth and the very origin of Taliban caused a peculiar sort of silence in the camp of Pakistani diplomats and scholars.

Dr Gordon was even more impressive when he explained the US policy towards Iran and its impacts on Pakistan while replying to the question of a former diplomat. He said a nuclear Iran was a threat to its neighbours and could put the whole region into a race for nuclear technology. Iran could even transfer its nuclear technology to its neighbours.

He said the US was against the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline because of the designs of Iran to become a nuclear power, which, if materialised, could destabilise the whole region.

He said the US still saw Pakistan as a vital partner in war on terror and wanted long-term relations with it. The US could not win its war in Afghanistan against Taliban until and unless Pakistan ensured that such people did not sprout up on its territory and stop crossing into Afghanistan. He said Pakistan-US relations were also dependent on Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror and uprooting extremism.

He admitted that it was a source of embarrassment for the US when civilians were killed by Nato forces and Hamid Karzai criticised it openly, however, the US had no option but to fight extremists and use force against them.

He also admitted that a fair solution to the Arab-Israel conflict could stabilise the world. But, he also reminded the participants that the US had been attacked on September 11, 2001 by Al-Qaeda at a time when it was busy in peace negotiations for the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.