WASHINGTON, Feb 29: The US backs restoration of an independent judiciary in Pakistan, but has no position on whether the sacked judges should be reinstated.

“This is something that we believe the Pakistanis themselves are going to have to sort out,” Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told a congressional hearing. “And I think that it’s something that’ll be taken up in their legislature and we will watch that discussion with interest.”

The United States, he said, was “certainly not trying to block any changes of any particular kind, nor do we have some kind of prescription or formula for how they should go about reforming or improving their own judicial system”.

Asked if the US administration had a policy regarding the reinstatement of the judges, Mr Negroponte said: “We have not -- we have been silent on the subject.”

His response, however, did not satisfy the senators who criticised the Bush administration for backing away from its insistence on an independent judiciary and for siding with President Pervez Musharraf in his refusal to reinstate the judges.

Democrat Senator Robert Casey reminded Mr Negroponte that immediately after the election, Pakistani politicians had called for establishing an independent judiciary while others had also demanded restoration of the sacked judges.

Senator Casey noted that instead of siding with the judges the Bush administration was pressurising the new Pakistani leadership to stop their calls for reinstatement of the judges.

Senator Barbara Boxer, another Democrat, said she felt “very disturbed” by the administration’s seeming ambivalence on the issue, noting that while Washington was spending billions of dollars in Iraq to set up a judiciary, it was not trying to help a country which already had one.

“Imagine what would happen if President Bush went to the microphone and said: ‘Today I’m firing the Supreme Court and all the judges can go home!’”

She recalled that the recent sacking of an attorney had caused uproar in the US while the Bush administration remained silent on the purge of the entire judiciary in an allied nation. “There are those who believe that re-seating the pre-Nov 3rd Supreme Court would almost lead to Musharraf’s removal from office” and that’s why he was reluctant to do so.

She claimed that the Bush administration remained wedded to a policy that would keep the embattled Mr Musharraf in power despite his weakness and lack of support.