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NEW DELHI, June 5: The United States plans to quickly shift gear in the blood-soaked Kashmir tangle to nudge and possibly craft a long-term political solution in the region, which it feels could otherwise easily become a new global centre for the kind of Islamic militancy that has come to terrorise the world, important sources said here on Wednesday.
While two high-level diplomatic missions from Washington would seek to defuse the raging tensions between India and Pakistan this week, the United States has formally asked Islamabad to accept veteran South Asia and Kashmir expert Nancy Powell as its new ambassador to the country, the sources told Dawn.
Powell was recently dispatched to Islamabad to hasten the process of her appointment and to set the more urgent tasks ahead into full motion.
Sources said the fire-fighting visits by Richard Armitage and Donald Rumsfeld to the region this week are expected to be followed by a deeper, closer look at a long-term solution to end the standoff between India and Pakistan. Many western diplomats feel it could spin out of control into a nuclear catastrophe if left unattended.
As the head of the political section at the US embassy in New Delhi between 1993-1995, Powell was deeply involved with Kashmir, where she came face to face with the western hostages crisis seen as early attempts by the now banned Harkatul Ansar group and Maulana Masood Azhar to up the ante against India in the Himalayan region.
“Nancy Powell has first hand experience of Kashmiri politics as well as ‘terrorism’ that began there during her stint in Delhi,” one diplomatic source remarked.
During that tenure, and following several visits to Kashmir, Powell developed an impressive array of contacts and working relationships with as many sides as there were in the Kashmir dispute, including the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leadership. She was considered to be close to the assassinated pro-freedom Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone.
One knowledgeable source in New Delhi said Powell’s appointment as US ambassador in Islamabad would immediately bring Kashmir as “an urgent issue on the otherwise distracted US radar.” The source said Powell’s predecessor Wendy Chamberlain was more familiar with narco-terrorism and her focus was more on south-east Asian affairs.
GHANI BHAT: Sensing the focus back on the Kashmir process, APHC chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat on Wednesday rejected Indian claims that armed militants were crossing into Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan, and indulging in violence.
“We reject outright the allegation against the people of Jammu and Kashmir in regard to infiltration or cross-border terrorism,” he told a news conference in Srinagar.
“There is absolutely no infiltration. No cross-border terrorism (in Kashmir),” said Bhat, signalling the fact that President Pervez Musharraf’s promise to stop cross-border militancy in Kashmir was now being practised.
“These are irrelevant issues as far as the people’s freedom movement (in Kashmir) is concerned,” said the Hurriyat chief. “The people’s struggle is indigenous in form and content.”
“Why should questions like infiltration and cross-border terrorism come up, I fail to understand?” he asked. “As far as cross-border terrorism is concerned, no borders exist in Kashmir. Neither with Pakistan nor with India. It is Line of Control (LoC),” he said.
“So cross-border terrorism may be a case for India and Pakistan to take up and discuss, but as far as we are concerned our position is entirely different. We belong to a disputed territory,” he said. Bhat urged the world community that Kashmiris be given the right to “choose their future.”
