WASHINGTON, July 22: The United States will resume its peace mission to South Asia with the Secretary of State Colin Powell’s arrival in the region on July 28.

Alarmed by the recent militant attacks in the Indian-held Kashmir, Powell’s visit will be followed by his deputy Richard Armitage’s in early August.

Richard Boucher, the spokesman for the State Department, says that ultimately the United States hopes to disengage more than a million Indian and Pakistani troops deployed on their borders.

Powell told a senate panel earlier last week that he is hoping to hold a meaningful dialogue with the Indian and Pakistani officials during his visit.

Powell follows British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who ended his two-day visit to the region on Saturday without making any headway in bringing India and Pakistan to the negotiation table.

On Saturday, Islamabad denied Straw a meeting with President Pervez Musharraf — the first snub to the western world since Pakistan joined the international campaign against terrorism.

According to the US and South Asian diplomatic sources, the recent reshuffling in the Indian cabinet is a cause for concern for Washington.

On June 29, Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani was promoted to deputy prime minister. The 72-year-old, hard-line Hindu leader is a possible successor to the ailing prime minister.

Also, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, who, like the prime minister, is one of the few moderates in the ruling alliance, was replaced by Yashwant Sinha.

Pakistan feels a certain apprehension about this move.

Sinha in his first news conference declared that India will not withdraw its troops from the border and is still considering a military strike against Pakistan if incursions into Indian-held Kashmir continued.

The United States, Britain and other world powers had pledged to make India withdraw its troops from the border if Pakistan stopped infiltrations into Kashmir. But Pakistan complaints that its western allies have failed to keep their promise.

India sent hundreds of thousands of additional troops to the border following a militant attack on the parliament building in New Delhi on Dec 13. It also broke diplomatic ties and travel links with Pakistan and refused to improve relations until infiltrations stopped.

Later, India and Pakistan reportedly deployed nuclear-capable missiles along their border, which was most alarming for the the international community.

Major powers, like the United States, Britain, France and Germany, sent senior envoys to the region to de-escalate tensions.

In June, Washington sent Armitage; a week later, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in South Asia, asserting that as nuclear states India and Pakistan could no longer think of war as an option for resolving disputes.

These visits succeeded in reducing tensions, and both India and Pakistan publicly agreed not to fight over Kashmir or any other issue.

“But the situation cannot be described as normal as long as troops continue to face each other,” a State Department official said while commenting on the renewed US peace efforts.

He described the complete withdrawal of troops from the border as “the objective,” adding that the United States “has a number of other ways to pursue this goal.”

Islamabad has welcomed Powell’s proposed visit and said that the international community should stay engaged to reduce tensions in the region.

But India has obliquely told the United States that its efforts to nudge New Delhi and Islamabad towards a dialogue would not succeed, and accused Pakistan of not helping at all in making any talks for possible.