WASHINGTON, April 24: The State Department hopes that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage will be able to initiate steps to ease India-Pakistan tensions and to stop cross-border infiltration into Kashmir when he visits South Asia early next month.

The department’s spokesman, Richard Boucher, told a briefing in Washington on Wednesday that the Bush administration regards this as an important visit and hopes that it would promote peace and stability in the region.

Elaborating the key aims of the visit, he said: “There are plenty of bilateral issues and then there is also the relationship between India and Pakistan, looking for more steps that can be taken to ease the tensions, stop the infiltration and look towards a dialogue between the two.”

Mr Boucher said the United States had “important relationships” with both India and Pakistan and during his visit Mr Armitage will explore possibilities to “further the progress in those relationships.”

The United States, he said, has a strong and continuing interest in promoting peace and stability in South Asia.

The State Department said exact itinerary of the visit is still being worked out but Mr Armitage is planning to travel from May 5 to 11 to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Without getting more specific at this point, we’ll see where we are when he actually goes. But there’s always way to further that process that I’m sure he’ll want to discuss,” the spokesman said.

Asked to explain why the State Department had included Afghanistan in a trip which apparently aims at defusing tensions between India and Pakistan, Mr Boucher said: “Each of these individual stops is important for the relationships (Washington has with those countries and) for the work that’s ongoing with those individual governments.”

Mr Armitage’s stop in Afghanistan, Mr Boucher said, would demonstrate a “strong US support for the government and for the (ongoing) political and reconstruction process” in that country.