WASHINGTON, Jan 14: The Indian reaction to President Pervez Musharraf’s speech is being seen in a positive light here in Washington, but it is felt that there is still some way to go before the crisis in the subcontinent is over.
A senior State Department official, asked to comment on the US assessment of the situation following the Musharraf speech and the subsequent statement by the Indian foreign minister, told Dawn on Monday the United States believed the Indian reaction was positive.
He hoped that Pakistan and India would now move forward towards dialogue and that both sides would be able to pull back their military forces from their present positions on the border.
The senior official pointed out that there appeared to have been a halt in escalation in the past few days, but the situation still remained dangerous.
The US hopes to build on the current thaw, which has come after weeks of mounting tension between Islamabad and New Delhi, through Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to South Asia beginning on Tuesday before the secretary heads to Japan for an Afghan reconstruction conference.
The senior official said Secretary Powell was looking forward to his visits to Pakistan and India and meeting leaders of the two countries. This will be Powell’s second trip to the region in four months, and he is also scheduled to go to Afghanistan.
The Bush administration has no expectations of an immediate breakthrough in Indo-Pakistan relations but is banking on quiet work to seek a gradual decline in tensions. A report in Monday’s New York Times said the challenge for Mr Powell will be to “try to keep up diplomatic momentum behind the scenes while not publicly appearing to insert Washington into a formal mediating role.”
The report quoted a former senior national security official as saying Mr Powell has to be supportive of Gen Musharraf’s efforts in public, while privately telling him that he has got to make some specific commitment about things he is actually going to do, so that when the secretary goes to India, he can urge New Delhi to give the Pakistan leader more time to take the actions he intends to take.
But diplomatic sources stress that Mr Powell’s visit should be seen in the context of America’s focus on persuading India to draw down on its troop build-up, and to that extent Washington might feel that the onus, at least for the time being, is now on India to make the next conciliatory move. No official has, so far, publicly said Pakistan has now done enough to de-escalate the situation, but that might just be what the feeling here could be.
The Americans, according to the sources, were worried by the Indian army chief’s bellicose statement given a day before President Musharraf’s speech and after the speech were believed to have urged India to closely study the general’s remarks and avoid a knee-jerk reaction.
This objective has to an extent been met by the Indian foreign ministry statement, which would explain the apparent satisfaction with which it has been greeted in Washington. But several imponderables remain that could alter the
situation, not least the worst-case scenario of another militant strike in India or Kashmir.
Pakistani-American circles say it is still not clear how much pressure the US can bring to bear on India. They point out that Washington has its own interests linking it to New Delhi, and relations between the US and India have perhaps never been as close as they are now.
At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said at his regular briefing on Monday that while Gen Musharraf’s speech offered prospects for easing tensions, Indian and Pakistani forces remained along the borders and so did the danger of military confrontation.