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Fear of Kashmir war prompts Clinton trip

LONDON: Alarm at the growing risk of a war between India and Pakistan that might "go nuclear" prompted President Bill Clinton to add Pakistan to his South Asian tour this month despite U.S. disapproval of its military coup.

Sources familiar with White House thinking say Clinton was convinced that attempting to prevent a potentially catastrophic new conflict over Kashmir had higher priority than shunning General Pervez Musharraf for suspending democracy.

U.S. and British officials say early warning signals of another Kashmir clash are acute, and it could prove impossible to keep any new flare-up within limits.

The Indian military is chafing for revenge after feeling humiliated by last year's incursion by Mujahideen across the "Line of Control" in the Kargil region.

Adding to the alarm are U.S. fears that Pakistan is heading towards disintegration due to ethnic and sectarian strife, the rise of religious extremism, endemic corruption and a crumbling of the state, which the coup did little or nothing to arrest.

"Pushing Pakistan further out towards the wilderness and denying it access to international lending would further weaken the regime's ability to stem this awful tide," said Steven Simon, assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Simon, who was a top White House counter-terrorism official until last year, said the long-running Kashmir problem, cause of two previous Indo-Pakistani wars, had become more explosive than ever since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998.

VAJPAYEE UNDER PRESSURE

On the Indian side, diplomats in South Asia say Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is facing intense, conflicting pressures over Kashmir.

The United States is urging Vajpayee to make some gesture towards resuming the talks with Pakistan that were broken off over last year's Kargil incursion, and allowing some sort of international role in "de-escalating" the Kashmir dispute.

But the Hindu nationalist premier is also being pushed by his own armed forces to seek revenge for last year's crisis, when the unpreparedness of India's army was exposed.

Pressure for such retaliation, which could even include air strikes against training camps of Mujahideen in Pakistan, had intensified since Musharraf, who directed the Kargil operation, came to power in the bloodless coup, diplomats said.

"The personal antipathy towards Musharraf has complicated an already tense situation," said a senior Western official. "It is going to be a difficult summer for Pakistan."

"Kargil cost us a great deal in terms of money and human life and people outside India little understand the pressure our prime minister is under," the Indian official said.

Western officials say India is likely to take a more aggressive posture when Himalayan snows melt in the spring and summer, which is the traditional time for Mujahideen to cross from Pakistan into Indian occupied Kashmir to pursue a hit-and-run insurgency that has been going on for 10 years.

MILITANTS OR FREEDOM FIGHTERS?

India has mounted a world campaign to have the Mujahideen, whom Pakistan calls "freedom fighters", branded as terrorists, but has so far failed to persuade Washington.

U.S. officials warned Islamabad after another Mujahideen group with links to Pakistani intelligence was held responsible for the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet to Afghanistan in December. But Washington has so far resisted putting Islamabad on its blacklist of "state sponsors of terrorism".

A senior U.S. official said Clinton would resist Indian pressure to "tilt" American policy against Pakistan despite its strong concerns about the direction of Pakistani policy, because to do so would increase the risk of war in the subcontinent.

The nuclear factor will further complicate the president's trip, beginning on March 20.

Clinton is determined that his visit should not be seen as lending legitimacy to India's or Pakistan's status as nuclear powers, and he will press both countries to join a global nuclear test ban treaty.

However, Washington's moral case is bound to be weakened by the U.S. Senate's refusal last October to ratify the treaty.

Experts say the biggest challenge for Western powers is to help India and Pakistan develop command and control systems, early warning, crisis communications and weapons security that reduce the risk of a nuclear exchange through miscalculation.

"The question is how you achieve that without appearing to legitimise their nuclear status," said one nuclear expert.

Retired Western nuclear planners and military experts have recently visited both countries in so-called "track two" unofficial diplomacy to try to reduce the nuclear risk.

One of those former aides told Reuters that only the start of a peace process on Kashmir, which would require extraordinary political courage from Vajpayee, could reduce the danger of a new Indo-Pakistani conflict spinning out of control.-Reuters