U.S. advises Americans to leave India

By Beth Duff-Brown

Associated Press

NEW DELHI, India – India’s defense minister said the confrontation with Pakistan was stable Friday, but the United States advised all but essential American diplomats to leave India and urged about 60,000 Americans there to depart as well.

“There isn’t any change on the ground,” Defense Minister George Fernandes told The Associated Press. On Thursday Pakistan threatened to redeploy troops moved from the Afghan border to the Indian frontier. “The situation is stable,” Fernandes said in Singapore, where he was meeting with other defense officials at a conference on terrorism and security.

In recommending the departure of nonessential diplomats, the State Department said, “Tensions have risen to serious levels.” It said Americans who choose to remain should steer clear of all border areas between the two countries.

“This is an authorized departure which is voluntary,” said U.S. Embassy spokesman Gordon Duguid in New Delhi. “individual officers and their family members will make the decisions on whether or not they should leave.”

In Pakistan, all nonessential U.S. Embassy staff and dependents were ordered home after the March 17 bombing of a church in Islamabad, which killed four people, including two Americans.

Britain advised its citizens Friday to consider leaving India along with all but essential diplomatic personnel. Britain estimates that 20,000 Britons live in India. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also advised British subjects to avoid travel to India as well as Pakistan because of “the heightened tension and increased risk of conflict.”

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, also attending the Singapore conference, said a war between the nuclear rivals would be “somewhere between terrible and catastrophic” and would destroy hard-earned improvements in U.S. relations with both nations.

Wolfowitz said the U.S. efforts to prevent war include both promises of incentives and warnings of punishments.

“I don’t think we believe in exhortation alone,” Wolfowitz said Friday.

President Bush announced Thursday that he would send Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the region next week. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage also is scheduled to visit Islamabad and New Delhi next week.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said he was considering moving more troops to Kashmir, a divided region over which India and Pakistan have twice gone to war. The adversaries have a total of 1 million soldiers on high alert along their border.

“Our security comes first. We will use all our resources to protect our security,” Musharraf told reporters Thursday.

The redeployment of what would likely be only a few thousand men would have virtually no effect on the balance of power in Kashmir, but could deeply impact the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

Pakistan was believed to have about 6,000 troops along the Afghan border. They were deployed to help U.S.-led forces track down al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who took refuge in the chaotic, mountainous tribal regions on both sides of the frontier, and they have been involved in the arrests of prominent al-Qaida leaders.

Rashid Quereshi, Musharraf’s spokesman, confirmed a pullback of troops and said Friday that their deployment to the Indian border depended entirely “on how the threat continues to increase from India.”

Witnesses in the northwestern frontier area said Thursday they had seen scores of army trucks moving soldiers.

With no sign that either India or Pakistan was offering a diplomatic solution in Kashmir, concern mounted about a broader military conflict. Both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, raising the stakes in their long-standing rivalry and drawing international concern.

India regularly informs the United States through diplomatic channels that it intends to go to war over Kashmir if attacks by extremists are not curtailed, a senior U.S. official told The Associated Press. But India has not advised the Bush administration how it would conduct such a conflict, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Indian military officials denied reports that India had secretly given Pakistan a deadline to halt cross-border infiltration by Pakistan-based Islamic militants into Indian-controlled Kashmir or face an assault by its troops.

A top Indian military officer told the AP that it was difficult to set a time frame for an assault against Pakistan because a variety of factors would have to be considered. He said the diplomatic pressure on both countries was unprecedented and playing a major role.

Bush, after a Cabinet meeting Thursday, said, “We are making it very clear to both Pakistan and India that war will not serve their interests. We are part of an international coalition applying pressure to both parties.”

Bush urged Musharraf to “live up to his word” and stop cross-border attacks in Kashmir.

India accuses Pakistan of supporting Islamic militant groups waging an insurgency in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir, a Himalayan province that has been the flash point of two wars between the uneasy neighbors, in 1948 and 1965.

Relations between India and Pakistan have been troubled since independence from Britain in 1947 – they fought a third war in 1971 – but tensions soared last December after a deadly terrorist attack on India’s Parliament that India blamed on the Pakistan-based Islamic insurgents.

Islamic Pakistan says its support for insurgents fighting in Indian-ruled Kashmir – Hindu-majority India’s only predominantly Muslim region – is moral and diplomatic, and denies India’s claim that it funds and trains them.

Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will attend a summit in Kazakhstan next week, where Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to organize face-to-face talks. Pakistan has agreed, but India says militant attacks must stop first.

A foreign ministry official said Thursday Vajpayee would meet separately with the summit’s host, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and probably with Putin, and the leaders of Tajikistan and China,

In New Delhi, Fernandes told the AP on Thursday that as many as 3,000 al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who fled Afghanistan were now in Pakistan-ruled Kashmir. Pakistan denies that al-Qaida and Taliban figures are there, while U.S. and Afghan officials said they are unaware of any such presence.

There were more deaths and injuries Friday as cross-border shelling continued.

An Indian Border Security Force member was killed and four soldiers were injured by Pakistani shelling in Sangral Post, about 205 miles south of Srinagar, the summer capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, police said.

In another incident, five police were injured when suspected Islamic militants lobbed a grenade at Khanetar, in Kashmir’s Punch sector, about 360 miles southwest of Srinagar, officials said.

Cross-border shelling and gunfire killed one person in a Pakistani area called Pukhlian, where two were injured, according to a Pakistani army spokesman. He said two people were injured in the Rawalkot and Neelum Valley sectors by “unprovoked shelling” from Indian soldiers.