The Hindu : 'Larger issues of Pak. terrorism not addressed'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 28, 2002

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'Larger issues of Pak. terrorism not addressed'

By Our Diplomatic Correspondent

NEW DELHI Dec. 27. The international community has "resiled" from its commitment to push Pakistan in the direction of ending cross-border terrorism, senior External Affairs Ministry officials said today.

The officials regretted that the international community's focus was simply on cross-border infiltration and did not address the larger issues of terrorist training camps and communication capabilities.

They said that the international community had simply stopped at the first step to end terrorism — infiltration. Its credibility would be at stake when the snows melted next year.

The officials said that "basic conditions" had to change for India to resume the dialogue with Pakistan. And this meant that Pakistan had to give up terrorism completely.

India had expected some "gesture" from Pakistan on the issue of terrorism after New Delhi announced its decision to pull back troops from the international border. Even now, it was prepared to resume the dialogue if there was some "credible gesture" from Pakistan insofar as ending the sponsorship of terrorism was concerned.

Asked about India attending a possible SAARC summit in Islamabad, the officials said Pakistan had shown no interest in extending the Most Favoured Nation status to India regarding trade. The only "credible agenda" for SAARC was economic cooperation and so long as Islamabad did not extend the MFN status there was little point in both SAPTA and SAFTA.

If Pakistan did not lift the basic restrictions on trade with India, there was no point in attending a SAARC summit. Pakistan was blocking the SAARC's economic agenda, making it difficult for India to get on with "business as usual". The SAARC summits were becoming a kind of "charade", the officials said and stressed that the only thing that made news was "handshakes" during such meetings.

Asked about a possible Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline on land, the officials pointed to a ''fundamental contradiction'' in Islamabad's approach to this question. At one level, Pakistan did not want to trade with India, but was, however, signalling some interest in an Iranian pipeline passing through its territory to India. If Islamabad was to move on the general economic agenda with India then some projects (including the overland pipeline) could be looked at in a different perspective.

The officials made it clear that the Iranians, on their own, were making a feasibility study of the overland pipeline through Pakistan. India was only involved in a feasibility study with Iranians as far as an undersea pipeline was concerned.

To a question whether there could be an agreement between Iran and Pakistan on Teheran delivering gas to India, the officials responded with a counter-question: what if terrorists blew up the pipeline in Pakistan and Islamabad said this was the job of rogue elements?

On the issue of North Korean nuclear proliferation, the focus should, in fact, be on Pakistan since it was reported to have supplied centrifuges to Pyongyang. They expressed concern at the fact that Pakistan was treated differently as far as the proliferation issue was concerned.

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