Pakistan Asks Help on A-Arms Pact With India : South Asia: The prime minister calls on the U.S., Soviet Union and China to broker an accord barring nuclear weapons in the region.

The prime minister of Pakistan, the Islamic world’s most advanced nuclear state, appealed Thursday to the United States, the Soviet Union and China to help broker a nuclear non-proliferation pact between his country and neighboring India, rivals that have fought three wars. India is known to possess nuclear-weapons capability, and Pakistan is believed to have it.

Pakistan’s initiative, unveiled by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during a major policy address to top generals, was aimed not only at ridding South Asia of a growing nuclear threat but also at restoring Pakistan’s vital ties to the United States. Washington cut hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic aid to Pakistan last fall after President Bush told Congress that he could no longer certify that Islamabad did not have a nuclear bomb.

Sharif’s proposal, which several analysts consider the most vigorous of a series of halfhearted Pakistani efforts to involve India in non-proliferation talks, was also clearly timed to mollify Pakistan’s American critics before a high-level Pakistani delegation meets next week in Washington with Administration officials and congressional leaders.

“We would not like to lose America, which has always been a good friend,” Sharif told three American journalists during a Thursday morning interview.

“I think these relations should not be affected by misunderstandings or misgivings. And there are certain misgivings on both sides.”

Sharif conceded that his non-proliferation initiative is partly an attempt to improve Islamabad’s ties with Washington; this country was once the United States’ closest Asian ally. But he also asserted that his goal is not to recover $280 million in U.S. aid frozen by Congress last year under the Pressler Amendment, which specifically bars U.S. aid to a nuclear-capable Pakistan.

“We would like to maintain our friendship with America. Aid or no aid, it really doesn’t make much of a difference,” Sharif said.

“We are sincere. We want this area, this region, absolutely free of nuclear weapons. And I think America also will understand and appreciate Pakistan’s point of view. It is exactly what America wants to achieve these days, as President Bush has said many times.”

To bolster his argument, Sharif and his most senior Foreign Ministry official, Akram Zaki, who will attend next week’s talks in Washington, repeatedly cited Bush’s recent call for a regional ban on weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East as a model for Islamabad’s new initiative.

“The climate seems to be favorable, because the major powers are moving in that direction,” Zaki said, adding that the Pakistani government briefed Indian diplomats Wednesday in Islamabad on the general thrust of the initiative and that Pakistan was encouraged by their response.

Senior officials in New Delhi could not be reached Thursday for comment on the proposal, but India, which successfully exploded South Asia’s first nuclear device in 1974, has blocked all previous initiatives for a nuclear-free region.

In rejecting those initiatives, India has cited the refusal of its northern neighbor, China, and other so-called “nuclear outlaw nations,” such as Israel and South Africa, to submit to international inspections and safeguards.

And India, relying in part on U.S. disclosures that Pakistan now has as many as six finished cores for nuclear warheads, believes that it needs a nuclear deterrent for its sometimes hostile western neighbor.

“On one level, this (initiative) is certainly a welcome development,” one Western diplomat in Pakistan said. “All previous attempts at non-proliferation (in South Asia) have collapsed because India first points to China, and then China points to the Soviet Union. Under this proposal, everyone would be under the same roof for the first time, and that would be progress.”

In his speech Thursday to Pakistan’s National Defense College, Sharif specifically proposed that the three nuclear superpowers “consult and meet with India and Pakistan to discuss and resolve the issue of nuclear proliferation in South Asia.”

Using as a model Argentina and Brazil, South American powers that agreed to bilateral safeguards last year, Sharif added: “The aim of the meeting should be to arrive at an agreement for keeping this region free of nuclear weapons on the basis of proposals already made or new ideas that may emerge. The nuclear non-proliferation regime . . . should be equitable and non-discriminatory.”

But the diplomat added that the initiative, even if it were to lead to the region’s first conference on non-proliferation, would probably not lead to a treaty for years. He said it is unlikely to satisfy Pakistan’s critics on Capitol Hill.

“I don’t see anything in this which addresses the more immediate bilateral problem between the U.S. and Pakistan, which is the credibility of Pakistan,” he said.

At the heart of that credibility gap, which has lately soured most U.S. lawmakers on Pakistan’s foreign policy, are perceived splits between Sharif’s new civilian government and the powerful Pakistani armed forces, which have ruled this Islamic nation for nearly half its 44 years of independence.

Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, army chief of staff, is to retire in two months, an unprecedented event under civilian rule in Pakistan. Comparable situations have triggered military coups in the past. Already, the nation is rife with coup rumors, and the Bush Administration is wary of a continuing role in policy-making for the army, which has increasingly moved toward Islamic fundamentalism.

That role became more suspect when Gen. Beg supported Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with a scathing attack on the U.S. role in the Persian Gulf, delivered at the height of the Persian Gulf War.

In Thursday’s interview, Prime Minister Sharif, whose Islamic Democratic Alliance defeated former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto in elections last year, dismissed rumors of possible rifts between his government and the army. He also sought to dispel the image that his civilian administration is religiously fundamentalist.

Sharif insisted that Gen. Beg only “mentioned some of his own views, personal views,” in his controversial Gulf War speech, which was not meant to undermine a policy under which Pakistan sent several thousand combat troops to assist the allies in the war.

To blunt criticism that the presence of fundamentalist parties in his ruling alliance is pushing the nation toward a theocratic state, Sharif said, “There are, of course, in the (ruling alliance) some groups which perhaps could be called extremist, but we are not under the influence of any extremists, and our party . . . is a very right-thinking party, moderate, middle-of-the-center.”

But the prime minister did show his government’s vestiges of concern over the future role of fundamentalist forces in the army, adding with a nervous laugh, “After two months, three months, you will not ask these questions--I hope.”

Pakistan has resisted international checks on its decade-long nuclear program, which it maintains is “essentially” for peaceful purposes, and has argued that it should not be forced to undergo such checks unless India submits as well. Asked why Pakistan expects its new initiative to succeed where others failed, Sharif said that “much depends upon India.”

But the prime minister, who met with leaders in India while there to attend the funeral of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, said he has received signals that the Indians may be more prepared to talk on the nuclear issue now than before. He also implied that Pakistan’s previous proposals were, at best, tenuous.

“This time, we are making a proposal very sincerely, and this is what the United States also wants,” he said. “And those (past) proposals were made a long time ago. Things must change. . . .

“We expect a favorable response from India,” he added.

He said that without a non-proliferation accord, the threat of nuclear war in the region will never disappear. Pakistan and India have been at various stages of war preparations lately over such issues as Kashmir and Punjab, two insurgency-plagued Indian states where New Delhi insists that the Pakistani military is helping train and arm secessionist rebels.