U.S.-Led Effort Seeks to Ease South Asia Crisis

In an attempt to prevent South Asia’s escalating arms race from spiraling into war, the United States this week will launch an international effort to defuse the flash points underlying half a century of hostility, senior U.S. officials said Monday.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will meet Thursday in Geneva with her counterparts from the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Until last month, the five nations were the world’s only declared nuclear powers.

The goal is to find ways to foster greater stability and security in South Asia, including steps “to encourage dialogue and reconciliation” between India and Pakistan, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said. “We want to dramatize the situation. We want to get an agreement about how serious it is. We want to get a coordinated strategy. Each country is going to have its own influence that it can bring to bear.”

Discussions among the five--Russia, China, Britain, France and the United States--will include the delicate subject of Kashmir, the disputed region that has already sparked two wars between India and Pakistan.

Albright hopes to broker a consensus on actions by India and Pakistan, beginning with confidence-building measures, that could ease the mutual hostility generated by the nuclear tests of recent weeks and create a framework for peace negotiations.

“The two countries live next to each other and yet have no bilateral interaction. They have diplomatic relations and lines of communication, but behind the paraphernalia there is no substance,” a senior Clinton administration official said.

Until now, the United States has been reluctant to become embroiled in negotiations involving the seemingly intractable dispute over the mountainous region of Kashmir. But the administration appears to have decided it has no choice if it wants to prevent further provocative steps by India and Pakistan, including the continuing development of nuclear weapons, tests of missiles and eventual deployment of fully loaded warheads.

The long-standing Kashmir crisis and the addition of both combatants to the nuclear club raise the “frightening prospect” of conflict that would be of “a different character,” Rubin said. “It’s time to get on with resolving this problem.”

The Geneva talks will be followed by a conference in London, tentatively scheduled for June 10, that is expected to include the five permanent Security Council nations plus Germany, Japan and Italy.

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The third phase of the evolving U.S. strategy involves taking a specific proposal for action to the United Nations. “We’re looking for measures that will get the Indians and Pakistanis to ponder the wisdom of the course they’re on,” the senior administration official said.

Underscoring the difficulty it faces in building a consensus, the administration has decided that it will not push other nations to follow the U.S. lead in imposing economic sanctions on India and Pakistan. “This . . . is not an attempt to gather support from China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom for the draconian sanctions the United States has imposed,” Rubin said. “Sanctions are an important tool in the fight against nonproliferation, but one has to realize when they didn’t work, and they obviously didn’t work in convincing India and Pakistan not to test.”

Neither Pakistan nor India will participate in the two summits, U.S. officials said.

Meanwhile, a Pakistani parliamentary delegation led by Sen. Akram Zaki, chairman of his chamber’s foreign relations committee, began a three-day visit to Washington on Monday with talks at the State Department. In a session with Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, the Pakistanis were urged to move forward by signing the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty “without conditions,” a senior U.S. official said.

The Pakistanis did not offer any new pledges, he added.

The obstacles facing the United States were further dramatized Monday when the Indian government released a budget in which military spending would increase 14% over the previous year.

Spending on atomic energy is scheduled to increase by 68% for the fiscal 1998-99 budget, and the budget allocation for space programs is up 62%. Both have important connections to India’s military programs.

In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Pakistan’s new nuclear capability will make Muslims feel “more confident” about a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear program. But Kharrazi called on both India and Pakistan to show “more restraint” and reduce tensions.