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U.S. Tells Pakistan to Rein In Militants

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Launching a personal initiative to ease tensions between India and Pakistan, President Bush spoke Saturday to the leaders of both countries in an effort to avert war between the nuclear rivals.

Bush told President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to take new steps to eliminate extremism in his country, the White House said. He told Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that the United States is determined to cooperate with his country in the fight against terrorism.

The White House account of the president’s conversation with the Pakistani president, an ally whose support has been at the center of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, suggested a forceful and blunt approach. Bush appears to have been more conciliatory with the Indian leader.

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The call to Vajpayee was Bush’s first, the White House said, since the Dec. 13 attack on the Parliament in New Delhi by terrorists who India says were linked to Pakistan. Fourteen people died, including the five assailants. The president had not spoken with Musharraf since the two met in New York seven weeks ago, according to the White House.

Bush made his calls from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he is spending a winter vacation. They were at the center of a day of long-distance diplomacy to ease tensions on the Indian subcontinent, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac joining the effort. But the calls by Bush reflected a new willingness by the president to interject himself in a distant, volatile confrontation. They added to the sense of urgency that the United States attaches to potential turmoil in South Asia.

The key role Pakistan is playing in the war against terrorism centered in neighboring Afghanistan made the conversations all the more delicate.

Thus, it was notable that Bush took a noticeably tougher line with Musharraf than with the Indian leader. Although U.S. policy has clearly tilted at times toward one country or the other, Washington has recently sought to demonstrate an evenhanded approach.

With troops massing on both sides of the border between India and Pakistan, Bush thanked the Pakistani leader for having already taken steps to rein in extremists, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

But, McClellan said, “the president urged President Musharraf to take additional strong, decisive measures to eliminate the extremists who seek to harm India, undermine Pakistan, provoke a war between India and Pakistan and destabilize the international coalition against terrorism.”

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White House officials would not elaborate on what steps Bush wanted Musharraf to take or what he meant when he asked the president to “eliminate” extremists.

In New Delhi, India said it would continue to position tens of thousands of soldiers at the border until Pakistan reins in Islamic militants. It turned aside a proposal from Pakistan that Vajpayee and Musharraf meet during a conference of South Asian nations that both plan to attend at the end of this week in Nepal. Chirac called Vajpayee to urge that the prime minister meet with Musharraf at the South Asian conference.

And Pakistan warned that the tensions could trigger a full-fledged conflict, as troops from both nations traded fire over the so-called Line of Control that divides the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Pakistan’s state-run news agency said Bush and Musharraf spoke for 20 minutes. State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker said that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, already deeply involved in diplomacy to calm the turmoil on the subcontinent, also spoke with the Pakistani president and with Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

In Bush’s call to the Indian prime minister, the president renewed his initial expression of outrage at the Dec. 13 attack, termed it a strike against democracy and, as he did with Musharraf, encouraged renewed efforts to reduce tensions in the area, McClellan said.

Bush also called Blair, who is about to visit both countries, and reviewed potential tension-easing efforts by the United States and Britain, the White House said.

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Two Pakistan-based guerrilla groups are the focus of the latest flare-up. India blames the two groups for the attack and has demanded that Musharraf’s government take action against them; Pakistan and the two groups have denied involvement in the violence.

The attack on Parliament brought with it the potential to skew a complex diplomatic balancing act that the Bush administration has performed between the hostile neighbors. India and Pakistan have gone to war three times since 1947, when they were carved out of the remains of the British empire.

Cold War alliances made Pakistan and India proxies for the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. During the 1980s, the United States and Pakistan were partners aiding the moujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, while India stayed close to Moscow.

Then, in the 1990s, the U.S.-Pakistani alliance turned chilly. Washington imposed sanctions against Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program and again in response to Musharraf’s seizure of power in a 1999 coup.

Before the terror attacks on Sept. 11, the Bush administration had moved with determination to strengthen ties with India while acting less forcefully to improve relations with Pakistan. After Sept. 11, the United States abruptly turned once again to Pakistan, seeking a military ally on the border with Afghanistan to join the campaign against the Taliban regime there.

“The new [Bush] administration was aggressively rebuilding ties with India, and it was cautiously probing to see what could be done with Pakistan,” said Leonard S. Spector, a nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. But after Sept. 11, he said, “things just flipped. The opening to India was continuing, but we had an urgent, urgent need to build good relations with Pakistan.”

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Now, as tensions rise between the neighboring nuclear rivals, the United States is attempting to juggle concerns about nuclear war, Musharraf’s uncertain grasp on power and its own effort to wipe out terrorist forces that may be seeking refuge in Pakistan.

“The trick here is to thread a needle,” Spector said.

Given Washington’s chilly relations with Pakistan in the 1990s, Spector said, it is not easy for Musharraf to appear soft on the politically explosive issue of Kashmir in response to U.S. demands.

“We don’t have much to work with here. Lots of parties are taking risks,” Spector said.

On Friday, Bush told reporters that he had spoken twice in two days with his National Security Council about India and Pakistan.

He took note of Pakistan’s “arrest of 50 extreme terrorists” and said he hoped India had noted it too.

Musharraf, he said in remarks that were more supportive than those conveyed Saturday, “is responding forcefully and actively to bring those who would harm others to justice.”

Bush, who has avoided trying to personally resolve foreign disputes, said then that he had not made any telephone calls to the region.

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“I will if need be,” he added.

So his new telephone diplomacy reinforced the idea that tensions between India and Pakistan could erupt into a war that could only complicate the campaign in Afghanistan.

In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said: “The possibility of a small action could trigger a chain of action and reaction that neither side desires. The propensity for such an outcome is very, very high.”

Associated Press reported from New Delhi that transport links were due to be cut between the two nations Tuesday. The last bus from Pakistan to India pulled out of the station in Lahore on Saturday, carrying 35 passengers.

The human drama reflected the situation between the two nations.

“Now I will not be able to come back,” said Pakistani-born Shaheen Iqbal, who is returning to her husband in India after visiting her family.

In a further weakening of the two nations’ connections, Islamabad banned Indian satellite television programs Saturday, accusing them of carrying “poisonous propaganda” against Pakistan.

And India’s national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, said that New Delhi will not pull its troops back from the border until Pakistan takes “credible, firm, substantive and visible action” against militants in Kashmir.

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According to Associated Press, Vajpayee told senior officials of his Bharatiya Janata Party that he would try to avoid war but would spare no means to end what he called Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.

Meanwhile, foreign ministers from six Arab nations of the Persian Gulf appealed to the two countries to step back from a military confrontation, expressing concern that the tensions there could spill over to their region, where millions of Pakistanis and Indians work.

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Times staff writer Jonathan Peterson in Washington contributed to this report.

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