Bush Warns S. Asia Rivals

In blunt language, President Bush called on Pakistan and India on Thursday to pull back from the brink of war as the United States flexed its diplomatic muscle and mobilized international support to prevent a full-scale conflict between the two nuclear neighbors.

The danger of war grew as India moved to load conventional warheads on its missiles and Pakistan announced that it might redeploy troops from the border with Afghanistan to its eastern frontier--both signs of their escalating hostilities.

Bush announced that he was dispatching Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the volatile region to try to help defuse tensions. The visit will follow a tour by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, the Bush administration’s most experienced diplomat on South Asian issues. Armitage is scheduled to arrive in the region next Thursday.

U.S. officials also said the State Department might evacuate U.S. personnel in India and warn the more than 60,000 American civilians there to leave. “It could come any day now,” said a senior department official, who asked to remain anonymous.

These developments signaled the alarm in Washington about the deteriorating relations between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir. Along with concern about the damage the two countries could inflict on each other, U.S. officials worry about the potential impact of the conflict on the unfinished war in Afghanistan, the campaign to stem the tide of Islamic extremism and a host of other issues.

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

The Bush administration is pressing Pakistan the hardest to take steps to end the cycle of violence. Bush specifically warned President Pervez Musharraf to “live up to his word” and halt extremists from attacking the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.

The predominantly Muslim region is divided between India and Pakistan by the Line of Control, which was established after a 1971 war between the countries. In recent months, India and Pakistan have been massing troops in the area, and the situation worsened May 14 when suspected Islamic militants killed more than 30 people, including the wives and children of soldiers, in an Indian army camp.

Musharraf “must stop the incursions across the Line of Control,” Bush said. “He must do so. He said he would do so. We and others are making it clear to him that he must live up to his word.”

But Musharraf, who came to power in a 1999 military coup, told a news conference Thursday in Islamabad, the capital, that Pakistan’s “security comes first. We will use all our resources to protect our security.”

He said his government is “seriously contemplating” moving troops from the Afghan border, where they are searching for Al Qaeda forces as part of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, to the eastern frontier with India “if tensions remain as high as they are now.”

The words from Bush and Musharraf showed that the conflict in Kashmir could strain a relationship that has grown close since Sept. 11. Cooperation from Pakistan has been essential to the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, and for many months Bush made a point of singling out Musharraf for praise.

There was no apparent letup Thursday in attacks across the cease-fire line in Kashmir. Reuters news service reported that two suspected Muslim militants who killed three officers at an Indian police camp were shot dead after a standoff.

Shelling between Pakistani and Indian troops deployed along the Line of Control also continued; unconfirmed reports from both sides of the border put deaths from the attacks at more than a dozen each.

The new crisis comes at a time when the administration is increasingly spread thin while attending to the world’s hot spots. Top officials and policymakers remain engrossed in battling the remnants of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan and trying to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

As the United States steps up its involvement in the India-Pakistan conflict, it is collaborating with allies such as Russia and the European Union.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is hoping to meet with Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at an Asian security summit in Kazakhstan early next week.

Putin was authorized by the newly established Russia-NATO Council to try to establish a face-to-face dialogue between the two leaders in a session hosted by Putin, according to Russian officials quoted in the Moscow media.

The summit of Asian leaders is to be held Monday through Wednesday; Armitage’s visit to South Asia then is to follow.

In its effort to calm the region’s tensions, the Bush administration is developing other strategies. These include offers of sharing U.S. intelligence to reduce the danger of miscalculations, as well as stressing the devastating impact of a nuclear war to both India and Pakistan, American officials said.

“We’ve given a lot of thought to their use [of nuclear weapons] and what the effects are--what the immediate effects are, what the lingering effects are and what the ... second effects can be with respect to other problems,” Rumsfeld said Thursday at the Pentagon.

“It’s the millions and millions and millions of people who live in those two countries who would be damaged by a conflict,” he added.

The shared intelligence might include confirmation of what type of warheads either country is loading on its missiles, U.S. officials say. One of the most feared scenarios is that India loads conventional warheads on its missiles but Pakistan misreads them as nuclear warheads, leading Islamabad to gear up or launch a nuclear response.

Armitage and other U.S. envoys already are in discussions with officials from both countries, promoting ways to ease the conflict.

“We are pressing President Musharraf very hard to cease all infiltration activities on the part of terrorist organizations across the Line of Control, and we are asking the Indians to show restraint until we can determine whether or not that infiltration activity has ceased,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday on the PBS “NewsHour” program.

“And if it has ceased,” he added, “there will be a basis for the Indians to reciprocate by starting to de-escalate ... and then hopefully other actions and other steps can be taken after that.”

The U.S. has been disappointed so far with the Musharraf government’s failure to rein in extremists who want either independence for Kashmir or the area’s union with Pakistan, which also is mainly Muslim.

“The situation has not improved in the last month or so,” Powell said. “We were receiving assurances from President Musharraf that infiltration activity across the Line of Control would be ended. But unfortunately, we can still see evidence that it was continuing.”

Powell added that Musharraf has offered new assurances that appear “more positive,” and the U.S. is waiting to see whether the Pakistani leader issues the “necessary orders” to stop the cross-border movement of militants.

The Bush administration is convinced that Al Qaeda forces have played a role, either directly or indirectly, in stirring up the long-standing hostilities between India and Pakistan for several reasons, including to divert U.S. attention and to undermine Musharraf.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned that a redeployment of Pakistani troops would impede the drive to finish the Al Qaeda network, much of it now believed to be concentrated along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The United States is pressing Musharraf not to move his forces.

“If troops are diverted from working with us to capture Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants back to the border with India ... it takes away from our own world campaign against terrorism,” Powell said.

The U.S. diplomatic response to the India-Pakistan conflict contrasts with the administration’s current role in the Middle East. Bush is trying to negotiate a political settlement in the half-century-old dispute between Israel and the Arabs. In its talks with India and Pakistan, the U.S. effort is designed largely to prevent war.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have long held that the two nations, which were a single British colony until independence following World War II, had to come up with their own agreement about what to do with Kashmir.

“We have no desire to make ourselves the mediator,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday.

Even before the current conflict, Defense Department officials had been concerned that both India and Pakistan were increasing their arsenals of nuclear warheads.

Times staff writers Esther Schrader in Washington and John Daniszewski in Moscow contributed to this report.