While Pakistan tried to link the Mumbai terror attacks to resolution of the Kashmir issue at the United Nations, US Senator John Kerry — who was just appointed head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — has ruled out any such association. “I don’t think it has anything to do with Kashmir,” Kerry said on Tuesday night, winding up his tour of Pakistan, adding that the Kashmir issue needs to be resolved by the two countries.Talking to a group of journalists, the Senator said that before the Mumbai incident, the two countries had made progress on various issues and had behaved responsibly. “Hopefully they (will) get back on the track (of peace) and focus on larger issues,” he said.Senior American analysts have also urged President-elect Barack Obama to refrain from direct US mediation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, saying any such move could “backfire”. Such a mediation “could backfire by raising unrealistic expectations of a favourable settlement among Pakistanis, thereby fuelling Islamabad’s support for militants in hopes of pushing a hardline agenda,” analysts Lisa Curtis and Walter Lohman said in a piece titled ‘Stiffening Pakistan’s Resolve Against Terrorism: A Memo to President-elect Obama’.“Your recent assertion that the US should try to help resolve the Kashmir issue so that Pakistan can focus on reining in militancy on its Afghan border is misguided,” they told Obama. Former President General Pervez Musharraf initiated the Kargil incursion into Kashmir in 1999 precisely to raise the profile of the Kashmir issue and encourage international mediation, they said in this context.
