Indo-US talks on Clinton8217;s visit this week

Against the backdrop of a rousing debate within the administration over the pros and cons of a stopover, the newly formed Indo-US joint task force on terrorism will have its first meeting on Monday. Indian officials are expected to expatiate their case on the export of terrorism from the rabid seminaries of Pakistan and Afghanistan and discuss how best the two sides can handle this surge of fundamentalism.

The Indian foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh arrives here Tuesday night and will hold talks on Wednesday and Thursday with US interlocutors, mostly Undersecretary Thomas Pickering and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, to work out the modalities of President Clinton8217;s visit.

Mansingh will also call on National Security Advisor Samuel Berger, the chief White House factotum who will put the final seal of approval on the agenda for the President8217;s visit. The nuts and bolts though will be tested by Mansingh and Pickering, both old hands in Indo-US bilaterals. Mansingh served in the Indian Embassy as the Deputy Chief of Mission while Pickering was US ambassador to New Delhi. The sense conveyed by both sides so far is that the Presidential visit will be weighed heavily with an economic and trade agenda, showcasing the increasing interaction the process of globalisation has enjoined on the two countries and speaking of the potential for greater cooperation.

Pakistan and its neuroses are not germane to the talks, Indian officials maintained. quot;We have merely pointed out that a Presidential visit to Pakistan at this juncture will send the wrong message and legitimize wrongdoing, particularly because we have held them responsible for terrorist activities. Beyond that we have kept our own counsel. The President8217;s visit to India is not conditional to his stop over in Pakistan,quot; one official said.But to go by the overheated reporting in the Pakistani media, the only item on the Indian agenda now is how to scupper the President8217;s Pakistan stop over. Indian officials however maintain that quot;Pakistan is not central to our talks with the USquot; and New Delhi does not share the Islamabad8217;s quot;neighbourly obsession.quot;

American officials too say the US-India agenda is more broad-based on not contingent on any one issue or one country. In fact, notwithstanding the sustained and hopeful Pakistani rhetoric on Washington stepping in to resolve the Kashmir issue, US officials have not even once uttered the K-word outside saying they would like to encourage dialogue between the two sides.

US officials also told The Indian Express that the administration had not yet made a call on a Pakistan stopover despite heaps of speculative reporting. quot;This is a call to be made by the President who wants to be all things to all people,quot; one US official who has tracked the administration8217;s South Asia policy closely said on condition of anonymity.

Elaborating, other officials and analysts said the President was towards the end of his tenure taking seriously his role as a peacemaker and was genuinely concerned about the deteriorating situation in the subcontinent.The question that was being weighed, they said, was whether it was worth the risk and infamy of shaking hands with a military junta to bring about some reconciliation, and also to further the US agenda of capping Islamic fundamentalism and nuclear proliferation.

The peacemaker President, incidentally, was joined by his wife Hillary Clinton, who announced at her Senate race announcement speech in New York last night that she wanted to bring about a rapproachment between India and Pakistan. But she was clearly appealing to the South Asian constituency in New York. She also wanted to bring about peace and the Middle-East and Ireland. New York has a large Jewish and Irish constituency. With the US looking for some signs from the military junta that some of Washington8217;s concerns in this regard would be met, the Pakistanis signaled over the weekend that they are ready to play ball.

The Musharraf regime has now indicated that it would move towards signing the test ban treaty and strive to rein in its protege the Taliban. Islamabad has also prevailed upon its ISI-run fundamentalist groups to forswear its anti-west and anti-American rhetoric and announce that their own cause is Kashmir. The Pakistanis have also considerably toned down their nuclear rhetoric, moving away from the quot;will-use-first-at-the-slightest-provocationquot; line to quot;will-use-as-a-last resort.quot; Islamabad has also instituted a detailed nuclear command and control chain aimed at reassuring the west that it is not a maverick nuclear power.

Previously, Pakistan8217;s trigger-happy nuclear utterances had unnerved the US administration.