As Pakistan withdrew more troops from the Afghan border yesterday, possibly to move them to the Kashmir frontier for a faceoff with India, the US stepped up efforts to avert a wider war.
A war between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan would be "somewhere between terrible and catastrophic" and would destroy hard-earned improvements in US relations with both nations, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said.
Wolfowitz said US efforts to prevent war include both promises of incentives and warnings of punishments.
"I don't think we believe in exhortation alone," Wolfowitz said yesterday in Singapore, where he was meeting with other defense officials at a conference on terrorism and security. "It will be along with carrots and sticks."
US President George W. Bush is sending Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the region next week. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage also is scheduled to visit Islamabad and New Delhi next week.
Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf said he was considering moving more troops to the Hima-layan province of Kashmir.
"Our security comes first. We will use all our resources to protect our security," Musharraf told reporters on Thursday.
The redeployment of what would likely be only a few thousand men would have virtually no impact on the balance of power in Kashmir, but could deeply affect the US-led war against terrorism.
The Pakistani troops on the Afghan border were deployed to help US-led forces track down al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who had taken refuge in the wild and mountainous tribal region on both sides of the frontier, and they have been involved in the arrests of several prominent al-Qaeda leaders.
Rumsfeld said the US had not seen any sign of a Pakistani withdrawal from the border with Afghanistan and said he hoped none would be forthcoming. "The number of Pakistani battalions that have been located along that Afghan border has not changed,"he said. "And we hope it will not change."
But Rashid Quereshi, Mushar-raf's spokesman, confirmed troops had pulled back and said yesterday that their deployment to the Indian border depended entirely "on how the threat continues to increase from India."
Witnesses in the northwestern frontier area said Thursday they had seen scores of army trucks moving soldiers.
Quereshi said earlier that the pullback from the Afghan border, where about 1,000 additional troops were deployed less than a month ago, would not affect Pakistan's relations with the US-led coalition. It was believed Pakistan had a total of about 6,000 troops along the Afghan border, but the government never details troop strength.
Meanwhile, Indian military officials scuttled reports that India had secretly given Pakistan a deadline to halt cross-border infiltration by Pakistan-based Islamic militants into Indian-controlled Kashmir, or face an assault by its troops.
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