Tensions mount as Pakistan shifts troops to Indian border
ISLAMABAD, (AFP)
Pakistan has redeployed thousands of troops to the border with India,
officials said Friday, in a dramatic escalation of tensions with New
Delhi in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
Washington urged the two sides to avoid escalating tensions and said
it was touch with both countries.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh summoned his military chiefs to
review New Delhi’s “defence preparedness” while his foreign ministry
advised Indians not to travel to Pakistan, saying it was unsafe for them
to be in the country.The developments sent ties plummeting to their
lowest point since late 2001, when Kashmiri militants staged a brazen
attack on the Indian parliament — an attack New Delhi blamed on the
Pakistan-based extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.India has blamed the same
group for the Mumbai attacks and has repeatedly said Islamabad is not
doing enough to rein in militant groups, a claim that Pakistan rejects.
The nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours — which have fought three
wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir —
have said they do not want war this time, but warn they would act if
provoked.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani reiterated Friday that Pakistan was
a “peace-loving” nation, telling reporters in the eastern city of Lahore
that while Islamabad had no “aggressive designs”, it would respond if
provoked, the Associated Press of Pakistan news agency reported.
In Islamabad, senior defence and security officials said troops were
being moved from the northwest tribal areas bordering Afghanistan,
hotbeds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda activity, to the eastern border near
India.
“We do not want to create any war hysteria but we have to take
minimum security measures to ward off any threat,” a defence ministry
official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
He added that leave for “operational” armed forces personnel had been
cancelled “as a defensive measure”.
A top security official, who also asked not to be named, explained
that a “limited number of troops have been pulled out from snowbound
areas on the western border where they were not engaged in any
operation”.
Pakistan’s army and air force have recently scaled back their
operations against Taliban-linked militants in both the Swat valley and
the Bajaur tribal area bordering Afghanistan. Both operations were
launched in mid-2008.
Any major shift of Pakistani troops out of the tribal areas would
likely spark concern in Washington and other Western capitals, as it
could open the door to more cross-border militant attacks on foreign
forces in Afghanistan.
“We continue to urge both sides to cooperate on the Mumbai
investigation as well as counterterrorism in general,” White House
spokesman Gordon Johndroe told AFP.
“We also do not want either side to take any unnecessary steps that
raise tensions in an already tense situation.”
Another senior Pakistani security official told AFP the new
deployments on the Indian border were not in “significant numbers but
only in areas opposite the points where India is believed to have
brought forward its troops”.
The defence ministry official said authorities had noticed the
movement of Indian troops toward the border near Lahore, and that they
believed India had also cancelled military leave.
Pakistan’s chief military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas
declined to comment.
New Delhi has said its slow-moving peace process with Pakistan is now
on hold in the wake of the Mumbai attacks last month, in which 172
people including nine of the gunmen were killed. |