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Straw to ask Musharraf to end
cross-border terrorism

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who embarks on Tuesday on a visit to Islamabad and New Delhi seeking to calm Indo-Pak military tensions, would make it clear to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf that he must stop terrorist attacks on India.

Foreign Office Minister Ben Bradshaw said Straw would tell Musharraf that 'he must stop the infiltration and the terrorist attacks on India'.

"He (Musharraf) has said he will do it. He hasn't and the Indians are right to feel aggrieved about that," Bradshaw added.

"But once Pakistan has made efforts to stop infiltration along the Line of Control, we would expect India to de-escalate and resume dialogue with Pakistan," he said.

"We're clear that there are a series of steps - the first has to be an end to cross-border terrorism, to terrorism in all it forms and all its guises and disguises in that region and elsewhere," Bradshaw told mediapersons at a news conference in Berlin.

Bradshaw made it clear there has been no change in policy over arms sales to India and Pakistan despite escalating tensions between the two countries.

He issued a stark warning about the consequences of a full-scale war between nuclear powers India and Pakistan.

"The current tension and the build up of military forces in Kashmir could all too easily spiral out of control into a conventional and then a nuclear conflict of a kind we have never seen before," Bradshaw told an audience of diplomats in Berlin.

He said the consequences of such a war were 'all too easy to describe: death, destruction, disease and economic collapse affecting not just the immediate war theatre but many parts of the sub-continent and lasting for years'.

PTI

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