The Hindu : Enough evidence was given to Musharraf: U.S.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 12, 2004

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Enough evidence was given to Musharraf: U.S.

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, FEB. 11. Joining issue with the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, who argued that it was only last October that the United States had passed on convincing material on nuclear proliferation activities, the United States State Department has said that relevant information had been given to Islamabad over a period of time and that the whole thing could not be brought down to a "single moment" of information.

In an interview with The New York Times, Gen. Musharraf said that it was not until October 2003 that the Bush administration officials gave evidence on the ongoing activities, including those of Dr. A.Q. Khan, and that if the relevant information had been passed on by Washington earlier "a lot of things would not have happened."

The State Department spokesman was asked to comment on Gen. Musharraf especially as it pertained to the timeline of sharing or passing information to Pakistan on the suspected nuclear goings-on.

"...We have had longstanding concerns about proliferation that could come from Pakistan. We've discussed non-proliferation issues with Pakistan repeatedly over a long period of time and it's been an issue of concern to us and to President Musharraf as well," the spokesman, Richard Boucher, said.

"We have talked to them about the potential for onward proliferation from Pakistan. We have talked to them at different moments about different issues that might have arisen that we might have learned about. So it's not a single moment of information. It's an ongoing dialogue that covered both the general concerns that we had about possibilities, and then from time to time, pieces of information that related to different aspects of things that we might have encountered or known were going on," Mr. Boucher said stressing that the non-proliferation dialogue with Pakistan went much beyond last October, or the time of the visit of the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage.

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