The Hindu : National : 'U.S. warned Nawaz Sharif of holding up loan'

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Wednesday, Sep 22, 2004

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'U.S. warned Nawaz Sharif of holding up loan'

By Amit Baruah

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 21 . The United States told the then Pakistan Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, that if his forces did not pull back from Kargil, Washington would hold up a U.S. $100 million loan that Islamabad "sorely needed" to tide over a gnawing economic crisis.

Strobe Talbott, who was U.S. Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, reveals in his new book "Engaging India" that in late June 1999, the U.S. President, Bill Clinton, telephoned Mr. Sharif to "stress that the United States saw Pakistan as the aggressor [in Kargil] and to reject the fiction that the fighters were separatist guerrillas." "We did not know whether Sharif had personally ordered the infiltration above Kargil [doubtful], reluctantly acquiesced in it [more likely], or not even know about it until after it happened [possible].

`Colossal blunder'

"But there was no question that he now realised it had been a colossal blunder. Pakistan was almost universally seen to have precipitated the crisis, ruining the promising peace process that had begun in Lahore and inviting an Indian counter-offensive," Mr. Talbott, currently on a visit to India, said.

He said that on July 2, 1999, Mr. Sharif telephoned Mr. Clinton and pleaded for his personal intervention in South Asia. "Clinton replied that he would consider it only if it was understood up-front that Pakistani withdrawal would have to be immediate and unconditional. He then telephoned [then Prime Minister Atal Bihari] Vajpayee to report on Sharif's request and his own reply. For someone we thought of as a man of few words, Vajpayee was voluble in his anxiety that Sharif would deceive or co-opt Clinton."

N-deployment

Mr. Talbott said on the eve of Mr. Sharif's arrival in Washington on July 3, 1999, the U.S. learned that Pakistan "might be preparing" its nuclear forces for deployment. "There was, among those of us preparing for the [Clinton-Sharif] meeting, a sense of vast and nearly unprecedented peril."

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