Musharraf tells US that Pakistan won't start war

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told a senior US envoy yesterday that he would not start a war with India, as diplomacy appeared to be making headway in averting a conflagration between the nuclear-armed foes.

"President Musharraf has made it very clear that he is searching for peace and he won't be the one to initiate a war," US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in the Pakistani capital.

"I will be hopefully getting the same type of assurances tomorrow in Delhi."

Armitage was in Islamabad on a mission to try to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir that have sparked fears of a fourth war between the nuclear armed rivals.

Two of their three wars have been fought over Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Armitage, who visits the Indian capital today, said Musharraf's comments were "a very good basis on which to proceed".

India and Pakistan have massed a million soldiers along their tense frontier and have traded artillery and gunfire daily for the past three weeks in skirmishes that have killed scores of people and wounded hundreds.

Armitage, a 57-year-old former special-forces veteran with a reputation for frank talk, arrived in Pakistan a day after India said there was room for "many proposals" to help end the stand-off.

India dismissed yesterday a British newspaper report US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would propose a joint Anglo-American military monitoring force for Kashmir when he visits the region next week.

"It is absolutely unnecessary to have third-party monitoring," Foreign Ministry spokesman Nirupama Rao told Reuters, calling the story "speculative".

She said an Indian proposal for joint patrolling by India and Pakistan - one rejected by Islamabad as unworkable - "was a very serious initiative".

Armitage told reporters his talks with Musharraf also touched on how to monitor incursions by Muslim guerillas that have stoked a 12-year rebellion in Hindu-dominated India's only Muslim-majority state.

"We're discussing all sorts of monitoring mechanisms, without any prejudices one way or another," Armitage said.

Indian and Pakistani troops again traded heavy artillery and machinegun fire yesterday across their Kashmiri frontier, as frontline villages in Pakistan practised civil defence drills and thousands of foreign residents left the two countries.

Pakistani officials said six Pakistanis were killed and several injured. The dead included two girls killed in Rawalakot district in the south of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and a woman in nearby Kotli district.

Indian mortar fire also killed three boys at a village near Nakial town in Kotli district, the officials said.

But India said the intensity of firing along the Line of Control and the international border in disputed Kashmir had fallen significantly since Wednesday.

India also reported its security forces shot dead the chief of a pro-Pakistan rebel group in Kashmir.

Rafiq Lone, head of the Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami rebel group, fighting for Indian Kashmir's merger with Pakistan, was killed in an overnight gunbattle, police said in a statement.

Armitage is trying to set the stage for talks between two old foes who have refused so far to meet each other halfway.

Vajpayee declined to meet Musharraf at a regional security meeting in Kazakhstan this week, saying he would only do so once India saw a conclusive end to infiltration.

Fears that millions could be killed in the first atomic war between nuclear-armed states have prompted world leaders to step up diplomatic pressure to pull them back from the brink.

Rumsfeld is scheduled to follow Armitage to Pakistan and India next week. President George W. Bush phoned Musharraf and Vajpayee on Wednesday asking them to take steps to reduce the risk of war.

India's junior foreign minister, Omar Abdullah, told CNN yesterday that India was seeking to work with Pakistan and world powers to avert a war.

"We're trying to work with both Pakistan and the international community to ensure that we don't have to exercise any sort of option of the use of force," he said.

"We're trying to work with the international community and with people back home to try to convince them that the path India has chosen right now is the best course of action available to us."

Although both countries have downplayed the possibility that a new war could turn nuclear, India has an estimated 100 to 150 nuclear warheads and Pakistan 25 to 50.

In Spain, a senior Pakistani envoy conceded there was a risk that a war could go nuclear but said Islamabad considered such an option "unthinkable".

"The option is there, but it's quite unthinkable and Pakistan has never factored this capability in as an option to rely on. Pakistan relies on its conventional force capability," retired General Jehangir Karamat, touring European capitals to put across Pakistan's position, told Reuters Television.