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Americans urged to leave India
Compiled from Times wires WASHINGTON -- In an ominous reflection of fears over war in South Asia, the United States on Friday urged more than 60,000 Americans to leave India immediately and authorized the departure of nonemergency U.S. personnel as soon as possible. The voluntary evacuation, the first urged for Americans in India, came as a classified Pentagon report estimated that up to 12-million people would die and another 6-million would be injured in the first weeks of a war involving nuclear weapons on the volatile subcontinent. A war would be "somewhere between terrible and catastrophic," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted Friday at an Asian defense conference in Singapore. The State Department warning also urged any Americans considering travel to India to defer their plans. Those who decide to leave will use commercial flights, which are plentiful. "Conditions along India's border with Pakistan and in the (Indian) state of Jammu and Kashmir have deteriorated. Tensions have risen to serious levels, and the risk of intensified military hostilities between India and Pakistan cannot be ruled out," the warning said. The warning called on Americans to avoid all border areas between India and Pakistan, including the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab and the disputed Kashmir region, because of military movements, heavy artillery fire and the presence of terrorists. "Terrorist groups, some of which are linked to al-Qaida and have previously been implicated in attacks on Americans, are active there as well, and have attacked and killed civilians," the warning said. In Pakistan, all nonessential U.S. Embassy staff and dependents were ordered home March 22, five days after an Islamabad church was bombed, killing four people including two Americans. Private U.S. citizens, numbering up to 10,000, were told of the ordered departure to encourage them to leave. Two of the three previous wars between India and Pakistan have been fought over Kashmir, a mainly Muslim area divided between the two nations by the Line of Control after a 1971 conflict. Rebels in the section controlled by India have been fighting for an independent state or union with mostly Muslim Pakistan. The U.S. warning Friday was coordinated with Britain, Canada and Australia, which also advised their citizens and nonessential diplomats to leave India. "The situation is dangerous," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, warning his nation's citizens to avoid travel to India and Pakistan. "War is not inevitable but it is important that we should exercise our duty of care as carefully as we can," he said Friday after returning from talks in South Asia. About 20,000 Britons are estimated to be living in India and some 700 in Pakistan. The warnings came amid growing international pressure on both India and Pakistan to not allow border tensions -- including the relentless daily shelling on both sides and terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists on Indian targets -- to escalate into war. Major powers from three continents and the United Nations appealed to the South Asian rivals to use restraint. "We're putting a 100 percent full-court press on this," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday in an interview with the BBC. "We're going to work with friends around the world, all the leaders of the world, to do everything we can to keep this situation from turning into a conflict." A strongly worded statement issued Friday by the Group of Eight nations called on Pakistan to take "concrete actions -- in accordance with its commitments" to prevent Muslim extremists operating in territory under its control from infiltrating into the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir and attacking Indian targets. "We call on India and Pakistan to continue to work with the international community to ensure that there will be a diplomatic solution to the current crisis," said the statement from the group, which includes the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain and France. The State Department said Friday that the United States had indications that Pakistani authorities had given instructions to stop the cross-border infiltration by radical Muslim groups, though it was not clear to whom the instructions were given. Powell noted that the impact and consequences of those directions are still unclear. "It's too early to say that it has stopped. And when and if it does stop, it must also stop permanently," he said, adding that the United States expects Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf "to use all of the authority he has to stop it and to keep it stopped so we can get this crisis behind us." With world intervention growing, India sought Friday to calm fears. "There isn't any change on the ground. The situation is stable," said Defense Minister George Fernandes in Singapore, where he was also attending the Asian defense conference. "The troops have been on both sides in an eyeball-to-eyeball situation for the last six months, so I don't think one needs worry just now as to what is likely to happen." Yet Pakistan continued to move many of its 6,000 troops deployed along the border with Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. Whether they will be dispatched to the border with India will depend "on how the threat continues to increase from India," said Pakistani spokesman Rashid Qureshi. Pakistan so far has not turned over about 20 militants India has demanded as a condition to de-escalate hostilities. India charged Friday that a large number of al-Qaida extremists who had evaded U.S. and Pakistani troops had sneaked out of Afghanistan and into Kashmir recently. -- Information from the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press was used in this report.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
