INDIA: India began pulling back 300,000 of its 700,000 soldiers from the border with Pakistan yesterday. This greatly reduces tension with its nuclear rival, nearly 10 months after the two countries came perilously close to war.
"We expect to receive the formal order today. We will start redeploying as soon as the orders are received," Brig Shruti Kant said of plans to end the largest peacetime deployment in independent India's 55-year history. Officers said it would take four to six weeks for the partial withdrawal and several months to clear landmines from thousands of farms along the Pakistani frontier.
Pakistan reciprocated by saying it would withdraw its forces to their "peacetime locations shortly". A Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement described the Indian move as a "step in the right direction". Pakistan had mobilised 300,000 troops along its border.
But India will not withdraw about 350,000 soldiers from the 480-mile line of control that divides disputed Jammu and Kashmir state.
After a meeting of the cabinet committee on security in New Delhi, the Defence Minister, Mr George Fernandes, said: "The committee has decided that as the armed forces have, with great distinction, achieved the objectives assigned to them they will now be asked to redeploy from positions on the international border with Pakistan, without impairing their capacity to respond decisively to any emergency."
There would be no lowering of vigilance in Kashmir.
Officials said the pull-back would include the two strike corps that form the Indian army's "sword arm" deployed across the three neighbouring states of Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
More than one million soldiers, backed by missiles, tanks and long-range artillery, have been locked in a stand-off along the 2,000-mile Indian-Pakistani border since a suicide attack by five gunmen on the parliament in Delhi last December.
Tensions spiralled again in May after a similar suicide attack by insurgents on a garrison in Jammu in which soldiers' families were killed. But the United States and other Western governments, fearing that a conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange, dissuaded India from attacking Pakistan. It assured India that Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir, that has claimed over 35,000 lives, would end.
In June India, again under US pressure, withdrew its naval task force poised to strike at Pakistan from forward locations in the Arabian Sea, and lifted a ban on Pakistani aircraft flying over its territory. This latter move has not been reciprocated by Islamabad, but official sources in Delhi indicated that over the next few weeks rail and road links would be restored and the respective high commissioners reinstalled in Delhi and Islamabad.
Mr Fernandes, however, ruled out any dialogue while Islamabad continued fuelling the 13-year old insurgency in Kashmir for an independent Muslim homeland.
But the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, will travel to Pakistan for the next seven-nation South Asian Association of Regional Co-operation (SAARC) summit in January, a junior minister said yesterday. "He is going there for the SAARC summit, not for the bilateral process. Heads of state of all SAARC countries will be there."
Besides India and Pakistan, SAARC includes Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bhutan and Nepal. The association's annual summit meetings have frequently been scuttled by bickering between India and Pakistan. Mr Vajpayee's attendance of the SAARC summit in Islamabad was another "indication that India wants peace in the region".