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Islamic societies face a period of intense self-examination and must choose between confronting the United States and the West or adopting politically moderate, "self-emancipating" policies, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview yesterday. Finishing up a Washington visit highlighted by a Camp David meeting Tuesday with President Bush, Gen. Musharraf said he was "fully satisfied" with the state of U.S.-Pakistani relations. But he acknowledged that there was strong anti-Bush and anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan in the wake of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The Islamic world must adopt a strategy of evaluating ourselves, deciding whether we want to follow a militant, confrontationist approach or choose a self-emancipating path away from poverty, away from a lack of production and opportunity," Gen. Musharraf told reporters and editors at a wide-ranging luncheon at The Washington Times.

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June 26, Washington -- Pakistan's President said Thursday he is confident U.S. lawmakers will support President George W. Bush's proposal for $3 billion in military and economic aid for his country. President Pervez Musharraf said he was encouraged by Senate and House members' "understanding and, I would say, gratitude with Pakistan in the fight against terrorism." "So therefore I don't find any reason why the assistance will not go through. I would urge the houses, in fact, to see whether they can increase the assistance," he told reporters after a closed-door meeting with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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New York -- Indian officials have been debating for over a month on whether to send more than 17,000 troops to help American forces stabilize Iraq. The detachment, a full Indian Army division, would be larger than the 14,000 British soldiers now deployed in southern Iraq and would make the Indians the second-biggest military force in the country, The New York Times reported in its Friday editions. The Indians would free a sizable chunk of the 145,000 American soldiers stationed in the northern third of Iraq, allowing them to return home. They would also allow the Bush administration to claim broader international support for the American occupation of the country, the newspaper added.

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June 26, Islamabad -- Pakistan sent its first relief flight packed with medicine and surgical equipment worth US$3.3 million to Iraq, a foreign ministry statement said Thursday. The Pakistan Air Force plane took the supplies Wednesday. A second aircraft will deliver 9,000 tons of rice, said the statement. It did not say when the rice would be shipped. "We could not send relief aid to Iraq earlier because of logistical problems," Foreign Ministry representative Masood Khan said.

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June 26, Shanghai, China -- Visiting China's business hub of Shanghai, India's prime minister Thursday urged information technology industries from the two countries to form partnerships pairing India's software prowess with China's high-tech manufacturing muscle. The call by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee came on the fourth day of a visit to strengthen ties between the giant rivals and dissipate decades of Cold War mistrust. Increasing trade and economic cooperation has been a major theme of the trip, but Vajpayee told a business conference in Shanghai that an "awareness gap" had stymied cooperation between high-tech industries in the two countries.

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June 26, Jammu, India -- Separatist violence claimed at least 10 lives in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir Thursday as India's President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam began a tour of the strife-torn Himalayan region. More than 25,000 security personnel were deployed to protect Kalam during his three-day trip to the Pakistan border, religious sites and camps that house Hindu refugees from a 13-year Islamic insurgency in Jammu-Kashmir state. Despite precautions, three government counterinsurgent troops and two suspected Islamic militants were killed in a gunbattle in the village of Godar, 150 kilometers north of the city of Jammu, police said.

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Srinagar, India -- A government soldier and three suspected rebels were killed in a gunbattle in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Friday, the second day of violence since India's President arrived to the region, a paramilitary officer said. Two soldiers and a civilian woman also were injured in the pre-dawn battle in Ringat, a hill village nearly 45 miles south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, the officer said on condition of anonymity. It was the second day of violence since India's President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam began a three-day tour of the strife-torn region, the first presidential visit to the Indian-held portion of Kashmir in five years.

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June 26, Srinagar, India -- Thousands of tourists have visited Kashmir this summer, encouraged by recent peace overtures by India and Pakistan who have fought two wars over the strife-torn Himalayan region. Nearly 66,000 tourists, including 2,400 foreigners, have visited India's Jammu and Kashmir state so far this year compared to 10,104 during the same period last year, Sheikh Nisar, a senior Kashmiri tourism official, told Reuters. He said the trend indicated that more tourists were likely to visit the violence-torn region this year than in 1999, when a record 217,000 tourists visited the state due to a lull in the bloody revolt against Indian rule, which began in 1989.

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June 26, Islamabad -- The announcement made at Camp David on Wednesday that President Pervez Musharraf had won $3 billion in aid from the United States elicited a mixed reaction today in Pakistan, reflecting both political opposition to the president and a popular view that America should do more. The Islamist parties, which are at loggerheads with General Musharraf over his changes to the Constitution and his continued role as both military chief and president, called the military and economic aid, which is to be spread out over five years, inadequate and even insulting. "Musharraf has provided every support in the so-called war against terrorism, but in return what has he got? I would say nothing for the people of Pakistan," Khursheed Ahmed, vice president of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's main Islamic party, told journalists in Islamabad.

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June 26, Bombay, India -- A senior American banker apologized Thursday after he was accused of racially insulting an Indian man, an incident that sparked a protest here by a nationalist party. Brian Brown, managing director of Citigroup subsidiary Smith Barney, allegedly called the dentist a "bloody Indian" following a minor traffic accident. The phrase is considered particularly insulting in India because it was used during colonial times when Indians were addressed in a derogatory manner by British officials. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party staged a demonstration Thursday outside Citigroup's Bombay office. The words "brown racist" were painted in the bank's lobby.

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June 26, Colombo -- The government said Thursday that it will send a set of proposals to Tamil Tiger rebels in two weeks in hopes of resuming peace talks that stalled in April when the rebels pulled out of the Norwegian-brokered dialogue. "Now we can say there is movement," government representative Gamin Peiris told a news conference. Peiris declined to say what the proposals would contain, but he said he was confident it would form the base for resuming talks. The rebels from the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam originally wanted division of this island into Tamil and Sinhalese nations. During peace talks, they gave up that idea and agreed for autonomy under a federal system for the northeast where most of the country's 3.2 million Tamils live.

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June 26, Colombo -- European cease-fire monitors said Thursday that there was no evidence to indicate that the navy had abducted 12 Tamil Tiger rebels when their ship sank in a clash with the Sri Lankan navy. Deputy head of the Norwegian-led monitoring team Hagrup Haukland said the missing crewmen "could either be dead or could have escaped." The Tigers claimed the navy sank a rebel oil tanker, suspected of smuggling weapons, in international waters on June 14 and abducted its 12 crew members. They asked international cease-fire monitors to investigate the incident and threatened the navy with retaliation.

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The University of Texas at Arlington broke ground Thursday on a residence hall named to honor alumna and space shuttle Columbia astronaut Kalpana Chawla Hall. Dr. Chawla, who received her master’s of science degree in aerospace engineering from the university in 1984, was a flight engineer aboard the shuttle that exploded over Texas in February. She and six other astronauts died. Born in India, she was the first woman from that nation to go into space on a U.S. shuttle. A scholarship in her name has been established at UT-Arlington.

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Jaffna, Sri Lanka -- Thousands of Tamils, made homeless by Sri Lanka's protracted civil war, assembled in this Tamil town Friday to demand that government forces vacate their homes and land. Most shops and offices were closed in the Northern city, as university student groups, backed by Tamil Tiger rebels, asked people to take part in the protest. The Jaffna University Students' Union said it expects more than 200,000 people to participate in the protest, called "Pongu Tamil," or Tamil resurgence festival. "The festival intends to send a powerful message both to the Sri Lankan government and the international community about the plight of people living in the Northeast," the student group said in a statement.

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Katmandu -- Nineteen Tibetan refugees who crossed over to Nepal en route to the Indian home of the Dalai Lama have been arrested for immigration violations, police officials said Friday. The 15 men and 4 women had reached the Nepalese town of Sanfebagar, about 600 kilometers northwest of the capital Katmandu Tuesday when they were apprehended without proper travel documents. The group was taken to district headquarters at Dipayal and will soon be brought to Katmandu to be handed over to U.N. refugee officials, police said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.

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June 26, Islamabad -- As Pakistan consolidates military control for the first time over a rugged area along the border with Afghanistan, leaders of one of the country's main Islamic parties have expressed support for armed resistance by local tribal groups, posing a fresh challenge to the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. In statements over the past few days, leaders of a faction of Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami -- one of the main partners in the coalition of six radical Islamic parties that lead the political opposition in Pakistan's parliament -- have challenged the army's right to operate in Mohmand Agency, one of six autonomous tribal areas on the Afghan border.

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Iraq isn't the only place U.S. and allied soldiers are being killed. The suicide bombing that killed four German peacekeepers in Kabul this month and the continuing offensive by U.S. soldiers against Taliban and al-Qaida members give graphic evidence of the perilous security situation in Afghanistan. That's especially true in the eastern part of the country along the border with Pakistan. Western Pakistan stayed hospitable to Taliban members long after the fall of the government that provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. For decades, governments ruling the rest of Pakistan mostly steered clear of the border region, letting tribes rule themselves. That hands-off policy ended after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York.

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