Powell to take up Indo-Pak issue after Iraq

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said he hopes to take up the Indo-Pak issue once the Iraq crisis is over.

In an interview to New York Times, he said the "Indo-Pakistan and the whole subcontinent problem" was part of the "broader agenda" that the US plans to go back to after Iraq.

"(We want to) make sure we don't find ourselves in the same situation we were in a year ago. When everybody was predicting war, we managed to solve that. People forget. If we had had a nuclear war, they wouldn't have forgotten it, but we didn't have one so they forgot it.

"A hell of a lot of work" went into preventing an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war," Powell said.

"We have to reach out. We have to spend more time," he said adding that once the Iraq crisis is resolved, "it frees us to engage in ways that we have not been able to, say, in the last six to eight months."

Powell said the "broader agenda we (US) will go back to" also included "work to cement the expansion of NATO even though we are not in the European Union."