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'US averted Indo-Pak war in 1999'

The United States helped avert nuclear powers India and Pakistan from what might have been a possible catastrophic war in 1999, President Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor Samuel Berger has said.

The US "helped pull nuclear-armed India and Pakistan from the brink of what might have been a catastrophic war in 1999," Berger told Georgetown University students in Washington Friday in a major foreign policy address.

Stating that local conflicts could have global consequences, he said, the US worked for peace in the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and India and Pakistan because "we believe that the challenge of foreign policy in any age is to defuse conflicts before, not after, they escalate and harm our vital interests."

The US has also worked for peace "for reasons unique to our global age," said Berger, because regions mired in conflict are increasingly likely to become breeding grounds for extremism and terror, especially in regions on fault lines of ethnicity and faith, like the Middle East and Balkans.

Without identifying the countries which train or harbour terrorists, Berger said that one of the questions before US foreign policy-makers is how to deal with both super-national and sub-national threats to American security. "One super-national threat," he said, "is the international network of terror groups active from south and central Asia to southern Russia to the Middle East and Africa."

Coordination among these groups, said Berger, makes them a particularly pernicious threat. But because they are loosely connected, the threat cannot be extinguished with one stroke.

The solution is to reduce the economic disparities on which they breed; to resolve the Middle East conflict on which they feed; and to strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation even further, without assaulting civil liberties in the process.

The sub-national threat, he said, is the challenge to the nation state from the potential disintegration of ethnically diverse societies, whether Nigeria or Indonesia today, or Russia and China tomorrow.

"How do we balance legitimate demands for self-determination against the danger of unleashing a spasm of map redrawing that creates new grievances? In part, the solution must be found in regional integration among ethnically diverse countries, so boundaries are less onerous and, therefore, less of a source of contention--as happened in western Europe after World War II, and as we are doing, with some initial success, in the Balkans In the short run, we need better international tools for maintaining peace in divided societies."

On Middle East peace Berger said both Israel and Palestine must rigorously implement the immediate steps they pledged at the summit to end the violence.

"I do not believe a viable Palestinian state can be created out of the barrel of a gun. And I do not believe that Israel can gain real security at an acceptable cost without a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. I hope that happens sooner rather than later, for as time goes on, the parties must come back to confront the same set of issues, the same geography, the same demographics," he said.

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