The State Department has stoutly defended the US policy of selling sophisticated military weaponry to Pakistan while at the same time building closer relations with India.

State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli, questioned about the dichotomy high-level Indian officials have expressed to the Bush administration, implied that arms sales to Pakistan were a commercial venture and it was not Washington's concern that they may be used against India.

"There is no contradiction between having strong, good relations with India and meeting the defence needs of other countries through the sale of US arms. Our arms sales policy, I think, is clear, governed by US interests and congressional legislation, it's transparent, it's publicly notified, and we've done that in the case of the recent transactions in question," asserted Ereli.

"So there should, I think, there should be no question that you can have good relations with one country and sell arms to another country. It's not a mutually exclusive proposition, and nor should it be."

But when asked if, by the same token, Washington would have any objection if India bought arms from other countries such as France or Russia, Ereli seemed to back up a bit.

"Again, I mean, as a general proposition, our view is countries are free to buy arms from whatever their source. The question is what -- you know, what is the purpose of those acquisitions? What does that represent for the strategic balance in the region? And that's how we evaluate these sort of things," Ereli qualified.
 
Ereli also dismissed any thought that US-India relations had suffered following the Bush administration's recent announcement that it planned to sell more than one billion dollars of sophisticated weapons to Pakistan, and Congress passing the $300 million military aid package to Islamabad.

"We did not intend to suggest that somehow relations were not good and went from a position of being less than excellent to something better than that," he said about a press release that outlined the basics of a meeting between the State Department's top South Asia official Christina Rocca and India's Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran.

"Our relations -- I think what the statement was trying to underscore is that we have a very strong bilateral relationship with India, that our level of cooperation in a variety of fields is intensive and mutually beneficial, and that the meeting in question contributed to that overall -- that overall condition," Ereli said.

--Indo-Asian News Service