WASHINGTON, June 13: The United States should offer Pakistan a nuclear deal to make Islamabad accept the obligations that come with being a state with atomic weapons, a US Senate panel was told.

Stephen Cohen, an expert of South Asian affairs at Washing-ton’s Brookings Institution, said the nuclear deal the United States had offered to India should have been based on criteria instead of being country-specific.

“A similar deal could have been offered to states like Pakistan and Israel,” he told a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee, “countries that have not signed the non-proliferation treaty but have nuclear weapons.”

Soon after the United States announced its intention to offer a nuclear deal to India in July 2005, Pakistan urged Washington not to make it India-specific and allow other countries to benefit from this arrangement as well.

But the Bush administration made it obvious that it was making only a one-time exception for India and had no intention of offering a similar deal to Pakistan.

Mr Cohen, however, said that the United States could offer a similar deal to Pakistan, patterning it on the EU offer to Turkey which requires Turkey to meet certain criteria for joining the European community.

“In the case of Pakistan you can establish criteria, such as a safe and secure nuclear programme, commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and arms control,” he said. “These are same as the NPT obligations.”

If Pakistan accepts these obligations, “it would be certainly eligible” for a nuclear deal with the United States.

Mr Cohen noted that China was already helping Pakistan with its nuclear programme but such assistance did not “quite legitimise” the Pakistani programme.

As part of the process of legitimisation, Pakistan will have to accept the obligations of the NPT signatories and will have to share all of its knowledge about past proliferation activities.

Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at Washington’s Heritage Foundation, recalled that when the US cut off assistance to Pakistan in the early 1990s, there was debate within the Pakistani security establishment over how to protect Pakistani security interests without backing from the US.

“Subsequently Pakistan began engaging in risky activities such as proliferating nuclear technology and know-how to North Korea in exchange for missiles it deemed necessary to meet the threat from India,” she said while urging Washington to stay engaged with Islamabad.

Michael Krepon, a co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Centre, told the committee that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were the nation’s most closely guarded man-made objects, its ‘crown jewels.’ “I do not place much credence in scenarios that project a takeover of the Pakistani government or army leadership by extremists.”

He noted that there was “very great suspicion” in Pakistan about US intentions.