NEW YORK, Jan 8: Many in Pakistan believe that a war with India could touch off an upheaval in which President Pervez Musharraf would be replaced by a more hardline military ruler and the promised October elections would fall away, said the New York Times.

In an analysis on the confrontation between India and Pakistan, the Times correspondent John Burns observes: “whether General Musharraf can satisfy India and avert a war between the nuclear-armed neighbours is not clear. He cannot be seen to abandon the Muslims of Kashmir, which Pakistanis believe should have been incorporated into their country when the British Raj split violently in 1947 into Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu, if officially secular, India.”

“He now intends to outline his programme in a speech to his nation. The address is seen as the second in three months in which the 58-year-old general faces an uncomfortable choice.”

In a bid to highlight the precarious situation confronting President Musharraf, the Times reveals that “...Gen. Pervez Musharraf became so concerned last week that tensions over Kashmir would spill into war with India that he telephoned the American ambassador in Islamabad, Wendy J. Chamberlain, to ask where Washington intended to draw the line in supporting India.”

“What General Musharraf wanted to know was how Washington could guarantee that India wouldn’t wait for some new incident to occur, then claim that it was backed by Pakistan and use it as a pretext to go to war,” an aide to the general told the Times.

“The general’s reasoning was: ‘What if some outraged Kashmiri takes a Kalashnikov and shoots an Indian politician or puts a bomb in a parking lot? Is Pakistan going to be held accountable every time anybody picks up a weapon? Is Washington saying that all freedom struggles, everywhere, can be suppressed under the guise of the war on terrorism?’”

The questions illustrated the narrow, hazardous course that the general must steer to make Pakistan what he calls “a dignified and responsible nation” in which extremism and bloodshed will cede to caution, tolerance and good- neighbourliness, especially with India, the paper said.

Now, the general again courts danger, or even political suicide. Supporting Kashmiri Muslims fighting Indian rule is a national cause in Pakistan, not a sectarian one like the fate of the Taliban, the paper noted

The Times said, “Yet General Musharraf can also not appear to be bowing to India’s will, particularly when many influential Pakistanis believe that evidence for the involvement of Kashmiri militants supported by Pakistan in the Dec 13 attack on the Indian Parliament is thin.”

“There is no question that we do have a problem with extremism in this country, and we cannot deny that there is a monster in our midst that has arisen in the past decades,” Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar told the paper in an interview.

“But India’s threats in the past three weeks have very greatly reduced our room for action, because our people will say: ‘These people are doing India’s dirty business. They are Pakistanis, so why don’t they stand up for Pakistan?’”