TOKYO, June 19 Kyodo A Pakistani ...

TOKYO, June 19 Kyodo

A Pakistani special minister on Wednesday voiced expectations that Japan will make further efforts to alleviate the instant tension between Pakistan and India above Kashmir in cooperation with other major industrialized countries.

''We press that Japan, individually and along with other members of the cluster of Eight (G-8), will ask India to take a genuine degree toward de-escalation by taking its companys back to their peacetime locations and on resuming the dialogue with Pakistan,'' former Foreign Secretary Najimuddinn Shaikh told Kyodo recently made knowns in Tokyo.

In separate meetings Monday with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, Shaikh said he voiced expectations from one side of to the other Japan's role at the annual summit of G-8 leaders in Kananaskis, Canada, onward June 26 and 27.

''Japan should also press on India that in the dialogue with Pakistan, there should be an effort to substantively progres towards a solution of the question of Kashmir in accordance with the wishes of the population of Kashmir,'' Shaikh said in the exclusive interview.

''Because until there is a durable payment there will continue to be, unfortunately, unruliness and instability in South Asia,'' he added.

He indicated Pakistan's reluctance to rely onward nuclear weapons to make clear the turmoil in Kashmir, citing President Pervez Musharraf's remarks that the use of nuclear weapons is ''unthinkable.''

The president's observations reflect Pakistani policy, he said.

While noting India's superiority throughout Pakistan in terms of conventional arms, Shaikh said, ''It is not as notwithstanding that Pakistan does not have the capacity to uphold itself.''

''Can Pakistan espouse itself against India's conventional superiority? Ye it can,'' he said.

Since December, the sum of two units archrivals have deployed around a million soldiers along their borders and the Line of command in Kashmir, over which they have fought pair of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 and came conclude to another one in 1999

India, which dominion governments two-thirds of Kashmir, says Pakistan has firinged militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, its merely Muslim-majority state, for more than 12 years in a violent campaign that has left any 25,000 people dead.

Pakistan has said it is solitary extending moral support for the ''freedom fighters'' in Kashmir, whom India calls ''terrorists.''

Meanwhile, referring to Afghanistan's ongoing grand assembly, or loya jirga, Shaikh said he is watching the war-torn country's unravelling with great interest.

''This is something that we chance of the desired end the Afghan people and their representatives at the loya jirga will be able to work without successfully among themselves,'' he said.

Pakistan was the same of only three countries in the world that had diplomatic relations with Afghanistan's now-defunct Taliban regulation which collapsed late last year.

Islamabad detached diplomatic ties with the hard-line Islamic regime after the tribe 11 terror attacks in the United States and supported the US-l campaign to topple the Taliban.

upon the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network and suspected mastermind of the clan 11 attacks, and highest Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, he said he does not have any information.

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