'Partnership between India and Pakistan to bring stability'

"It serves both the interest of India and the interest of Pakistan and that of the US and the world to develop the kind of relationship that allows for greater trust, that allows for potential partnership between India and Pakistan, because that would bring stability to the region and both peoples would prosper," said Mike Hammer spokesperson National Security Council, White House.

"What we have done is to encourage both countries to engage in dialogue between them. We have seen some efforts of it," Hammer told PTI in an interview referring to the series of talks between India and Pakistan at various levels in the last two years.

Spokesperson of the National Security Council for the first two years of the Obama Administration, Hammer now moves to the State Department from next week.
He had travelled to India with the US President Barack Obama in November last year.

"This (talks) needs to, one would have hoped would continue again because it is an area of the world that can have great impact on the rest of the world and we want to promote peace and stability," he said. "The best way has been to encourage both of our friends India and Pakistan to try to bridge this historical challenges and the problems that they had difficulty in overcoming in the past to do that," he observed.

"We realize that this takes courage on both sides, but we want to be supportive in any way that we can if the parties decide that the United States can be helpful," he said.
Noting that there has been a strong focus of this administration on Pakistan from its very outset, he, however, asserted that this has not been at the expense of any other country, including India.

"We have seen strategic dialogue initiated here across various government agencies with our Pakistani partners. What we will see in 2011 will be continuation of that. But I want to make sure that it is understood that because we are doing this, is not at the expense of other relationship or partnership in South Asia or the world," he said.

One of the great qualities of the United States is that it has the capacity to have very intense focus in engagement with a number of countries around the world. "We have a number of staff here at the National Security Council, but also across the United States Government that work on these issues every day," he said.

"So seemingly, some partnership or relationship would appear to have getting more attention on any given month or week, you have these other relationships that continue to move forward," he said. Referring to the federal notification of the Department of Commerce removing several Indian companies from entities list, he said this was follow up to the export control agreements that were reached between Prime Minister Singh and President Obama.

"So while we are engaged in issues related to Pakistan, we are following up on the commitments that the President made with prime Minister Singh in India," he said.