By IANS,
Washington: Pakistan has moved more troops to its border with Afghanistan than it has to its border with India since the Nov 26 Mumbai terror attacks, according to a top US official.
But the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, declined to say how many troops Pakistan has moved from the border with India even as he refuted a suggestion that Pakistani troops there are back to the pre-Mumbai attack levels.
“I’m not going to give you figures for the simplest of reasons: It’s for the Pakistan government to announce their own force deployments, not for me to make a headline here,” he told reporters Wednesday.
“But I will say that the number of troops that have been moved west is clearly larger than the number that were moved east after the Mumbai bombing,” he said. “And I don’t believe there’d be any question on that.”
US would like to see a reduction in tensions between India and Pakistan in part in the hopes that Islamabad can redeploy troops from its eastern border with India to fight the Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan.