Holbrooke on India visit from Tuesday

Against the backdrop of President Barack Obama unveiling a new strategy on Afghanistan-Pakistan, US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke will undertake a visit to India from Tuesday to discuss how India could help in efforts to end terror threat emanating from there.

Holbrooke, Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, will meet Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and National Security Adviser M K Narayanan. He is coming here after visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The two sides are expected to discuss ways in which India could cooperate in US efforts to "defeat" terrorism originating from Pakistan and Afghanistan, the sources said.

India has maintained that the "epicentre" of global terrorism is in Pakistan and unless it is targeted, the threat to the world will not end.

India underlines that the international community needs to take collective and assertive action to target terror infrastructure in Pakistan as Islamabad lacks capability or will to do so.

The visit will take place in the backdrop of a new Afghan-Pakistan strategy unveiled by Obama last month in which he observed that the threat to the world is emanating from these two countries and vowed to "disrupt" and "defeat" the extremist groups responsible for the dangers.

While unveiling the new policy, Obama talked about involvement of India besides other countries of the region, saying they do not benefit from the "base for Al-Qaida terrorists and a region that descends into chaos" and have a "stake in the promise of lasting peace and security and development."

Obama said the US would work to create new diplomatic mechanisms, including establishing a 'Contact Group' and a regional security and economic cooperation forum.

During his first visit here after his appointment as the Special Envoy in February, Holbrooke had noted that terrorism emanating from Pakistan is a "common threat" to the US, India and Pakistan.

He has maintained that the crisis in Afghanistan cannot be resolved without addressing the problem of militancy in Pakistan's restive tribal region.

The "heart of the threat" to the US and many other countries in the world including India lies at western Pakistan, he observed last month.

He said the starting point for the Barack Obama administration's approach to the region is to treat it as an integrated whole, a single theatre of war, with very different rules on each side of the border.