WikiLeaks: 'Indian PM doesn't understand my constraints', Zardari tells US

New Delhi: In June 2009, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Russia on the sidelines of a six-nation summit. Their first meeting after 26/11. A few days later, Zardari told the then US National Security Advisor General James Jones that Singh was "an excellent economist but he's not convinced the Indian PM understood his constraints."    

The then US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson noted Zardari had "hinted"  at "helping Singh to understand them (Zardari's constraints) was of importance." She wrote this in a cable to Washington, accessed by WikiLeaks and available exclusively to NDTV.

Patterson said NSA Jones reminded Zardari to ensure that there was no repeat of a Mumbai-style attack. National Security Council Senior Director Don Camp said the Indian perspective was to ask what it had done to quash terrorist organisations. 

Patterson noted in her cable to Washington that "Zardari reiterated that Singh was unaware of what it took to 'change the mind-set of Pakistan's establishment,' given  Pakistan's short history of fragile democratic regimes toppled by the military."

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India had suspended composite dialogue with Pakistan after the November 2008 Mumbai attacks and terrorism had topped the agenda of the Zardari-Singh meeting in Russia. The Anne Patterson cable quoted Zardari as telling the visiting US officials that in his meeting with Singh, "he had  underscored that 'there could not be a better political moment' to improve relations across the board. 

"India," the cable quotes Zardari as saying, "was a mature democracy and an ancient nation."

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(As part of a special arrangement that NDTV has come to with WikiLeaks, we will be reporting on cables dispatched by American diplomats who were posted in Pakistan. We shall do this along with the DAWN of Pakistan and the Indian daily The Hindu. All the cables will be posted on NDTV.com as we report on them and can be read here at 6:30 am IST/1:00 UTC.)