ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In an attempt to defuse already tense relations between Pakistan and India, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Sunday dismissed an alleged incursion by two Indian fighter jets into Pakistani airspace as a technical error.
He talked to reporters at a news conference alongside British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who visited Pakistan and India to try to help calm tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations.
In a sign of how worried the West is about terrorism spreading from al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan to the rest of the world, Brown also pledged more money and help for the country to fight militancy.
The warplane incursions, which India has denied, allegedly occurred Saturday over the eastern city of Lahore and the Himalayan region of Kashmir. Pakistani jets chased the Indian planes back, officials said.
To many Pakistanis, that was no coincidence. Lahore is near the base of Jamaat- ud-Dawa, the front group for banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India blames for plotting the attacks last month in Mumbai that killed 171 people. Kashmir is where that group has had training camps and sent fighters to India’s part of the disputed territory, a region Pakistan thinks should be its territory.
On Sunday, Zardari said the planes were flying at about 40,000 feet and barely entered Pakistani territory.
“When they turned, the turn slightly entered our Pakistan soil,” Zardari said. “Such incursions do happen.”
The reported incursions have added meaning, given that the U.S. has justified sending drones to strike militants in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. If the U.S. can justify those attacks, analysts said, India could use similar reasoning to launch cross-border strikes into Pakistan.
On Sunday, Brown also announced a counterterrorism project that aims to improve Pakistan’s bomb-disposal ability, bomb-detection capability and airport security. He also said that Britain would give Pakistan almost $9 million to combat the causes of radical Islam.
But he also suggested that help was conditional on whether Islamabad authorities fully cooperated in the Mumbai investigation.
