India has used the armed attack in Indian Occupied Kashmir as a pretext to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan for domestic political purposes, Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has said, as he called for an international inquiry into the incident. India, he told The New York Times, was taking steps to punish Pakistan \u201cwithout any proof, without any investigation.\u201d Twentysix people were killed and several others injured in a gun attack on a group of tourists near Pahalgam, a town in the southern part of the disputed territory. In the interview with the Times on Friday, Asif said that Pakistan was \u201cready to cooperate\u201d with \u201cany investigation which is conducted by international inspectors. Times correspondent Julian Barnes, who interviewed the defence minister, wrote that his remarks \u201cappeared to be aimed at defusing tensions with India\u201d. \u201cWe do not want this war to flare up, because flaring up of this war can cause disaster for this region,\u201d the defence minister said. Noting Indian officials assertion that the group that claimed responsibility for the attack is a proxy for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group behind the Mumbai attacks in 2008. The defence minister disputed that allegation, saying Lashkar-e-Taiba was \u201cdefunct\u201d and had no ability to plan or conduct attacks from the Pakistani side. \u201cThey are finished; they don\u2019t have any setup in Pakistan,\u201d he said. \u201cThose people, whatever is left of them, they are contained. Some of them are under house arrest, some of them are in custody. They are not at all active.\u201d Asif suggested that the attack might have been carried out by local separatist groups in occupied Kashmir pushing for more local control. He added that Pakistan does not support separatist groups in India. Asif also suggested that the attack could have been a \u201cfalse flag\u201d carried out by the Indian government to provoke a crisis. Pakistan, he said, had nothing to gain from a terror attack on civilians. The Indian government, he added, was using it to marshal support and to get out of the water treaty. The World Bank negotiated the Indus Waters Treaty, which India and Pakistan signed in 1960. By suspending the treaty, India could at some point restrict the flow of rivers into Pakistan, cutting off the country\u2019s source of water for irrigation and human consumption, it was pointed out. Asif, who previously served as Pakistan\u2019s minister in charge of water supplies, said that for the last decade, India had been trying to get out of the treaty, which has been a source of stability in the region. \u201cThey were creating excuses. They were creating problems that were not there,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have now found an excuse to get out of this arrangement.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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