Islamabad, June 01: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is expected to make a last ditch effort to defer the sale of Phalcon radar systems to India when he meets US President George W Bush in Washington later this month. The US last month cleared the one billion dollar deal, giving the green signal to Israel to sell Phalcon planes to India. A US delegation was scheduled to go to Israel to have "technical" discussions on the deal.
The sale of Israeli phalcons would be part of the agenda when Musharraf meets Bush at Camp David on June 24, Pakistan foreign secretary Riaz Husain Khokhar, who is currently on tour of US told the Pakistan media in New York on Friday.
Musharraf would prevail upon Bush to defer the sale of Awacs radars to India on the ground that it would heavily tilt the military balance in favour of India on the conventional front, Khokhar said.
Khokhar, who was scheduled to go to Washington next week to meet US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as well as US national security officials at the white house, held talks with top UN officials in New York, specially on the new peace process between India and Pakistan.
He briefed UN deputy secretary-general Louise Frechette on situation in south Asia and said the initiatives taken by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart Mir Zafarullah Jamali had led to an improvement in the atmosphere in the region. Bureau Report