The high-profile visit to the region takes place only a week after Washington confirmed that Pakistan conducted a ballistic missile test on Monday. The US team arrives here on April 14 from Bangladesh and will go on to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

The agenda of the visit, US officials insist, is to ``get to know the new Government.'' The delegation will meet Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Home Minister L K Advani and Defence Minister George Fernandes, besides meetings with the Foreign Office. Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha is already in Washington to attend the World Bank-IMF annual jamboree.

A senior official of the US State Department briefing journalists in Washington said the US wanted India and Pakistan to ``move forward on all areas of contention. The dialogue includes, asone part of the eight-part agenda, Kashmir. It (Kashmir) is on the agenda''.

The mere fact of Richardson, the US ambassador to the UN, leading this team, US officials accept, is proof that Security Council reform would be high on the agenda of the talks. Islamabad's firing of an intermediate ballistic missile named `Ghauri' on Monday will definitely come up in the discussions, especially since Pakistan went ahead with the test despite pressure from Washington to maintain a missile-free South Asia. But the Washington official said Clinton, who is likely to make a trip to South Asia in either early September or mid-November, had made it clear that his administration wanted to help India and Pakistan ``look to the future and not continued to be pulled back by the past''.

Nevertheless, US officials seem quite concerned that `Ghauri' will provoke India to go ahead with the development of its own `Agni' long-range ballistic missile and, perhaps, even harden public opinion here on the nuclear issue.

On Mondayitself, the day `Ghauri' was launched in Pakistan, the spokesman of the US State Department James Foley had said in Washington, ``Our information is that a ballistic missile test flight did occur today.'' India has so far carried out three tests of the Agni ``technology demonstrator'', the last in February 1994. It stopped short of testing it further, ostensibly after Washington applied the screws thereafter. Richardson is accompanied by senior director for Near and East Asia in the US National Security Council and Karl F Inderfurth, the pointperson in the US State department for South Asia. The Washington briefing however made it clear that Richardson was not carrying any specific settlement proposal for New Delhi and Islamabad to look at. Nor, the official added, did the US intend to mediate in the Kashmir dispute, preferring both parties to sort out their own differences. The visit will ``underscore our policy of enhanced engagement with the region, including maintaining peace and security,'' the officialin Washington said. The Washington official also accepted India's ``particular interest'' in UN Security Council reform, adding, ``We want to hear what the new Indian Government had to say on this issue...We will also be interested in listening to what others in the region had to say about it.'' But the official did not accept the view that a grand bargain could well take place on a permanent seat for India on the Security Council in exchange for New Delhi signing the CTBT. ``We are not looking for a quid pro quo,'' he said.

But the official denied reports that Secretary of State Albright had agreed to expand US support for Germany and France during her visit to New Delhi in November. Evidently, Albright actually told then P M Gujral at the lunch he threw for her, that ``We will be looking again or we have to keep looking at the issue, something on these lines,'' the official said.