Tuesday, August 2 2005 10:19 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The United States (US) has described India as a natural ally and expressed the hope that Pakistan and Afghanistan too would become democratic and stable to form an arc of salvation in the region.

After the September 2001 terror attacks in the United States, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that American leadership traced the roots of the attack to Afghanistan.

Rice said, "We went to Camp David a few days after 9/11, and the map rolled out and people realised that it was Afghanistan."

"This place that has been described the arc of crisis, the place that great powers go to die," Rice said in an interview to The Washington Post.

She said she found for herself the promise the region holds when she visited the region after becoming the Secretary of State six months back.

"And thinking how difficult this region was; but then being in Afghanistan and then being in Pakistan and being in India and seeing the promise of that salvation arc as imagining a world in which you have not just an Indian democracy, which is a natural ally, but also a Pakistan that is stable and has rooted out extremism and is democratic, and an Afghanistan that is stable, that has good relations with Pakistan. I think that part of this for me has been that when you go to these places, the kind of strategic significance of achieving the goals that are being laid out comes into pretty sharp relief," Rice said.