A COUPLE of days ago I spoke at a seminar organized by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Organization of American States. The seminar’s subject was the “World after September 11.” I used the argument presented by me in this column to suggest that there was no reason why the terrorist attacks on the United States should have a profound impact on the relations between developed and developing countries.

My basic conclusion — termed very optimistic by an ambassador of a Caribbean country to Washington who also spoke at the seminar — was based on a strong belief in the durability of the relations that have come to link the economies of the developed and emerging worlds.

These relations include the enormous amount of foreign direct investment being made by tens of thousands of western corporations which are now operating in the developing world. They include the growing trade between developed and developing countries which should be helped further by the recent decision at Doha to launch another round of trade negotiations. This time around, these discussions will take special note of the conditions in the developing world. And, they include the movement of hundreds of thousands of people who leave every year the world’s populous developed countries and migrate to join the work forces in industrial nations.

There is little doubt that transnational corporations, in search for profit, will continue to invest in the developing world. There is little doubt also that trade will continue to bring together buyers and sellers from different parts of the globe. The American led war against global terrorism will not make any difference to the further evolution of these relations. But what about migration from developed to developing countries, in particular from the world’s Muslim countries?

Will Europe and America continue to allow the citizens of the Third World relatively easy access to their countries and continue to welcome skilled people from these countries to join their workforces? Will the colleges and universities in the West continue to bring in students from the developing countries? Will the West — in particular the United States — divide potential migrants into two streams, one to be welcomed and the other to be kept away from reaching its shores, if need be by the use of force?

The last two questions — the questions about the access of students to the colleges and universities in America and the possibility that the United States may begin to discriminate against the people arriving from Muslim countries — have begun to yield some troubling answers. That large segments of the American society are extremely suspicious of the Muslims has become quite palpable in recent days. That Pakistan was one of the first countries to declare support for the American war on global terrorism has not spared it the suspicion with which much of the Muslim world is perceived today.

A few days ago my wife’s niece, a second year student at the Aga Khan Medical University of Karachi forwarded a copy of an e-mail sent to some students by a professor teaching at a prestigious university in the United States. The professor was responding to requests from some Aga Khan students for admission into a summer programme run by his institution. I believe it is a common practice for the students from Aga Khan University to go to the universities in the United States and become “summer interns.” If the e-mail was not a hoax or a joke but was actually sent by an American academic to a batch of Pakistani students, then its message is very troubling.

This is how the American professor reacted to the requests that were made. “Yours is among three such messages received from second year medical students in your school I have had in the last ten days. Just in case you are legitimate, you should know my immediate reaction, and the true nature of your disadvantage. Your ethnicity and your age are so similar to those of the jihad-minded terrorists that nurtured the Taliban and Al-Qaeda that it is not worth our trouble to try to determine if you are a well-disguised terrorist or a real learning-motivated medical student...We seem to have no efficient choice but to react with suspicion, which motivates us to extreme avoidance or to kill-or-be-killed defensive activism aimed at extremism.”

The professor’s message is simple but chilling: he is perfectly willing to put some students at a “disadvantage” because of their age, ethnicity, and the country from which they come. This is not something we associated with the American value system.

Whether this message truly represents the sentiments of an extremely angry university professor is something we should soon find out. I have sent a copy of the e-mail to the president of the university that employs the professor indicating that the students who received the e-mail were greatly troubled by its content. It wrongly and mischievously brackets them with the hijackers who committed acts of terrorism against the United States. In my letter I said that messages such as these are utterly unhelpful since they play into the hands of those determined to create a deep divide between America and the young people of a large Muslim country.

Will the attitude represented by the professor’s diatribe affect America’s open door policy? Probably not since America still needs foreign workers. One reason why the United States was not likely to suffer a decline in the size of its population in the first half of the 21st century was its willingness to accommodate a large number of migrants. All other developed countries were set to see fairly significant declines in their populations beginning as soon as 2010.

America was likely to escape this fate since it was more willing to bring in foreign workers to compensate for the decline in the indigenous work-force. I say “was likely” since the terrorist attacks of September 11 may seriously change this open attitude in the United States towards foreigners and international migration. Such a change in attitude would bring considerable economic grief to America.

It is now widely recognized that without international migration, the developed world will not be able to sustain a high level of economic growth in the coming decades. Before September 11, attitudes had begun to change even in the countries not known to favour migration. In 2001, before the collapse of the “dot-com” bubble, the Germans had decided to import 20,000 skilled workers for the country’s large and rapidly expanding technology industry. Likewise, the Japanese were contemplating a change in their migration laws to bring in more workers from the developing world.

I have long been of the view that migration does not harm either the labour-exporting or labour-importing countries. In spite of the worldwide reduction in the rates of fertility, there is a pronounced “demographic asymmetry” between the developed and the developing countries. This asymmetry is characterized by the relative youth of the populations in most developing countries compared to the populations in developed countries that are rapidly aging. Pakistan, for instance, has some 70 million people under the age of 18. The United States, with twice as many people, has only 72 million people in this age group.

With the right kind of educational system, Pakistan could produce a sufficiently large number of skilled people not only to meet its domestic requirements but to contribute to filling the skill gap that was fast appearing in the developed world. I never bought the “brain-drain” argument. I have argued that it was in our interest to treat population like an economic asset to be used both at home and for export.

In fact, I have been of the view that there was a great deal to be gained by populous countries such as Pakistan to create large diasporas in Europe and America. Such diasporas become important sources of capital flows to their homeland. Pakistan has already benefited a great deal from the flow of remittances from its citizens living and working abroad. The Pakistan diasporas could also become an important source of foreign direct investment. Diasporas also bring new technologies and management practices to the countries of their origin. This too has begun to happen in Pakistan’s case.

One example of this is the task force appointed by President Pervez Musharraf to devise a strategy for the rapid development of the country’s large human resource. The task force is chaired by Dr. Naseem Ashraf, a Washington based physician of Pakistani origin. Assisting Dr. Ashraf are a number of people from the community of Pakistanis living and working in the United States. And, diasporas can be helpful in representing the point of view of their homeland in their host countries. Pakistanis in the United States have been fairly active in projecting their country to various American audiences.

There is no doubt that following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Muslim communities in America and Europe are under a great deal of pressure. As a result of their country’s initial support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis in the United States are feeling this burden to a greater extent than the Muslims from other parts of the world. Will this attitude persist? Will the terrorist attacks make it difficult for the Pakistani diaspora to continue to increase in size at the rate experienced in the 1990s?

By deciding to interview 5,000 students from Muslim nations attending American colleges and universities the US government is encouraging the kind of reaction already seen by the students of the Aga Khan Medical University. Will the authorities in the United States realize that it is morally wrong and strategically unwise to create two classes of migrants who have already arrived or are attempting to gain admission into the country?

What can we do to have ourselves better understood in the West, in particular in the United States? This question does not have an easy answer. The “us” in the question are the Pakistanis in America. Now and in the immediate future the clout the Pakistani diaspora possesses should be used to keep the American educational institutions open to young men and women from Pakistan. Given the sorry state of education in Pakistan it will be extremely unfortunate if the universities and colleges in the United States begin to effectively discriminate against our students. The education they will be denied cannot be provided at home. But we need to do more over the medium and long term.

The imam of the mosque at which I said my Eid prayers last week rejected the notion that there is an extremist Islam or a modern Islam, or a backward Islam. He said that there is only one Islam. But that is not the way Islam presents itself when we hear the unfortunate fulmination of Osama bin Laden or of the young people interviewed countless times on western television. Why is there not a modern institute of Islamic studies in Pakistan that can investigate the questions that are being asked about issues such as jihad, the treatment in Islam of women, the attitude of Islam towards other religions and towards minorities within Muslim countries? And, equally important why have we failed to invest in institutions of higher learning in a variety of areas and disciplines in order to reduce our dependence on western education? These are important questions. We need to seriously reflect on them.

INDIA and Pakistan are coming too close to confrontation for anyone’s comfort. One chilling example is New Delhi’s demarche to Islamabad after the attack by terrorists on the Parliament House and the latter’s curt reply that it was a stage-managed show.

The two have traded similar accusations in the past — whether it was an attempt to blow up the state assembly building at Srinagar, the intrusion into the Red Fort or the killing of Sikhs at Chitapura in Kashmir. What is alarming is the heightening of shrillness and exasperation in and counter-statement. The Pervez Musharraf government is probably not conscious of the wide support the Atal Behari Vajpayee government would have if it were to pursue the terrorists inside Pakistan territory. People in India find New Delhi “ineffective” and want it to act. Voices for restraint and caution are getting feeble.

Pakistan gives an impression of turning over a new leaf after being an accomplice of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The government’s fight against fundamentalists may also have a ring of authenticity because it has silenced the big guns of religious organizations by putting them behind bars. The action against the madressahs has some credibility.

Yet there is no doubt that Pakistan is the breeding place for terrorist organizations like the Lashkar-i-Taiba, Jaish- i-Mohammed, Harkat-ul-Ansar and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, particularly the first two, which have killed people in India and attacked different places. They operate from Pakistan, their headquarters. America may have been able to put pressure on President Musharraf to close down training camps. But their operation is over in Afghanistan, not in other countries. Some training camps are reportedly operating from new sites. And then there is the omnipresent ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence).

The five terrorists who attacked the parliament are not only Pakistani nationals but also belong to one of the organizations functioning from Pakistan. In fact, the general atmosphere in that country is so anti-India — from schools to the highest institutions — that the liberals have become a rare commodity there. Musharraf, if he is serious, has to change the very environment. But he looks like using the terrorists for one purpose and denouncing them for another.

On top of it comes Islamabad’s statement that New Delhi has stage-managed the attack. Was the number of casualties pre- determined, both on the side of the armed terrorists and the unarmed watch and ward staff? The allegation is too ridiculous for words. Stories cannot be concocted to cover up their crime.

Pakistan’s military spokesman Rashid Qureshi, who was irresponsible in his immediate reaction, sounds better when he says that India should not jump to conclusions “without even a preliminary inquiry.” New Delhi’s report is that it was a joint operation by the Jaish-i-Mohammed and the Lashkar-i-Taiba at the behest of the ISI. A detailed report, supported by evidence, must have been sent to Pakistan and other countries which are watching the situation with concern. One should wait for more on the subject.

The unkindest remark by Musharraf is that India was out for a misadventure. As an unelected head of the state, he has to play to the gallery. But his warning of “dire consequences” sounds jingoistic. As a military man, he should know more than anyone else what war means, particularly for the countries which are so poor and so under-developed. His condemnation of the attack on the Parliament is welcome but it makes little sense when he has not uttered a word against the Jaish-i-Mohammed and the Lashkar-i-Taiba. If he has really turned his back against them, he should not be afraid of them. He should cultivate in his country the liberal lobby which would be strengthened if he denounced the terrorist groups.

Even otherwise, how un-Islamic were those who planned and participated in the December 13 attack, which was during the Ramazan, a holy month. The fast of Ramazan is the most carefully observed of all religious duties by the Muslims. Not only must they refrain from all food and drink between dawn and dusk, but they must not commit any unworthy act. One lie can make a day’s fast meaningless. How does the killing of nine innocent men of watch and ward and police fit into what the terrorists and their mentors did?

Musharraf lacks popular support. He lacks the electoral backing which every ruler cherishes. The test may come next year when Pakistan has to return to democracy under the orders of the Supreme Court. Pakistan may not turn into a democratic polity. The army has too much stake in the policy Pakistan pursues. Even otherwise, the army in a Third World country seldom returns to the barracks if it once tastes power. It is worse in Pakistan because there authoritarianism is woven deeply in the warp and woof of society as it is organized on the basis of Bonapartism and feudalism.

Pakistan must face the fact that things can go out of hand if it connives at the activities of such terrorists who are working against India and find a way out to deal with them in their own territory. The supply of arms, training or money in the name of religion is divisive. Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto saw the point during her recent visit to India and she said she would stop cross-border terrorism if she were to return to power.

Washington’s reaction to the attack on the parliament is obvious but it does not come as a surprise to those who have followed its political history in the last few decades. It has always talked of democracy but has supported and sustained the most undemocratic regimes for its temporary gains. America has done more harm to democracy than all the undemocratic countries put together. As if it is a laid down rehearsal, it condemned the attack. But when it came to standing up and be counted, secretary of state Collin Powell warned India against taking any action.

Within hours of the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11, President Bush announced war against terrorism throughout the world. He said that all those who sheltered terrorists, supported them or even indirectly helped them would not be spared. America’s or, for that matter, the West’s fight was confined to Afghanistan — the Taliban and their guide, Osama-bin Laden. The surrender of the Taliban has more or less ended the job of America and its allies. They are now concentrating on locating Osama.

That ends their war against terrorism, although they continue to go over the exercises and say that the war would go on.

Washington has not lifted even a finger to follow up the attack on the parliament. What has happened to the resolve? Does terrorism have different connotation for the Americans and the Indians? It is a pity that Islamabad, which has been let down by Washington many a time, does not understand that the latter’s support is for selfish reasons. It is interested only in itself, how to ensure that the world stays unipolar. See how it has withdrawn unilaterally from the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty?

Pakistan should have tried to span the distance with India. Instead, Islamabad is doing its best to stay close to Washington. It is a temporary gain because in the process America is extending itself in the region, much to the dislike of China and Russia.

In the immediate future, Pakistan’s attitude may spoil the possibility of talks between the two sides at the time of the SAARC summit in the first week of January. The bitterness between the two countries may not allow any leeway. Still a dialogue between the two may clear the dirt a bit. Even a bit is much needed in an atmosphere which is fraught with danger.