IN THE United States, the American presidency protects itself against all manner of vulnerability. Every elected president is made aware daily (obstructive pretzels notwithstanding) that his physical well-being and continuity in office is of paramount significance, as much in the interest of the nation as to prevent his vice-president from replacing him.

The reason for this caution is that the vice-president is elected only indirectly as a running mate and invariably nominated to accommodate some special interest. If the vice-president happens also to be political inept (as Nixon’s Spiro Agnew and Bush Senior’s Dan Quayle were), the system tightens its resolve. It is said that in the case of vice-president Dan Quayle, he was accompanied everywhere by two CIA bodyguards, with instructions to shoot him if anything happened to the president.

The present configuration of governance in Pakistan has no such inherent safeguards. President Musharraf does not have a second fiddle. He stands dangerously and poignantly alone. When he was brought to power two years ago in what was essentially an act of self-preservation by the army, his avowed aim had been to clear the rubble left by the destructive twin cycle premierships of Mian Nawaz Sharif and Mohtarama Benazir Bhutto. Since then, as each day has passed, he has found himself burdened with the infinitely more complex tasks of reconstructing Pakistan’s inefficient administrative structure, recovering looted national wealth, reviving its atrophied economy, and realigning its myopic foreign policy.

His has been a lonely mission, made lonelier by the fact that while everyone wants him on the job, no one wants his job. Today, every outside power with any interest in the region, particularly the United States — its acolyte Great Britain, for historical reasons the Commonwealth, for future reasons the European Community, and for the deepest and subtlest reasons China — has chosen to support him. They have placed all their bets on him, and on him alone. Within his own country, President Musharraf’s fellow citizens are content to have him, their self-appointed president, shoulder he sole responsibility for their governance.

That is easier done than said. With the political leadership of the country in hibernation, with his programme of administrative devolution slipping into an unsupervised hiatus, with the new identity card scheme in cooling storage, and with the army monitoring teams redeployed to the borders to defend the very population it has over the past two years hounded on suspicion of corruption, graft, incompetence and inefficiency, a vacuum is perceptible between the solitary president and 140 million of his people. That is not to say that President Musharraf has lost the confidence of the people. Quite the reverse.

Like New York Mayor Guiliani, were President Musharraf to stand for national elections today, he would win a mandate hands down. But for the time being he has not asked the Pakistani people for such a mandate, nor is he being given the chance to obtain it. It is symptomatic of the subcontinental paradox — ‘a Pakistani’s meat is an Indian’s poison’ — that the very confrontation that is now preventing President Musharraf from holding elections in his own country is the one which, according to some, the BJP coalition government in New Delhi hopes will bolster its own success in the forthcoming state elections in Uttar Pradesh.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that never in the history of Indo-Pakistan relations have both countries been brought as close to war as they are at this inflammable moment. For India, it must be galling to find that it is once again challenged by the same army that it thought it had vanquished in 1965 and more definitively in 1971. They are being reminded what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto learned to his cost - that martial law in Pakistan can never be buried completely, or as he said ‘once and for all’. Any hopes that Musharraf would slough off the markings of Kargil and of Agra to emerge glistening with fresh purpose were dispelled during his televised address on the January 12. He told his foreign audience what they wanted to hear - that he was on the side of the angels and that he would protect Pakistan from collapsing into Luciferous fundamentalism.

He told a minority of Pakistanis what they did not want to hear - that their militant bearded brigades no longer enjoyed a place in a modern forward-looking moderate Pakistan. And he told the Indians what they had suspected (despite the soothing assurances of the United States) they would hear - that President Musharraf was always prepared to talk to them but simultaneously Commander-in-Chief General Musharraf was equally prepared to fight them, to the finish if need be. Musharraf’s double-barrelled warning could not have been more explicit: he was both the carrot and the stick.

Gen Musharraf must have been a junior officer in 1986-87 when the Indians under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his Army Chief Gen K. Sundarji initiated Operation Brasstacks. He will no doubt remember how in November 1986, the Indians concentrated their forces in Rajasthan in such a manner that they could cross the Indira Gandhi canal, attack the midriff of Pakistan (south of Bahawalpur), sever it in half and render it paraplegic as a sovereign state. Such a bold strategy on paper at least, like Kargil, seemed a masterstroke, and like Kargil, it failed in the field. Pakistan under General Ziaul Haq countered by massing its troops on the India’s Punjab border that Zia had already made insecure by supporting the Sikh Khalistan movement.

Why did Gen Sundarji dare to take such a dangerous risk? One analysis - provided interestingly by an Indian Ravi Rikhye in his book ‘The War That Never Was’ (New Delhi, 1988) - was “that Brasstacks was initially intended to lead to a concerted attack on Pakistan via deception and misdirection (attempting to lure the Pakistanis into a first move, and then responding with a massive counterstroke).” Rikhye concluded that the chance of a lifetime had been missed because of the timidity of the leadership (i.e. Rajiv Gandhi).

Four years later, in 1990, a similar exercise - Zarb-i-Momin - was organized by Pakistan to test the Indian response over Kashmir. Although there were provocative incursions across each other’s land and air space, restraint by both sides prevailed. “New Delhi and Islamabad sent clear messages that they were not willing to escalate the situation, provided the other side was equally circumspect.” According to W.P. Sidhu who wrote of this episode, President George Bush sent his Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates to Islamabad in May 1990 to meet President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and General Aslam Beg with the message: “Washington had war-gamed every possible Indo-Pakistani confrontation and Pakistan was the loser every time; in the event of a war, Islamabad should not expect any support from Washington; and Pakistan must refrain from supporting terrorism in the Indian part of Kashmir.” Gates took the same message to Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh, with a caveat that “although India might win a war, the long-term costs would exceed any short-term benefits.” Gates added: “The intelligence community was not predicting an immediate nuclear war. But they were predicting a series of clashes that would lead to a conventional war that they believed would inevitably go nuclear.”

In 1986 and again in 1990, common sense prevailed. Had wisdom prevailed, neither India nor Pakistan would have been glaring at each other again today. Sadly, sunburnt fingers are again poised on the same dangerous triggers.

The whole world would of course rest more comfortably had those fingers been only those of President Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Unfortunately, should a conflagration be started - deliberately or unwittingly - it could be begun by someone other than these two, someone insignificant whose trembling fingers and quickening heartbeat precipitate a war no one at the moment wants to start and that no one will know how to stop.

Hopefully, it is not too late to make an appeal in the names of all those innocents on either side of the border who will be affected - the householders who want to avoid becoming homeless, the wives who are unprepared for widowhood, the children too young to become orphans, and the unborn who deserve something more than a wasteland to be born into. Hopefully, it is not too late to ask the leadership of both countries to realize the grave implications of their actions.

BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent visit to South Asia, and to Pakistan on January 7, 2002, has left many in Pakistan more disturbed than they felt before his tour. On the surface, he appears to have fulfilled a ceremonial but timely call for restraint by both India and Pakistan. Yet on the same surface there are signs of ominous new trends that could deepen the crisis in South Asia rather than resolve it.

There is a perverse coincidence to a British Prime Minister in 2002 attempting to deal with a situation created by two English men in 1947. Cyril Radcliffe and Lord Mountbatten possess the dubious distinction of planting the seeds of the Kashmir dispute. The one by his arbitrary act of giving a Muslim majority Gurdaspur district to India in the Boundary Award thus providing rapid access to the Kashmir Valley by Indian troops. The other, by his various blatant acts of support to India at the cost of Pakistan in the aftermath of partition.

Even as we try to overlook history in order to shape a better future, let us note what Mr Blair said in India. In essence, three elements of his pronouncements are relevant. He said that not only should the terrorist acts cease in Kashmir or in India but support for such terrorist acts must also cease before a meaningful dialogue can take place. This is, give or take a syllable or a word, a virtual echo of the Indian government’s position. And it is New Delhi alone that wishes to decide whether an act is a terrorist act or a legitimate response by a freedom struggle against brutal state terrorism. It is India alone that wants to determine the authenticity of the evidence that links such actions with Pakistan. There is no room for a third party. Just as there is no room for the UN observers on he Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir even though Pakistan has always allowed them this access.

The second element that Mr Blair stressed was that the United Kingdom would henceforth provide active support to India’s claim for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. This was like delivering a weird double-whammy. Instead of working towards the abolition of the apartheid of brute power that marks the United Nations system in which five nations are more equal than the other 185 members, Mr Blair was proposing to expand the scope of this apartheid to include a new sixth member. Furthermore, he is advocating a seat for a country that has failed for over 50 years to implement the UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir.

Britain’s leader completed his terrible treble with the somewhat remarkable suggestion that the scope for India’s inclusion in NATO should be explored. This was a startling proposition because it attempts nothing less than to reshape the geo-political map in an increasingly uncertain era in favour of a combative, hegemonic state. Has such a proposal been debated in the Labour Party’s foreign affairs committee or in the British Government before being introduced into discourse?

Between his visit to New Delhi and his arrival in Islamabad Mr Blair exchanged a telephone call with Mr Bush. The significance of the timing and the elements articulated by both leaders was not lost upon any one. In an age of transparency, there appears to be no scope for a confidential phone call between two leaders that remains undisclosed to the media nor does there appear to be the need for any subtlety in such diplomacy.

For Pakistan, the prime minister delivered a therapeutic treble. Firstly, the now customary and warm appreciation for the courageous leadership and actions of President Musharraf in his support to the international coalition against terrorism Mr Blair, like leaders and media elsewhere, appear to be unaware that, well before September 11, President Musharraf had begun a series of measures to curb the extremism and violence practised in the name of Islam. Such measures included a ban on the public display of weapons, confiscation of illegal arms, closure of two sectarian militias and an outspoken address to religious leaders in June 2001 in which he castigated them for distorting the message of Islam and stressed that the principles of moderation, tolerance, the pursuit of education and scientific knowledge truly represented the faith.

Aptly, Mr Blair urged Pakistan to exercise restraint on the Line of Control and on the border with India. As any such appeals for calm in the face of the excessive military build-up and verbal hysteria currently being generated by India requires exceptional caution to be shown by Pakistan, this appeal was well-made.

He then reiterated Britain’s support to a dialogue between the two countries as the only way to resolve disputes. It bears remembrance that the merits of dialogue being self-evident to all, it is President Musharraf who has consistently and unfailingly called for a dialogue with India since he took charge in October 1999. And it is India which has been most reluctant to engage in a dialogue. It prefers to allow the difficulties of the Agra summit or the complexity of the freedom struggle and the recourse to terrorism by the extremists to be used as pretexts to prevent a sustained dialogue.

When he cited Northern Ireland as an example of a conflict resolved through a dialogue and worth emulation in South Asia, Mr Blair disregarded two self-contradictory aspects of his reference.

Firstly, Northern Ireland was, and is, an internal, domestic part of the United Kingdom. Ireland certainly has a close nexus with the Northern Ireland problem but at no point in recent history have Ireland and the United Kingdom gone through the kind of confrontations and wars which Pakistan and India have experienced over Kashmir. Indeed Northern Ireland is an exceptional case in which one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies was unable to resolve an internal conflict for several decades in the 20th century, whereas Kashmir has been a disputed territory from the very birth of the two independent sovereign States of Pakistan and India in 1947.

Secondly, the Northern Ireland conflict required intervention and mediation by a third party in the form of the US, a role made more notable because it represented a case of one sovereign country i.e. the US, dealing with what was, strictly speaking, an internal affair of the United Kingdom. In the case of Kashmir, India refuses to allow any role for a third party and thus compounds the crisis and postpones a solution.

Mr Blair would be well-advised to refer to models of conflict resolution through a dialogue other than Northern Ireland.

To be fair, there were some tangible gains for Pakistan from Mr Blair’s support. Financial gains, particularly through Britain’s valuable role in the Paris Club for the rescheduling of US$ 12 billion of Pakistan’s debt. Then, expanded support to the development of the social sector in Pakistan particularly in education and health. Third: some ancillary gains in the defence sector through training and re-equipment. Fourth: a reinforcement of a new fellowship and sense of fraternity with the international community.

Yet, Mr Blair’s visit has raised more questions than it has answered. For almost 30 years now since the Simla accord between Pakistan and India was signed in 1972 we have lived with an uneasy Line of Control in the disputed territory of Jammu & Kashmir. The prime minister’s visit has indicated the emergence of two even more disquieting new Lines of Control.

One such line appears to be a Line of Control for South Asia in which India becomes the sole custodian of the region with the power of the UN veto. It is bad enough for Pakistan and for South Asia to live next door to a bully state without a veto. But a veto-armed India portends a nightmare of unchecked bellicosity. For the record, India is the only one of the seven states in South Asia that has steadily extended its territory since its birth in August 1947 to swallow Hyderabad Deccan, Kashmir, Junagadh, Manawadh, Sikkim and Goa. It then intervened militarily in East Pakistan in 1971 to ensure the breakup of a state.

By making India a member of the NATO, the second new Line of Control appears to have twin aims; to contain the volatility and unpredictability of Muslim states in general and Pakistan in particular and to build a bulwark against China. To Pakistanis particular and to other South Asian and Muslim states in general, and for China neither the existing Line of Control in Kashmir nor the two potential new Lines of Control will be acceptable or enforceable.

In consonance with the great values that Great Britain lays claim to, the only acceptable demarcation is a Line of Justice for a fair and peaceful resolution of disputes and the management of inter-state relations on a mutually respectful and equitable basis.

The writer is a former Federal Minister of Pakistan.