PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf’s speech of January 12 should mark a turning point in the current eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation in the subcontinent. There has been a grudging welcome of the speech by Jaswant Singh, the Indian foreign minister, whereas the Indian media and public seem more enthusiastic.

Jaswant Singh has stressed the need for effective implementation of Musharraf’s proposed measures and has linked any de-escalation of the military build-up to such progress. The United States and other countries have warmly welcomed the measures announced by President Musharraf and urged India to reciprocate. Under the circumstances, the threat of hostilities has visibly receded.

As usual, the versions put forward by India and Pakistan about the course of the recent events — and their respective motivations and aims — are sharply different. However, there can be little disagreement that the war hysteria was created by India, which assembled its troops on the border in a most aggressive manner. Pakistan’s response to this development was measured and moderate; and its military moves were entirely defensive. And yet, curiously, the international pressure led by the US was applied mostly on Pakistan. This paradox needs some explaining.

There is perhaps a second paradox. While India has more than its share of fire-breathing hawks, those responsible for policy-making in India must know that a war between India and Pakistan can quickly turn into a nuclear holocaust. That will only lead to massive devastation, which can in no way serve India’s national interests. Hence, Indian policy-makers have really no choice but to rule out any outright war with Pakistan. This being so, how can one explain the Indian war hysteria?

On reflection,it appears that India has followed a carefully worked-out strategy — albeit a highly risky one — since the December 13 attack on the Indian parliament. It has sought to exploit to the hilt two guiding factors in current world politics, namely i) that there must be no nuclear war; and ii) that any blatant act of terrorism justifies retaliation by the use of military force. Whoever carried out the attack on the Indian parliament, therefore, provided India the great opportunity to exploit these two global concerns to its own advantage.

India’s immediate objective seems to be the curtailment of support by individuals or groups from across the border to sustain the freedom struggle in occupied Kashmir. India has been insistent for more than a decade that such “cross-border terrorism” has been taking place from the Pakistani side. As it turned out, in the past decade, the Indian arguments fell on deaf ears and its expectations that international pressure would be brought to bear on Pakistan did not materialize. However, in the changed international environment after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and the launching of the “war against terrorism” by the US and its allies, India found a golden opportunity. It sought to draw a parallel between the incidents of September 11 and December 13. If the US was justified in retaliating against Afghanistan for harbouring “terrorists,” how could it oppose a similar response by India against Pakistan?

Secondly, India calculated that any spectre of a nuclear war in the subcontinent would be a cause of grave concern to the US and others. These countries would seek to intercede with India not to go to war. New Delhi would then place the condition that these countries must put the pressure on Pakistan to stop or reduce the activities of the jihadist groups based on its soil. This is what has actually happened. Furthermore, Pakistan as the smaller country, with a weaker economy, is also more susceptible to pressure.

Let us assume that India had not raised the war hysteria. In that situation, would the US and others have applied the present degree of pressure on Pakistan to curb Islamic extremists on its soil? Clearly, there has been a method behind the Indian madness in creating a situation of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. In other words, it never had any real intention of going to war, since that would be as ruinous for India as it would be for Pakistan. What India has done in actual fact is to wage a war of nerves. Evidently, it has secured certain results as well. By the same token, it is unlikely to deescalate in a hurry, so that it can maintain the pressure on Pakistan to curb the activities of pro-Kashmiri groups operating across the Line of Control (LoC). Hence, the military stand-off is likely to continue, at least for some time.

Is Pakistan,then, the loser in the present context? Fortunately, there seem to be some positive aspects to the current situation for Pakistan as well. The US and others have warmly welcomed the measures announced by President musharraf. Hence, the mileage gained by India on the issue curtailment of the activities of the Islamic extremists is unlikely to yield any further results. Instead, the pressure would probably now increase on India in the context of the international community’s determination that there should be no nuclear war. This should also increase to some extent the degree of international interest in resolving the Kashmir dispute. President Musharraf has certainly urged the West to do so. Moreover, the curbing of the Islamic extremists should benefit Pakistan, both internally and externally. The destabilization of Pakistan, witnessed over the last few years, as a result of gun running and widespread terrorism has damaged the country’s international image as well as dried up foreign investment. The suppression of these groups and the xenophobic attitudes of the jihadists would strengthen Pakistan, both internally and externally. In fact, these steps ought to have been taken much earlier.

The international image of President Musharraf also has improved. He is viewed as a balanced, moderate and progressive ruler. He has shown courage and foresight. He has also received tremendous coverage in the global news media. In the process, Pakistan has gained in importance as a key country in the region and even on the world stage. The West now has a stake in supporting Gen. Musharraf and in keeping Pakistan afloat as a viable country. Significant economic dividends have already been secured by Pakistan and this trend is likely to continue.

On the other hand, India’s international image has suffered because of its policies of nuclear brinkmanship. It has raised fresh fears in the world about its sense of responsibility as a nuclear power. Of course, the present-day India has no resemblance with the image of that country sought to be built up by its founder Mahatma Gandhi who had won world renown for his philosophy of non-violence. The moral edge that this philosophy had given India is dead and gone. Today’s India is acting like a power-drunk bully — jingoistic, arrogant and averse to the world’s pleas for restraint and moderation.

For Pakistan, there is need for self-introspection as well. A nation must know what are its limitations. Realism rather than emotionalism must be the basis of policy decisions. For too long have we allowed a drift in our society towards jihadist militancy and extremism. This has hurt us in more ways than one. Our policy towards the Taliban regime was also defective. It is undeniable that we should seek friendly relations with any regime that comes to power in Afghanistan and hence we had to establish a good relationship with the Taliban. But there was no need to go overboard in our support for the Taliban regime. The fact was that its ideology had little in common with our attitudes.

Some of our closest friends like Turkey, Iran and China had serious misgivings about the Taliban. Befriending the Taliban at the cost of creating cracks in our relationship with these countries was unwise. In the internal fighting in Afghanistan, we appeared to have become partisan against the Northern Alliance. This has evidently done long-term harm to our equation with the non-Pukhtoons in Afghanistan with whom previously we never had any problems.

In the context of Indo-Pakistan relations, realism also demands that policy-makers in Islamabad revert to the pre-1989 policies on Kashmir. The degree of activism seen in the past decade needs to be diluted. President Musharraf’s speech of January 12 perhaps is already a pointer to a new phase in our policy. Pakistan’s national interests must take precedence over everything else. If this was so in the case of Afghanistan, it must be so in the case of Kashmir as well. The present crisis has shown how adamant India is on holding on to Kashmir. Clearly, there can be no military solution to the Kashmir problem. In the present context, of course, little worthwhile results can be expected from talks. However, as Churchill once said, “talk talk is better than shoot shoot.”

Pakistan needs time to consolidate itself. It has at present a rare window of opportunity for economic development. In President Musharraf we have a leader who has given the country an honest and dynamic government. This is the right time to set our house in order. We need to become more inward-looking and have to be less preoccupied with foreign policy problems. Pakistan has great potential for progress. Its people have the talent and the capability to rise to great heights provided we have capable leadership and provided, of course, we have peace within and peace without. In other words, Pakistan needs some breathing space. A wise people must have the patience to wait for the opportunity when it is best placed to tackle its adversary and the latter is at a relative disadvantage. Acting prematurely does more harm than good. Economic progress and consolidation should be the guiding norms for Pakistan.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

WAS it necessary for the government to ask Chief of Army staff S. Padmanabhan to give Pakistan a war-like message a day before President Pervez Musharraf was to make his broadcast speech? Although Defence Minister George Fernandes tried to tone down, reportedly at the asking of Washington, India sounded hawkish.

At a time when New Delhi was pursuing diplomatic efforts and succeeding with America and the UK, the army chief jumped the gun. Washington had conveyed to New Delhi a few days before the gist of Musharraf’s speech, which he conveyed to the visiting US senators. Still the army chief was not stopped. Even the reaction was slow. The government took nearly 18 hours to respond to the speech.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee could have consulted leaders of main political parties on the phone if he considered the exercise so necessary. Even after having been bitten at Agra, the government has not learnt how the media functions and how important it is to respond quickly to some of the announcements which Musharraf made. Our reply was timid, sparse and halting.

True, Musharraf has yet to win our confidence because he started his career with the intrusion at Kargil. We have also bitter memories of earlier betrayals at Tashkent, Simla and Lahore. Yet, here was a man who wanted to turn his country round, a country founded on religion and bristling with fundamentalism. We should have been more positive in our response. The entire world was watching us. We should have unilaterally withdrawn our forces from the eyeball-to-eyeball position. In the meantime, Musharraf carried accolades of approval practically from all over the world.

We have always wanted Pakistan to be a democratic and secular country. Is it happening? We will have to wait till October this year to find out whether Musharraf respects the Supreme Court verdict to hold elections by then. But as far as the secular aspect is concerned, he has said that religion and politics will not be mixed — an attitude that is needed even in India.

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah announced on the eve of Pakistan’s birth: ‘You cease to be Muslims and Hindus. You are now either Pakistanis or Indians’. His was a secular approach. But it practically died with him. Is Musharraf trying to rekindle Jinnah’s thought? He has announced a war against religious forces in Pakistan. It is a tough job because they have had complete freedom all along. The 11-year-old rule of General Ziaul Haq strengthened them — some even in the armed forces.

Even Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used religion for his political purpose. He declared the Ahmedis non-Muslims and declared Friday the weekly holiday to placate the mullahs and maulvis. Musharraf may need some time in containing religious elements. He should be given that time. Large-scale arrests and sealing of offices will not satisfy India. It wants to see whether Musharraf’s action would end “cross-border terrorism”.

So far the axe has fallen on the terrorists working within Pakistan. Those who have committed terrorism in Kashmir have not been touched. In fact, some of the banned terrorist organizations have challenged the Pakistan government. They are quite right in saying that the interpretation of jihad Musharraf gave till yesterday could not be changed overnight. Musharraf had defended at Islamabad the jihadi violence in Kashmir before a gathering of journalists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. He had argued that they were freedom fighters. Even when it was pointed out that jihad had a different connotation in India he stuck to his words. For him to say that jihad means an onslaught against poverty, hunger and ignorance, is quite a volte-face.

But when he has made a U-turn on Afghanistan in, what he called, “the national interest”, he can do the same on Kashmir. His statement that he will not allow Pakistan to be used as a territory for interference in other countries is significant. This is, indeed, in his national interest. If he lives up to his promise, the two countries can be friends again. The hostility with India has not helped Pakistan in any way. It has suffered economically and internationally. No doubt, the chapter of hate and hostility going back to 50 years cannot be closed overnight. Yet, much will depend on the education Pakistan imparts at schools and colleges. So far, there is too much hatred, too much distortion of history in the textbooks. The action against madressahs, however commendable, will not be enough. The content of instruction must change.

Musharraf has said that Kashmir runs into the vein of every Pakistani. I am not so sure of that. During the lunch hosted in honour of Indian delegates accompanying Vajpayee to Lahore, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, Pakistan’s former foreign minister, asked the Pakistanis sitting around our table how they felt about Kashmir. The people from Balochistan and the North-west Frontier Province shrugged their shoulders, while a Sindhi said it was too distant. Yaqub Khan turned to me and said: If you ask people in the south, or the non-Hindi speaking states, you will get the same answer. “The problem is between the Punjabis on the two sides,” he said. “You should sort it out between yourselves.”

Still Kashmir has plagued relations between the two countries and it should be discussed peacefully as Musharraf has said. But once India’s fears on “cross-border terrorism” are set at rest, there is no reason why the talks on Kashmir cannot begin. The agenda should cover all the pending issues between India and Pakistan, so that the subcontinent turns a new chapter of amity and cooperation.

The problem of Kashmir has become intractable over the years. The state has got communalized. Hindu-majority Jammu wants to integrate with the rest of India, giving up the special status the state enjoys. Ladakh, a Buddhist-majority state, is keen to become a union territory, directly administered by New Delhi. So we are left with the valley having a predominantly Muslim population. Had Jammu and Kashmir gone to Pakistan at the time of partition, people in India would have regretted it but would have taken it in their stride. Today, after 55 years, the state cannot be divided into three parts on the basis of religion. Can secular India allow the valley to secede on the demand that it has a Muslim majority? Such a course will harm its secular polity beyond redemption.

The entire politics of the BJP and the Sangh parivar is anti-Muslim. The determination of the valley’s future on the basis of religion will give it a card which it will play to destroy whatever secular polity India has built so far. The Hindutva forces will say that if Muslims in Kashmir want to opt out of India after 55 years, then why should the other 140 million Muslims be allowed to stay in the country.? Even if all secularists in India lay down their lives in trying to protect them, millions of Muslims will be knocking at the door of Pakistan. Communal riots will become inevitable. The prospects are too horrendous to contemplate. It may be going back to partition which killed five million people on both sides and uprooted 20 million others.

Some way has to be found to sort out the Kashmir problem. But the solution does not have to be based on religion. Perhaps the governments on both sides can appoint some eminent people to work out a solution. After the Lahore agreement, Vajpayee’s representatives R.K. Mishra and Nawaz Sharif’s nominee Niaz Naik almost found something acceptable to both sides. Vajpayee said at that time. “We were almost there.” An unofficial effort will do no harm.

AFTER the U-turn on Pakistan’s Afghan policy (abandoning the Taliban), the government looks set to carry out a similar turnabout in its Kashmir policy: abandoning militants fighting to rid the valley of Indian occupation. In his recent address to the nation President Musharraf outlined measures to curb religious extremism in Pakistan, and announced a ban on two Pakistan-based jihadi groups: Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad.

The apparent reason for both foreign policy shifts is the changed post-September 11 global environment in which support for any kind of religious extremism or non-state actor violence is unacceptable. But there are also underlying longer-term causes.

In the case of Afghanistan, the U-turn was long overdue. Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was a good idea in theory but one that, by the late 1990s, was proving a liability. Pakistan gained little from its association with the ultra-conservative Taliban: the hoped-for gateway to Central Asian energy wealth did not open up. As it became clear that Islamabad’s ability to moderate the student militia was negligible, and as Islamabad suffered internationally for associating with such obscurantist regime, the policy of backing the Taliban should have been abandoned. Voluntarily ditching them would have yielded far more than the enforced divorce after September 11.

Turning to Kashmir, Pakistan’s policy in theory was again very sound. Pressing for the Kashmiris’ right of self-determination, supporting them in their struggle to break away from India, thereby putting pressure on New Delhi and forcing it to the negotiating table. Thanks to the militants, Pakistan would be in a strong position at that table, and would be able to secure at least the valley. A grateful Kashmiri Muslim population would of course opt for Pakistan in preference to independence.

That was the theory. Reality has proved very different, though, and very disappointing. After almost thirteen years of armed struggle, Jammu and Kashmir remains firmly in India’s grip. International sympathy lies more with New Delhi than with the Kashmiris. Pakistan’s support is seen in international circles as interference and trouble-making, even as an instance of sponsorship of terrorism. Among Kashmiri Muslims gratitude to Pakistan is tinged more and more with resentment: a free vote tomorrow would probably see many more opting for independence than to join Pakistan.

What went wrong? Much of the blame, of course, rests with New Delhi. Contrary to the expectations of Kashmiri Muslims and Pakistanis, India did not prove another Soviet Union. As the physical and financial toll of its occupation of Kashmir increased, it did not buckle under the pressure and offer Kashmiris their freedom. Quite the opposite: its determination to hold on to the state increased. So too did the force applied to achieve that: greater numbers of soldiers were deployed in the valley, more draconian legislation was passed, a pliant ruler (Farooq Abdullah) was put in power through blatantly manipulated elections. Some attempts were made at political resolution (Vajpayee’s Ramazan ceasefire), but these were invariably cosmetic.

The other major Indian counter strategy was to convince the world of its version of the Kashmir conflict: that in reality it was a Pakistan-incited and sponsored terrorist movement — part of the wider problem of Islamic militancy. It thereby hoped to deflect sympathy from the Kashmiris, malign the Kashmir movement and force Pakistan to abandon support for militancy there. As recent events show, it has largely succeeded in that effort.

Its success — and the overall failure of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy — owes much to one fatal mistake made by Pakistani planners (i.e. the ISI): the injection of a foreign jihadi element into the Kashmir movement. The impetus for this came from Afghanistan. Islam was no doubt a major factor in the Mujahideen’s victory over the Soviet Union. But its effectiveness led to the erroneous notion that it could be a universal tool and, specifically, that a replication of the Afghan jihad in Kashmir would yield the same results: India’s withdrawal from the valley. It didn’t happen quite that way and would seem unlikely to in the foreseeable future.

Kashmir is not Soviet-occupied Afghanistan; India is not the erstwhile Soviet Union. While there was universal condemnation of Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan and a huge groundswell of international opinion against that action, no such consensus exists on the Kashmir issue. Many in the international community see Kashmir as India’s internal problem, or at best as a protracted Indo-Pakistan dispute to be resolved by peaceful means and certainly not one that would justify launching a jihad. Besides, unlike the spurned Soviet Union, India has many international courtiers (the US, Israel, Iran to name but a few). In brief, the use of Islam against the Soviet Union was acceptable because enmity towards it was so great. India has never been hated like that.

By making Kashmir an Islamic rather than a bilateral political issue, it was thrown open to jihad-seekers from all over the Muslim world — Pakistanis, Afghans, Chechens, Arabs and Africans: an itinerant jihad force made Kashmir its battleground. In doing so they changed the nature of the armed struggle there. Kashmiri Muslims — traditionally docile and peace-loving — targeted only Indian security forces in their campaign. Pundits in the valley were not persecuted, civilian casualties were avoided as far as possible, tolerant liberal Islam was practised.

The arrival of foreign jihadis changed all that. Civilians became expendable. A harsh, intrusive Islam was imposed (recall the recent deadline for Kashmiri women to cover themselves or face acid attacks). Pundits had already fled the Valley, but foreign tourists were targeted along with Indians. Suicide bombings and hijackings became the favoured strategies.

In 1995 five western tourists were kidnapped by Al Faran. The headless corpse of one of them was discovered later, but nothing has since been heard of the others. In May 1995 an exchange of fire between foreign militants holed up in Charar-i-Sharif and Indian forces led to the shrine being burnt and destroyed: Kashmiris would never have violated its sanctity that way. In December 1999 a civilian airliner was hijacked and its passengers forced to endure awful conditions at the Kandahar airport where the plane was taken. In March 2000, 35 Sikhs were massacred and more recently, 38 people were killed in the attack on the Srinagar legislative assembly.

Such incidents were not representative of the movement as a whole, but they attracted a disproportionate amount of media attention and publicity. They overshadowed and eclipsed the infinitely greater suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims at the Indian hands. They seemed to corroborate Indian accusations that those engaged in violence in Kashmir were simply terrorists. These tarnished the image of the Kashmiri struggle for freedom and proved a setback for it.

Finally, the use of Islam in Kashmir as a tool to beat the Indians with came at a time when the West was waking up to the dangers posed by a resurgent political and militant Islam. Huntington’s flawed but widely accepted ‘clash of civilisations’ theory, first aired in 1993, pinpointed Islam as the new post-communism global threat. Any kind of militant Muslim movement was therefore viewed with suspicion.

Pakistan should have confined its backing of the armed movement in Kashmir to indigenous Kashmiri groups, or at the most groups drawn from Azad Kashmir. Thanks to India’s appalling record of human rights in the state, there has never been a shortage of willing recruits for freedom struggle. All they needed were training, logistical support, weapons — not foreigners to fight in their place. As Muslims, Islam and the jihad factor was always present in the Kashmiris’ movement. It did not need to be spelled out. The rhetoric of their struggle should have been kept nationalist.

A pure Kashmiri movement would have avoided the excesses committed by foreign jihadis. A pure Kashmiri movement could have easily countered Indian allegations of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘cross-border terrorism’. A pure Kashmiri movement would have stood a better chance of attracting international support, and of surviving the aftermath of September 11.

Thanks to the international pressure being applied on Pakistan, the Kashmir movement will now be purged of its extremist foreign cadres. The question is: will it be able to survive the damage inflicted by their involvement? If not, thousands of lives will have been lost in vain.