THE joint US-India military exercises which began over the week-end near Agra could mark the start of a close strategic relationship between the two countries. Navies of India and the United States have also been jointly patrolling the strait of Malacca, ostensibly to check the incidence of piracy at sea. However, the strait has an obvious relevance to the defence needs of the countries located in its proximity.

Not much has been disclosed about the scope and tactical content of the Agra “war games”, except that they are being held in a “facility where India’s military trains its elite para commandos.” The details have been kept under “wraps” as a report from New Delhi put it. An Indian official, commenting on the joint manoeuvres, expressed some concern about whether the American troops would be able to withstand the “arid conditions of the exercise theatre”, with the day temperatures round 40 degrees celsius these days.

With its known pro-Soviet stance during the cold war, India, had no occasion to hold any joint exercises with the American military for nearly 40 years. There was a brief spell, though, of military cooperation between the two countries following the aid offered to India by President Kennedy in the wake of India’s military debacle at the hands of the Chinese in NEFA in 1962. Being a close ally of the US, Pakistan had expressed strong reservations about the military aid and assistance extended to India at that time. It feared that India would not hesitate to use hardware provided to it by the US against this country. President Kennedy, however, felt that any such fears were unfounded.

To reassure Pakistan, Dean Rusk, the US secretary of state at that time, went to the extent of suggesting that “the US would ‘nuke’ India if it attacked Pakistan,” a statement with which President Kennedy disagreed, saying that “America was unlikely to use nuclear weapons except in a crisis with the Soviets.” However, even after India’s border tensions with China all but ended, the US continued to supply military hardware and training facilities to India’s armed forces, disregarding New Delhi’s strongly pro-Moscow policies and inclinations.

Pakistan cannot remain unconcerned about the latest development in US-India relations. The American overtures to India (as also to Pakistan) came in the wake of the events of September 11 last year when terrorist attacks were carried out in New York and Washington by what the US believes were Al Qaeda activists at the instance of Osama bin Laden. Outraged by the development, when President Bush decided to set up an international coalition force to combat terrorism worldwide, he called upon other countries to cooperate with him. Both India and Pakistan responded to President Bush’s call: for India this was a clear departure from its known policy posture, while Pakistan, being a close neighbour of Afghanistan, where the US-led war against terrorism was actually launched, could not have remained a silent spectator.

From the outset, India has seemed to be determined to outbid Pakistan in the race for getting on the bandwagon of the US-led coalition against terrorism. Disregarding the considerable opposition at home to his pro-US tilt, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was determined to exploit the opportunity to establish a close rapport with the US. What is more, he appears to be succeeding in his objective and in a sense could be said to have taken a lead over Pakistan.

After the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, there has been some reluctance on the part of the US policy-makers to place their full trust in Pakistan since a segment of the Al Qaeda cadres are believed to have had links with organizations based in Pakistan. On the other hand, the US harbours no such mistrust about New Delhi and it is not unlikely that in the long run it would accept India as a close strategic ally and even help it secure a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, something that has been India’s long-standing ambition.

Going by some of the comments appearing in leading newsmedia in the US and other western countries, Pakistan is at a disadvantage vis-a-vis India for two main reasons: one, it is once again under military rule which sets it far apart from a continually democratically governed India; and, two, it continues to suffer from lack of political and economic stability, besides having a serious law and order problem. There is also the perception that despite the determined efforts of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan has not been able to get rid of religious extremism and militancy. The recurring incidents of sectarian killings and the recent suicide bombing of a naval vehicle killing, among others, 11 French technicians are a setback to Pakistan’s efforts to establish itself in the eyes of the outside world as a stable society.

Paradoxically, the US which continues to be agitated at the villainy of the remnants of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda still not apprehended does not appear to be terribly dismayed at the killings of muslims in India’s Gujarat state which has gone on for over. There have been first-hand, accounts that a great deal of what has been happening in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat has had the backing of the police and other official agencies. There have also been credible accounts of the state’s security forces aiding and abetting the pogrom of the Muslim community in Gujarat.

In a moving comment on the happenings in Gujarat, the celebrated Indian author, Arundhati Roy, has been constrained to go on record saying that in some cases the mobs on the rampage against the Muslims were led by people who had “computer-generated cadastral lists marking out Muslim homes, shops, businesses and even partnerships; they had mobile phones to coordinate the action... trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders, hoarded weeks in advance which they used to blow up Muslim establishments. They had not just police protection and police connivance but also covering fire...”

The US policy-makers cannot be unaware of the fact that India thinks it has the right to ‘punish’ Pakistan for its alleged involvement what it calls “cross-border” terrorism in occupied Kashmir, in the same way that the US-led international force has been dealing the terrorists of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. India has had no compunction about massing its troops on Pakistan’s border.

The Indian government has been continually accusing Pakistan of engineering the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building in New Delhi last December without producing even a shred of evidence in support of its allegation and even turning down Pakistan’s proposal for a joint or independent inquiry into the matter. It also refuses to accept Pakistan’s assurances that it (Pakistan) had nothing to do with the incident.

Instead of agreeing to join India in the Agra “war games”, it may have been more in the interest of the peace of the region if the US had prevailed upon New Delhi to agree to Pakistan for ending the military standoff on the two countries’ common border and to defuse tension which has held the subcontinent in its grip over the past several months. As the planners in the Pentagon would undoubtedly be aware, apprehensions are being expressed by western experts of an impending war between the two countries, even a nuclear conflict, with all its horrifying implications for the region.

The US State Department apparently shares these fears and the assistant secretary of state, Christina Rocca, would be visiting India and Pakistan by the time these lines appear in print. Clearly, her objective is to get the leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad to resume bilateral talks for resolving Kashmir and other outstanding disputes and differences including the ones that have led to the current standoff. The fact that she would be spending barely a day in each capital makes any dramatic or significant development in the context of India-Pakistan relations as a result of the visit rather unlikely.

There has been virtually a total stalemate between India and Pakistan since the Agra summit in July last year. Added to that is the military standoff since December. Pakistan will need to watch the Agra “war games” with a sense of foreboding since they could have implications for the future of Islamabad’s relations not only with New Delhi but also with Washington.

TWO days after April 30 I came across this rather amusing story in Dawn which also tickled my sense of the ridiculous. It said that the Capital Development Authority had asked the Chief Executive’s secretariat if the banners, streamers, posters and slogans with which Islamabad had been peppered for the referendum should now be removed or...

Actually there was no “or” in the story. This was put there by my impish imagination and made me wander into conjectures. Suppose, said my mind in its ramblings, the officer who dealt with the CDA query had taken a decision at his own level and directed that the banners, streamers, etc. may be allowed to remain since they might again be required for the general election in October. What would have happened?

But my whole premise was wrong. I should have remembered that bureaucrats, even at the highest level of federal secretary, long ago gave up the dangerous habit of taking decisions and left them to their respective ministers. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the casual leave application of a naib qasid landed on the table of the minister. The authorised section officer had wisely thought that since this particular naib qasid dusted the minister’s office table every morning the minister should know he was going on leave.

You couldn’t blame the section officer for not exercising his authority in this minor matter. During the period from August 1988, in the glorious double reigns of the two awam-loving prime ministers who took turns at double-dealing, ministers had taken over the authority of section officers and the like for appointment of naib qasids and office sweepers because their voters and adherents from the village were shocked to find that their heroes were not empowered to give even the lowliest of jobs to anyone.

The fact that the banners and streamers extolling the qualities of General Pervez Musharraf were taken down before the second day was over, means that someone did take a decision immediately and conveyed it pronto to the CDA. This must have been a military officer, for no civilian would take on such a heavy responsibility. He would have said to himself and to his colleagues, “Better ask the boss. You never know in such matters.”

If I had been the Dawn reporter who filed the original story I would have followed it up to its very conclusion. It was hardly a scoop that the CDA had sought the advice of the CE Secretariat, nor did the subsequent removal of the banners and streamers create waves as a prize-winning story. The real story had just begun. That is, what did the CDA do with all those thousands upon thousands of cloth and plastic creations of imaginative and sycophantic minds?

They were not government property, so they couldn’t be misappropriated by some greedy official, or clandestinely sold to raddiwallahs under the counter. Each one of them bore the name of the admirer who had it prepared, lovingly drafted the words of praise on it, and paid the cost, all in the hope of gainful returns in the near future in some form or the other, maybe political. So what happened to the whole stock, probably many tons in weight? This is what the reporter should have tried to find out.

Take this practice of hanging the portrait of the serving head of state in government offices, public buildings and educational institutions, even in hospitals and abattoirs. I am sure President Pervez Musharraf must have been pestered by flatterers that his revolution could not be complete without his portrait looking down at everyone of us, but, as is evident, he did no heed their advice and was spared a dubious honour. But before I forget here is a very short story. In the seventies a crackpot young employee of the (government-managed) Flashman’s Hotel in Rawalpindi lost his job because he had affixed a portrait of Prime Minister ZAB on the WC of his toilet! (Name can be supplied on request).

When General Ayub Khan promulgated the first martial law and became king of Pakistan on October 7, 1958, and emperor twenty days later after dethroning Iskander Mirza, he was advised that since he was as great as the Founder of Pakistan his portrait should adorn wherever there was space available for it in the country. This was done.

When he abdicated in March 1968, statisticians tried to compute how many of his portraits in public locations became redundant. You have to remember that the eastern wing was still a part of Pakistan and the number must have been in many lakhs, possibly a million. The question could have been asked at that time what happened to these countless portraits and their beautiful frames, and, if they were sold, which enterprising official out of the many hundreds involved in the deals made the most money. This question could also have been asked about the portraits of ZAB in July 1977 and those of Ziaul Haq in August 1988.

Here is another story, about the whims and fancies of Pakistani leaders. The fact is that Ziaul Haq did not order the installation of his portrait in offices till long after he had (mis)appropriated the country in the name of Islam. It was only when he dismissed the gentlemanly Muhammad Khan Junejo as prime minister in the last days of May 1988 that a circular of historic dimensions on the subject went out from the Cabinet Division. It said, “Kindly note that the portrait of the President should be two inches below the top level of the Quaid-e-Azam’s portrait in offices.” What a humble acknowledgement of the founding father’s position!

As long as Pakistan is there, leaders will come and go. They may or they may not order their portraits to adorn government offices. If they don’t many of the questions asked by me may never arise. And if they do I may not be there to ask what happened to their pictures, and whether they were eaten by worms before their own bodies were. But I am sure the events of the past will never teach them a lesson.

I hate to end on this morbid note. So here’s to remind the reporter of Dawn, Islamabad, to try and find out what has been done, or is being done, by the CDA or whoever is concerned, about the thousands of banners and streamers and slogan-bearing portraits of you-know-who retrieved from lamp-posts and trees and buildings after April 30.

LAST week, Pakistan experienced the horror of its first case of suicide bombing in which 14 people were killed, 11 of them French engineers working on a naval submarine project.

This act of terrorism will have far-reaching implications for Pakistan’s politics, economy, security and foreign policy, apart from the effect it has had of besmirching the country’s image even further at a time when a turnaround was thought to be near at hand.

The authorities had no definitive information about the identity of the attacker, his motive and his connections with a terrorist network, if any. Yet the knee-jerk reaction in official circles was to point an accusing finger at India for this horrendous crime.

These allegations surprised no one, for it has been the traditional practice for the two countries to make the other the scapegoat when such criminal incidents occur.

President Pervez Musharraf, who appeared on television the same evening, was vocal in expressing his distress at the suicide bombing and condemning the dastardly act. He described it as “external terrorism” as distinct from the “internal” variety. Reading out a list of names of people who have been killed in recent days, the president categorized the latter acts as internal terrorism.

The moot point is whether we can really make this distinction today when the world has shrunk to become a global village. The globalization of terrorism has been a much-talked about subject in the wake of 9/11, and it is now coming to be realized that the international reach of the terrorists is extending further and beyond the control of governments.

The fact is that there has been a blurring of the international borders and in many respects it is difficult to draw the line between the internal and the external. What might be internal today could become external tomorrow and vice versa. Classification can be a tricky business, especially when we do not want to believe that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander as well.

Islamabad has never regarded those who cross the Line of Control in Kashmir to fight the Indian forces not just in the Valley but also beyond as infiltrators, as external terrorists. And yet, in the post-9/11 era, the very same elements have been branded as terrorists, when they operate in Afghanistan. The dichotomy is that barely nine months ago these very “terrorists” when they were operating just beyond the Durand Line were said to be waging jihad and constituted a pillar of Pakistan’s security.

In the changed circumstances of today, all acts of violence and terror have an external dimension. This is plain if we recognize the fact that the premises, which formed the basis of state structures yesterday, are fast disappearing. It is time we understood the new paradigms within which international relations need to be conducted and security and economic policies formulated. This is an age when the nation state is on the retreat, though this has not been admitted formally.

The equality and sovereignty of states, which constitute the defining traits of the units of the international community, are now no more than a myth. Today the different members of the international system wield unequal powers and influence.

A basic shift in the international system has come with the emergence of the multinationals as players on the world stage. Their influence and role might be judged from their economic clout. Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are MNCs and 49 are states. The combined annual sales of these MNCs amount to 3,000 billion dollars, which is one-third of the world’s GDP.

These corporations, be they arms manufacturers, media conglomerates or pharmaceutical companies, have emerged as the driving force behind the world economy. Against this backdrop, technology determines the pace of progress as well as the role of each member of the world community. It also determines the pace and intensity of communications between governments, between governments and people, and between people and people.

Globalization, in the form it has assumed, has given rise to a new phenomenon, namely, the stratification of societies horizontally. With the concentration of wealth in every state, the divide between the classes has grown. What is more, these classes straddle international borders and share common interests, irrespective of which countries they belong to. Even if this convergence of interests might not be articulated or defined very clearly, its presence is acknowledged and it determines relations between people at the transnational level and it is facilitated by the increased mobility of the people.

Another factor that has led to the diminishing of the states’ control over their future is the extensive migration which is taking place and the resultant presence of large foreign communities in every state. These immigrants have independent communication and financial links with their compatriots living in other states and they use these connections quite independently of state control.

How does terrorism fit into this changed scenario? The globalization of terrorism is not simply the existence of terrorist networks, which reach out to all parts of the world. Given the changes that have taken place in the pattern of inter-state relations and in the power structures within states that have weakened their sovereignty and control over their own affairs, terrorists have almost come to enjoy an invincibility previously unthinkable.

In short, the normal policing methods are now proving to be ineffective in a situation like this. The transnational terrorist organizations by their very nature enjoy some inherent advantages. Since they are not bound territorially, they do not have rigid and hierarchical structures, and are not required to conform to the norms of transparency, the agents of terror appear to be winning the war that is being waged against them.

This appears to be true in Pakistan, where new and sophisticated security measures have not prevented the infiltration of terrorists, and the incidence of violence is going up.

How can international terrorism be checked? There is no easy answer to this question, given the escalation of this phenomenon. If the world community’s success in curbing hijacking is taken as a pointer, it is important that the states that are affected by terrorism should cooperate to eliminate this evil. Here a word of warning would be in order. International cooperation must, however, not be allowed to militate against the interest of smaller states. If a big power unilaterally sets the agenda and formulates the strategy, it could actually hurt its smaller partner.

This is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan where the US is calling the shots. This approach could backfire by making the junior partners even more vulnerable to the ire of the terrorists than before. The need of the hour is to draw up international conventions to lay down the framework of action as was done to check the spate of hijackings in the sixties and the seventies. This would also have to address the issue of state terrorism. When governments become a party to, or the perpetrators of, acts of violence against innocent civilians, they generate anger and hatred, which can drive some people to a state of utter desperation.

Hence international cooperation to draw up strategies to fight terrorism must also take note of such culprits, be they state governments as in Israel or local administrations as in Gujarat (India).

The world is being polarized between the irrational, extremist, fanatical and militant elements who are willing to resort to terrorism, and those who are tolerant, peace-loving and sensible. Paradoxical it may seem, the fact is that this division has thrown the Islamic militants, the protagonists of the Hindutva and the Zionists in Israel and America in the same camp. They may not be cooperating consciously among themselves but they are promoting each other’s goals by attempting to destroy their common foes — the rationalists. They are also more determined and better organized.

It is a pity that the voice of the peace activists is muted. They have not even attempted to organize themselves and network with the likeminded people on the other side of the border. How many of them have tried to establish links with the forces of peace, say in Israel, India, etc? There are more Indians condemning the Gujarat massacres than the critics outside. Strong voices opposing Sharon’s terrorism are being raised in Israel. But do we know of them? Governments which are genuinely committed to peace should be supporting these forces of sanity and peace.