June 7, 2002	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25,1423

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WASHINGTON, June 6: The current India-Pakistan crisis has led to an increasing realization here in the past few days for the need to address the Kashmir issue, with a leading member of the Senate, Senator Robert Torricelli, saying on Wednesday the issue could no longer be dodged.

Speaking at the annual Congressional outreach event of the Pakistan American Congress (PAC), Senator Torricelli, a Democrat, said half a century of injustice should be addressed, and the Kashmir issue must be justly settled.

The same view is reflected in an editorial in The Washington Post on Thursday in which the paper said that the US and other outside powers would find the present crisis difficult to manage if they overlooked the fact that “underlying India’s nominal casus belli — terrorist attacks sponsored by Pakistan — is a deeper substantive problem, concerning governance of Kashmir, that has been obscured and distorted by the vocabulary of 9/11”.

The paper said that, just as in the case of Russian-ruled Chechnya and Israeli-occupied West Bank, “to accept that the central problem in Kashmir is terrorism is to allow the dominant power in a longstanding conflict to duck the need for a deeper political solution”.

“Even as it presses Mr Musharraf to break decisively with terrorists and their methods,” the Post added, “the United States must work to bring Mr Vajpayee back to the strategy of negotiating with Kashmiris about peaceful and democratic solutions. This is the only way to end the crises that have regularly brought South Asia to war, and now to the threat of nuclear catastrophe.”

It is notable that the Post editorial and similar other comments have come on the eve of two high-powered visits by Bush officials to the region — by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But at the PAC event, former Azad Kashmir president Sardar Abdul Qayyum, who is in Washington in his capacity as head of the Kashmir Committee, said he had seen no signs of specific steps to address the Kashmir issue.

Urging deeper US involvement in finding a settlement, Sardar Qayyum said if India and Pakistan had to co-exist, then means had to be found to enable such co-existence, and the US should recognize that India had been pressuring Pakistan out of all proportions for the past half a century.

Sardar Qayyum spoke immediately after Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia Programme at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, who bluntly told his Pakistani audience that there was a widespread belief in the Bush administration that Pakistan was officially or unofficially engaged in cross-border incursions and in activities in Indian Kashmir and the rest of India, and bore a larger share of the blame for the existing situation.

Saying his remarks might be found unpalatable by Pakistanis, Mr Hathaway said they should understand the thinking in Washington, and “the conviction in this town is that the Musharraf administration is playing a double game”. The feeling here was that the forces of extremism were getting stronger despite some very positive steps taken by Gen Pervez Musharraf. In the event of an India-Pakistan war, it was “very difficult to see the Bush administration taking Pakistan’s side”, and it was necessary for Pakistan to make itself an attractive partner to work with by building a culture of tolerance.

A more positive note was struck by former assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Ms Robin Raphael, who said there was no option other than peace for the people of South Asia to develop and prosper. She said her hope was that “we’ll get through the current crisis without war”, but it was more important to focus attention on the longer-term prospects for peace in the region.

Ms Raphael believed that the events of September had created many opportunities for everyone in South Asia to shift away from old rigidities, and everyone would have to make compromises. “India says, and with some logic, that if Pakistan can change its policy towards the Taliban and religious extremism, it can also change its policy towards India and Kashmir in respect of training camps and support for militancy.”

Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said Pakistan needed peace for its own reasons, for the welfare and development of its own people, and not to win cheers from other countries.