IN his grim concentration camp memoir ‘This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’, Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish poet and survivor of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, tells the story of a ferocious SS camp guard shot in the stomach by a desperate female inmate who grabbed his gun while he was molesting her. “My God, my God,” the stricken sadist cried. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ He hadn’t a clue. It looks like a parable for our time.

Nations are very quick to trumpet their glorious virtues and, even quicker, to produce self-satisfying excuses whenever they fail to act according to exquisitely high standards, which is most of the time. Their spin doctors trot out reassuringly to announce that, in order to get along in the gruesome global arena, they regrettably must play as dirty as the other guy does. The other guy invariably is pictured as so vile as to rule out absolutely nothing. Whatever we do, even preemptively, are mere reprisals.

The US public cannot grasp why anyone except ‘evil-doers’ can be angry at America, nor can many Israelis understand hostility toward ‘Eretz Israel’, nor can most Indians or Pakistanis comprehend opposition to their own great and good states. This blinkered ‘realism’ is geared to cloud, not aid, realistic thinking.

The irony of realism is that although it operates as a mental framework that promotes the sober weighing of one’s forces against those of opponents and thereby usually counsels compromises, the more power you wield, as US does today, the more uncompromising you become. That’s being ‘realistic,’ no matter how much harm you may do to others or, ultimately, to your own country. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is determined to invade Iraq if no one physically prevents it. So let us kindly forget that as a Reagan envoy in the mid-1980s Rumsfeld reopened US relations with Saddam Hussein, and that both the US and UK exported weapons and equipment (including equipment from Vice-President Cheney’s Halliburton corporation while he was CEO there) to Iraq despite proven gas attacks on Kurdish areas in 1988.

So the United States after September 11 gallops off (once again) to police the world as if it was dispatching the 7th Cavalry to rescue an embattled wagon train, the Israeli government consecrates its own right to crush the Palestinian nuisance, and India’s BJP-led coalition amasses an assault force along the western border where contested Kashmir is the sorry site of many injustices of Indian as well as Pakistani origin.

Yet what were wagon trains doing on native American lands anyway, why are the Israelis defending fanatical settlers, and what good are India and Pakistan doing for the ordinary Kashmiri? Asking these questions and spurring debate opens up ground for a more rational policy, and for hope. Can you spot the mote in your own eye or the gleam in the eyes of your national leaders?

If ‘regime change’ is what one seeks, and if democracy is the goal, then seamy American exploits in Venezuela regarding Hugo Chavez stand little scrutiny. The widest application of ‘pre-emptive’ action is old hat for seasoned US operatives. Look at the Guatemalans, Chileans, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Cubans, East Timorese, Nicaraguans and the increasingly restive Afghans, among others.

What, for example, are non-Kashmiri jihadis doing in Kashmir? A good many were trained in the 1980s by the United States, utilizing Pakistan’s ISI as an arms conduit and as drill instructors, to fight the Soviets. In the oceans of indignation in the pages of the American press after September 11 one could hardly discover that the US government at an earlier stage supported the very Islamist extremists who attacked them in a spectacular ‘blowback.’ Everyone who consorts with religious extremists pays a price, often a fatal one, as did Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist assassin, Anwar Sadat by the Muslim Brotherhood, and Indira Gandhi by the extreme Sikh sect of Bindranwhale. US policy makers played with volatile forces and imagined their nation wouldn’t get burned. They pretend it never happened.

Probably no American administration since the 19th century became notorious so rapidly for its top-to-bottom corruption and its bald-faced stonewalling, lies and denials.

The waning of poll support today for Bush, and rising support for Palestinian statehood is a good indicator of increasing domestic scepticism about American foreign policy. All three administrations — Bush, Sharon and the BJP — are in downward slopes in public approval

Fortunately, Israel is a seriously divided society where many courageous dissidents challenge their own authorities and provide a flickering hope for a just settlement someday. With the western immigrant pool drying up, a just settlement might improve the image of Israel so that it need not transport, as it has recently, 90 clueless converted Peruvian Indians to settle in the West Bank. (In reaction to such desperate measures, a number of Jewish intellectuals in Britain renounced their ‘right to return.’) In targeting Saddam, as the Iraqi political elite in exile observes, the US wants a palatable replacement to keep the local populace in line.

Earlier this week the US assembled a well-tailored group of anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles as a readymade replacement regime, although, according to Abdul Bari Atwan, the leading Arab journalist working in Britain, they have no popular following inside Iraq. If Saddam is deposed, why should the new regime fare any better than that of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan who, as we have seen, won’t last a day without an American bodyguard and American funds purchasing the loyalty of the Northern Alliance?

Despite politically correct rhetoric, the Israelis, like the American administration, are very wary of the spread of democracy. For, if one could wave a magic democratising wand over the Middle East, the new democratic Arab states afterward would be averse to allowing the Israeli occupation without mounting a serious intervention.

Other ironies arise. The human rights record of Turkey, a staunch American ally, is not markedly better than Iraq’s. Yet the unpredictable whims of realpolitik make Turkey act as a welcome brake on US policy because of fear of regional fallout from a dismembered Iraq. “There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind that this man is thumbing his nose at the world,” Bush said of Saddam Hussein, as he was thumbing his own. Allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are no more proven than recurrent charges of American germ warfare in Korea.

Terrorism seems a remarkably fluid category where designations change with a snap of the fingers. The grave of the Baruch Goldstein, who killed sixty Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994, is a pilgrimage site for Jewish extremists. Are they not terrorists?

Some American news reports are bold enough today to point out that there may be more (American-backed) terrorists in Miami than in Cuba. The KLA was a terrorist group in 1998 and an America ally a year later. How does the notorious Abu Sayyaf stack up as a threat versus the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines who ask for autonomy, as do the Kasmiris? How do we sift out the differences? It depends on who does the sifting.

More irony? The BJP wound down the feverish level of threat along the Pakistan border but prefers military forces to remain there for a second round. The reckless way that BJP adherents prattled about nuclear weapons was appalling and, irony again, can be blamed for irrevocably ‘internationalizing’ the Kashmir conflict — precisely what Indian policy sought to avoid. The European powers and the US cannot afford a South Asian nuclear war that poisons the rest of the planet.

The BJP enabled Musharraf to come off as a reasonable political figure inasmuch as he is firmly in power and therefore need not rouse the drumbeat of zealotry. Musharraf, commendably, is tamping down fanatics who are murdering Shia doctors and attacking Christian institutions, even though he surely also carries the taint of responsibility for training some of these people and for the Kargil misadventure. There are no clean hands anywhere but that is a counsel not for despair but for pragmatic initiatives.

Musharraf, of course, is no epauletted angel. Apart from installing a militarized National Security Council as a “check” on parliament and banning key opponents from the October elections, he approved a statute permitting only university graduates to run for office. In Pakistan the largely illiterate electorate never put fundamentalists in parliament, while disdainful politicians and generals often backed and used them. If he continues in this vein, support will evaporate. As for Kashmir, the rote reiteration last week calling it a “sacred trust” (Musharraf) and an “inalienable part” of India (Vajpayee) was not terribly helpful.

The Indian political establishment clings to the view that if Kashmir becomes a separate identity, it will adversely affect the secular character of India so that Muslims in other states will be harmed. What happened in Gujurat this year and to the Babri mosque in 1992 (where Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani played an instigating role) demonstrates that this argument is a distressingly dubious one. Governments may have extremist inclinations and eruptions too. Government also can be spurred to overcome them through informed public debate. American public support for an Iraqi invasion is falling steadily.

GENERAL Pervez Musharraf’s much anticipated constitutional package was made public at a press conference held on the evening of Wednesday, August 21. The general used an unusual format for letting the people of Pakistan — and the people outside Pakistan interested in that country’s trials and tribulations — know how he planned to govern the country for the next several years. That the conference was held in a hall named Chaghai must not have been lost on the people who attended it or watched the proceedings on national television.

It was in the hills of Chaghai in Balochistan that Pakistan exploded half a dozen nuclear devices in May 1998 and joined the club of seven nations who admit to the possession of nuclear weapons. Although Pakistan’s nuclear programme relied on the expertise of civilian scientists, it answered a military objective. Pakistan’s armed forces have been focused on the threat — both real and perceived — offered by India, a much larger and stronger nation that shares a long border on the country’s south and east. The Chaghai explosions signalled the arrival of a deterrence against possible Indian aggression.

The tremor caused by Chaghai was heard around the world. So was the case with the constitutional changes announced by General Musharraf on August 21. Much of the reaction to the changes proposed by the general was negative. Most political parties in Pakistan — especially the parties that held power in the 1990s — were bitterly opposed to the changes in the Constitution. Most of the press commentary — editorials as well as articles on the op-ed pages — did not like the suggestion that for the foreseeable future the military will have the constitutional right to watch over the workings of the political system.

The foreign press and commentators were equally critical. The New York Times, in an editorial that appeared on August 23 under the title of “Power Grab in Pakistan” advised Washington to deliver Pakistan a strong rebuke. “For years, Washington has condoned anti-democratic behaviour by pro-American dictators... Washington should never again be so uncritical of the undemocratic company it sometimes feels compelled to keep,” said the newspaper. A similar sentiment was expressed by the novelist, Salmaan Rushdie, in an article contributed by him to a recent issue of The Washington Post.

Is all this hand-wringing justified? There is no doubt that the announced changes in the Constitution are significant not only for Pakistan and its political and economic future. They were also of tremendous import for the world since Pakistan today is America’s most valued ally in its war against global terrorism. General Musharraf’s reflections on Pakistan’s political problems and prospects were offered amid cacophonous debate over strategy between, inter alia, the military and civilian politicians.

The general took some pride in the fact that he had allowed open debate on the set of proposals on constitutional change. The discourse he permitted lasted for a month and was, it would appear, followed carefully by the military strategists. This, the general proclaimed, was a much more democratic process than the one followed by the government headed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in getting the National Assembly to pass the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

As General Musharraf leafed through his notes while addressing those assembled in the Chaghai hall, he explained why some of the changes contemplated in the initial draft were dropped and why some other, although not popular with most of the commentators, were retained. It was clear that he and his associates were not prepared to compromise on their right to oversee the working of the civilian government in a number of strategic areas. It was for this reason that the provision for establishing a National Security Council, although strongly resisted by those who commented on the proposed changes, was not abandoned. The only concession made was to shift the weight of membership towards the civilians by including the chairman of the Senate and the Speaker of the National Assembly.

According to my count, this will be a 12-member body if the president is also the chief of staff of the army or a 13-member entity when the presidency is finally claimed by the civilians. But in this game numbers don’t matter since, in all probability, decisions will not be enforced on the basis of a majority emerging from the exercise of one vote per participant. In the Turkish NSC, the military prevails on issues that it holds dear to its heart — the defence of the country’s secular constitution.

Let me now take a look at the debate that preceded as well as that followed General Musharraf’s announcement of the changes in the Constitution. As already indicated, a great deal was said and written — and, undoubtedly, a great deal more will be written and said — as Pakistan marches on towards the holding of yet another general election. I have followed the debate with some care and diligence. My main conclusion is that it has missed by a wide mark the main issues concerning the nature of our political structure.

The most important of these, of course, is the lack of confidence on the part of the military establishment in the ability of the politicians to manage the affairs of the state. Since the military — rightly or wrongly — is supremely confident of its ability to first confront and then solve all kinds of problems, it feels that it must keep the politicians on a short leash and watch over them with great care. What has made the military so confident and why does it regard the politicians so poorly?

It is said that in the ultimate analysis, power flows out of the barrel of a gun. This is no doubt also true of the power the military has wielded in Pakistan. But to ascribe the military’s ability to intervene in politics to its artillery is to seriously misunderstand Pakistan’s political evolution. If military power meant political ascendancy, democracies in the West would never have flourished. What could be a stronger military than the one possessed by the United States. And yet there has never been any serious doubt about the supremacy of the civilians in the way ultimate power is exercised in America. It is not a secret that the military resents the way Donald Rumsfeld, America’s current secretary of defence, exercises authority over them. But his decisions are followed without being questioned.

To stay with the American example a bit longer, what has given strength to its political system is not that the country’s founding fathers gave it a written constitution. What has really mattered is that the institutions developed by the civilian side of the power-sharing equation came to be much stronger than those developed by the military.

There is a belief — highly mistaken, I maintain — that what matters in a country in Pakistan’s situation is respect for the constitution and periodic elections. That is, at best, only one half of the story. The other half has to be seen in terms of a battle between institutions.

I believe the civilians in Pakistan don’t understand the military. They view its repeated incursions into their domain as a sign of perfidy: the military, according to the conventional civilian view, is always out to protect its rights and privileges. There is no doubt that the military rewards its senior officers very well. They draw not only salaries comparable to those given to the highest echelons of the civil service. Those holding senior ranks in the military also receive generous awards of land in military cantonments and in Pakistan’s ample countryside. By now the military has also built an elaborate business empire to serve its pensioners and provide welfare to its personnel. According to this line of thinking, the military is fearful that it may lose control of this significant economic asset if the civilian authority manages to assert its authority over military matters.

I look at the continuing civil-military conflict through the glasses of an institutional economist. The structure of the military in Pakistan is built upon a series of interlocking institutions that reach into every aspect of what the armed forces do. These institutions include academies that train officers and soldiers; colleges that keep the commanders current on national, international and strategic issues; and think-tanks that ponder about the way the world is evolving around us. The institutions are run by professionals; they maintain well-stocked libraries; they publish journals that get widely read; and they invite people from outside their ranks to join the various debates in which the military’s senior officers are engaged.

And then there are formal institutions that are brought into play when important decisions are to be taken. We all know about the periodic meetings of the corps commanders and the GHQ’s principal staff officers in which important matters facing the military or the country are discussed. The man at the top — generally the chief of the army staff — calls the final shot but he tries to develop a consensus among his colleagues on whatever decisions get taken.

There are other well established institutions the military uses to conduct its business. The chain of command in which officers of different ranks and ages congregate on a regular basis provides a way for both discourse and passing on information. Army messes offer space where much informed dialog takes place among the attending officers. “Bara khanas” bring together on festive occasions the officers with the men they command.

My purpose for delving into all this is to underscore the point that the military, an entity with a rich institutional infrastructure, confronting a body of people who have no respect for institutional thinking, is not likely to develop a great deal of confidence in the latter. What the military has attempted to do in this round of constitutional changes is to create and strengthen the institutional system on which the political structure should be based. I don’t believe the politicians have fully grasped this point. The constitutional protection afforded the State Bank, the National Accountability Bureau, the Federal Service Commission, etc., falls squarely in this category.

By creating the National Security Council, the military is attempting to formalize its dialogue with the civilian authority. As General Pervez Musharraf disclosed in response to a question from one of the Chaghai hall audience, he must have visited the prime minister 50 or 100 times to discuss the various affairs of the state. That dialogue can now take place within the forum provided by the NSC.

The military leadership cannot be impressed with the way the politicians reacted to some of the institutional-making attempts of recent weeks. The way the political parties reacted to the demand to democratize their own operations by electing, inter alia, their own personnel could not have increased the military’s respect for the civilians’ capacity to go beyond personal interests or the interest of the narrow group the politicians represent. That a politician defeated in the poll to elect the party’s president should walk out with his handful of supporters and found his own party cannot be viewed as a serious commitment to institution-building either. Without developing a robust set of institutions of their own, the politicians will not be able to keep the military at bay. Power comes from institutions, not necessarily from the barrel of a gun.

THERE is the assumption that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and the further assumption that Saddam Hussein will use them. That seems reason enough to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq and bring about a regime change.

In all this clamour, this moral righteousness, one fact is ignored. Israel too has weapons of mass destruction, worse, it is a nuclear power and has been one for many years. I think it was the defence minister of Israel or someone equally high who said that Israel would not sit out this Iraq war but use all the weapons that are at its disposal. Nuclear weapons?

There seems to be everything right about the good guys having weapons of mass destruction and everything wrong about the bad guys having them. Weapons of mass destruction themselves are okay, the United States itself has them, but they are for self-defence but Saddam Hussein is a proven villain and Donald Rumsfeld has compared him with Hitler and by implication, himself to Churchill.

We would have been more comfortable had Rumsfeld compared himself to Nelson Mandela who made peace with his enemy and brought about, not just a regime change, but brought the walls of apartheid tumbling down. Churchill, on the other hand, fought tooth and nail to hang on to the British Empire and was an implacable foe of India’s independence. Churchill was a war-time leader but he could not be trusted with a post-war Britain and he was unceremoniously dumped by the very people he had roused and inspired with his fighting words. He was a hawk.

Unless some very dangerous game is being played, the engineering of a regime-change in Iraq without the resort to the dropping of bombs, the thunder and lightning produced by weapons of mass destruction at the disposal of the Pentagon, it seems that the way is being cleared for the invasion of Iraq. The Americans will go it alone but few doubt that the currently reluctant allies will fall in line.

According to polls, a high percentage (a majority) of Americans back a war against Iraq and this number will doubtless increase after the anniversary of September 11 is observed, as if, it is Saddam Hussein who must pay for the sins of Osama Bin Laden. Already attempts are being made to show that Al Qaeda members may be hiding in Iraq and that, by innuendo, Saddam Hussein may be giving them sanctuary. But half that logic, al Qaeda is present in the United States, otherwise where is the need for such stringent and draconian measures that are being taken in the name of Homeland Security?

The world has changed since George Bush Sr. embarked on his Gulf War. There was then the fig-leaf of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the United Nations Security Council’s blessings of that war. A sort of legitimacy was provided. But one of the consequences of that war was that the Arab world had become radicalized, a process that is ongoing, helped in no small part by the adventurism of Israel which the rest of the world sees as the 51st state of the United States of America.

The Americans seem bewildered and hurt that there should be so much anti-Americanism about, a sort of globalized phenomenon. And they host high-powered conferences and call on all manner of people, including Salman Rushdie, to ask them what can be done to bring about a change of heart. This is an admission of the limitations of unilateralism. A war can be won by bombing the living daylights out of a country. But what about the peace?

Assuming the best-case scenario for the Americans, that there is a regime-change in Iraq, with or without war. Then what? A puppet regime will be installed but for how long? The men, women and children killed in Iraq do not matter, except to the Iraqis. But will American big business be able to operate in an environment that will become increasingly more hostile?

I bring in the big business element because I believe that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft are of the same breed and ilk as Charles Wilson who had testified before the Armed Services Committee in 1953 and declared that for many years he had believed that what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. It was the vice versa that was revealing.

The perception is that it is the military-industry complex that is fuelling the engine of war. The steep rise in the defence budget of the United States confirms our fears. When Iran was the enemy, Iraq was not quite an ally but was seen as the good guy in the brutal war that Iran and Iraq fought. Now, it is entirely possible that Iran might come on the side of Iraq in the event of a war.

One can dismiss this and say that it is a cock-eyed world but that is no consolation to those who are victims of the continuing bloodshed in the Middle East and even less consolation to future victims who will bear the brunt of increased destabilization of the Middle East that a war against Iraq will almost certainly bring in the Middle East and elsewhere. After all, human lives are not consumer goods whose price is subject to market forces. But the only argument that will prevail is, if we can show that war is neither good for the United States nor for General Motors!

WITH September 11 around the corner, a brief review of the impact of that catastrophe on the Islamic world generally and on Pakistan particularly would be appropriate. Never in recent history has an act of violence and terror perpetrated by a militant Muslim group, had such disastrous consequences, especially for the Islamic world.

If September 11 with its tragic loss of innocent lives and the terrible psychological shock to American mind, had been a run-of-the-mill act of terror, it could have been explained as an act of bitter frustration and revenge without due thought to the likely consequences. But to the obsessed masterminds of this act, nothing mattered more than what they had set out to do, not even the terrifying backlash of their insane action, especially affecting the Muslim countries and their interests generally.

With the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US was in the throes of a “rent an enemy” psychosis to sustain its unchallenged military power for the realization of its strategic aims. The perception of Islamic militancy as the main emerging threat in the unipolar world and the propagation of the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory had already created a psychological climate for an assertion of this power on a wider scale. The September 11 cataclysm provided an ideal opportunity for that purpose.

How things were going to be like in the new context was summed up in the West Point address of President Bush on June 12, 2002. He spoke of using pre-emptive and unilateral force, of imposing a universal moral clarity between good and evil, uncovering Al Qaeda cells in sixty or more countries and removing governments considered repugnant.

The immediate price was paid, and is still being paid by the Afghans whose Taliban rulers had been led into abandoning the interests of their own country under the influence of a handful of non-Afghan, Al Qaeda extremists tilting at the windmills of western hegemony. A country, which had never been occupied in history by a foreign power today has perforce to live with the indefinite presence of US military power, which has also established bases in neighbouring Central Asia.

A tailor-made opportunity has been provided to the oppressors of genuine freedom movements such as in Kashmir, Palestine and elsewhere to suppress these by tarring them with the terrorist brush. Overnight the scale of Israeli brutality has gone several notches up and the Arab-Israel peace process has been finally buried. India has lost no time in making common cause with the West against ‘Islamic militancy’ and using this bogey to isolate and crush the Kashmir freedom movement.

The list of targets of the anti-terrorist campaign also includes Iran and Iraq as part of the ‘axis of evil’ and Syria, Sudan and Libya as part of the ‘gallery of rogue states.’ Russia has been given a free hand in Chechnya in return for its supportive role in the anti-terrorism coalition.

The European Union is a hesitant fellow-traveller with the US. The UN has never, in its fifty-seven-year history, appeared as passive a by-stander and on-looker of international events as in the post-September 11 period.

For its part, Pakistan has borne a large part of the brunt of the post-September 11 happenings. While its switch away from the Taliban ended its international isolation and economic sanctions, the expected dividends from its new role as a front-line state in the war against terror have been stymied by the fallout of the US-led military operations in Afghanistan. Foreign and domestic investment continues to be shy, while commitments on tariff relaxation for Pakistan exports and related economic benefits continue to be largely unrealized because of the unstable regional security environment.

Since September 11 India’s strategy has centred on (a) blurring the distinction in western eyes between Islamic extremism and the Kashmiri freedom movement; (6) intimidating Pakistan with the threats of war into ending support for the Kashmiri struggle; and (c)using the forthcoming, managed elections in occupied Kashmir as a camouflaged device to legitimize its occupation of the disputed state, thereby securing an “internal” solution of the conflict. The efforts to rope in some APHC elements into taking part in the elections are part of the same strategy.

India is using the bogey of Al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan to highlight the chances of Pakistan’s nuclear assets falling into terrorist hands and to suggest the advisability of taking out these assets or destroying these by means of a preemptive strike. India also uses the preemptive strategy of the Bush administration as a justification for its own threatened action against targets in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan.

In this scenario, how does Pakistan face up to its economic, security and political challenges? If the political and economic dividends of the post-September 11 policies and actions are to be realized, the leaders of religious parties and groups must be required to rein in their militant activists and accept the primacy of Pakistan’s interests over all other considerations, including pro-Taliban and related sympathies.

Similarly, the mainstream political parties should refrain from exploiting the post-September 11 policy switch for partisan purposes against the government. The plain fact is that in the immediate grim aftermath of September 11 terrorist attacks, no other government in place of the Musharraf regime could have acted any differently in the matter of a policy switch vis-a-vis the Taliban. India’s current bellicosity derives partly from Pakistan’s failure to resolve its internal contradictions and to present a united front.

At the same time, the government must pursue and further step up its drive against militant elements in the country against whom the authorities have recently taken some tough steps but who nevertheless remain a potentially disruptive force. That some major strikes such as the attacks on the parliament building in New Delhi and the assembly building in Srinagar may have been aimed at precipitating a military clash between India and Pakistan cannot be ruled out.

Improving our image abroad depends largely on curbing religious extremism and terrorism and tackling the perennial problem of political instability. For the latter, the government should go more than half way to help conciliate the political forces and to continue efforts to reach a modus vivendi on the highly controversial question of constitutional changes.

In facing up to the Indian threat, Pakistan should continue its policy of defusing tensions and refraining from steps likely to lead to military escalation. It should give top priority to curbing terrorism, and promoting good governance and economic and social betterment.

In the event of India continuing to refuse to negotiate on a settlement of Kashmir dispute acceptable to the people of the held state, Pakistan must continue its diplomatic and political efforts for such a settlement, without, of course, provoking a military confrontation with India.

With regard to Pakistan’s relations with its strategically important neighbour Iran, the ouster of the Taliban order in Afghanistan has opened the way for developing a close and trusting relationship with it. It requires a strong political will on both sides to build upon the identity of geo-political interests between the two countries without allowing extraneous elements (including the US factor) to weaken their relationship. While Pakistan is well placed to use its good offices between the US and Iran, the latter can be helpful in smoothing Pakistan’s relations with the dominant Northern Alliance elements in the Kabul regime and with certain Central Asian states.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.