WHEN Pandit Nehru had decided to take Kashmir to the United Nations Gandhi had commented that India and Pakistan will get “monkey justice”. As an adolescent, I first read these lines and thought that Churchill’s “half naked fakir” was afraid of international opprobrium but over the years my own painful reflections on Kashmir made me grasp the wisdom of those words.

I now think venerable Mahatma knew and understood many things about man and his world that the smart Oxbridge minds could not fathom. So are we finally witnessing the end of Sisyphus’s ordeal? Or the strategic mindsets in Delhi and Islamabad on the verge of committing similar mistakes once again? With the now almost historic comments of PM Vajpayee — “last and final try” — and the message of the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage — “All violence to end” — it is generally believed by evolved souls on both sides of this unfortunate divide that we are about to witness a new era of peace between progenies of ancient India.

But is there a new vision in Delhi or a mere change of tactic within the confines of a 20-month-long strategy? To make any evaluation it is important to revisit and analyze certain facets of the coercive diplomacy set into motion by Delhi in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

On the morning of 9/11 there were no war clouds hovering over the subcontinent. True, Agra summit had failed to yield any visible dividends but India and Pakistan were determined to play it cool and there was even talk of PM Vajpayee either visiting Pakistan or meeting President Musharraf on the sidelines of UN General Assembly. However, with the fall of the Twin Towers the world changed and the much expected Pakistani decision to join the US-led war on terrorism compelled a visibly disturbed Delhi to unleash a calculated strategy of ‘defiance and restraint’.

Delhi’s strategy was as much targeted at the US as it was at Pakistan. It had three important objectives: first, to contain the extent of relationship which Islamabad might try to renew with Washington and with the West generally; second, to prevent Kashmir from becoming an international issue from the age-old Pakistani perspective; third, to preserve the evolving multi-dimensional relationship with Washington.

Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that the US perceived the Indian anxieties and tried to communicate reassurances but Indian strategists — perhaps correctly — assessed that in a time of great change if India did not assert its importance by a careful combination of strategic defiance and restraint, it might suffer in many ways. Some disadvantages of the new situation were pretty obvious — for instance, diplomatic circles in Delhi had this assurance that in the year 2002 president George Bush would pay an exclusive visit to India.

If it were to take place then it would have been a clear vindication of the Gujral Doctrine that had envisaged a decoupling of India from Pakistan. However, with Pakistan jumping on the US bandwagon, it became obvious that either the visit would not take place or worse it might turn into a usual Indo-Pakistan affair — something which was most unacceptable because it would have negated the high point and the spirit of the last Clinton visit during which a US president only briefly stopped over in Pakistan.

The Indian strategy contained two important and interesting phases: First, between end-September and December 10, 2001, the US-led operation in Afghanistan was continuing and India effectively bargained for international political space by exhibiting a restraint in the face of much trumpeted grievances. Once Hamid Karazai took office on December 10, India then launched the second phase of its strategy that was to give effect to those US and British promises that were extracted during the phase of ‘projected restraint’ and about which Indian strategists were convinced that if not cashed will be forgotten conveniently in the day-to-day pre-occupations of Capitol Hill and Whitehall. As one reflects on the timings of various moves, it becomes obvious that nowhere did India overstep its acquired and perceived mandate.

President Musharraf and many in his kitchen cabinet have routinely argued: What has India gained by amassing troops on Pakistan borders? One hopes they make these statements only for public consumption because believing one’s own propaganda is a dangerous state of mind. The Indian strategy was, if anything, brilliant; it spent perhaps less than one tenth of the costs of Kargil conflict, and achieved most of its objectives without firing a single shot: a reasserted Indo-US road map; an internationally applauded election in Kashmir; a tarnished Pakistani image in international media and finally, a much shrunk US-Pakistan relationship as compared to what it might have been if the Indian strategists were not working day and night to constrain it.

Delhi’s coercive diplomacy, as recently argued in this space by former Pakistani diplomat Afzaal Mahmood, could not have continued indefinitely. But the question is why? Every student of economics and law would remember that there was a time no one could fathom that radio waves or bandwidths could be auctioned and traded like natural commodities. In the current international set-up ‘perceptions’ too have become commodities that can be traded at the stock exchange of international power politics. And like most commodities, an indefinitely delayed transaction means ‘lost capitol’. Having created a capital India had to trade it. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that if, by September 2002, neo-conservatives had not started to sap Washington’s energy on the Iraq agenda, India would have eased its pressure on Pakistan, at an appropriate moment after the Kashmir elections, in anticipation of US mediation to extract an international acceptance of the LoC.

So one should probably be surprised at those who are surprised at the Indian prime minister’s decision to ease the pressure and open the door of dialogue. It appears that most columnists in Pakistan fail to follow Indian papers, analysts and think tanks with the care and attention needed. Had they done so, they would have realized two things: one, the Vajpayee statement was long overdue and expected, and second, it is hardly a Vajpayee decision. So all those who are looking at the body language of the prime minister to gauge sincerity and seek inspiration need to remember that India’s coercive diplomacy is the product of a careful and calculated strategic mind-set and so is the timing of each move in that context.

Actually there is one — Kashmir is an irritant to the emerging Indo-US road map. True, India has been fairly successful in winning acknowledgement, especially in popular western media, that Kashmir is ‘foreign-sponsored terrorism’ of which India is a victim but nevertheless it is an irritant that precludes India’s larger role in the international arena. So could it be that the Indo-US strategy is only restricted to Pakistani acceptance of the Line of Control as the permanent dividing line?

But this alone is hardly a vision, it may be good for the narrowly perceived commercial and corporate interests of some classes here and there but this is not going to lead to that ‘heal and repair’ to which we earnestly look forward. Despite Washington’s pressure, Islamabad might not be able to deliver and any attempt to do so might create unmanageable disruptive problems for Pakistani body politic — something which needs to be understood in Delhi, if in fact a vision for South Asia exists at all.

Jean Monet, the exponent of the European Union idea, had a vision that grew out of his deep understanding of European history. If we have learnt anything from our own history of which Kashmir is only a painful symptom — then a visionary settlement can provide a road map based on trust, not only for the states of India and Pakistan, but for diverse racial and religious communities of South Asia on which these state structures rest. We are often so blinded by the moment that we fail to realize that state structures tend to be fluid in nature and they change when people change.

The test of the vision for India and Pakistan will be whether or not they accept that their governing principles have become time-barred, especially in the wake of new issues of energy, water, and environment and growing tides of religious fanaticism in the two countries. For Pakistan that means coming to grips with the painful realization that maybe after 56 years of sacrifices it is now better for Pakistan, for India and for Kashmiris to extend ‘de jure’ recognition to ‘de facto’ realities. And for India it will mean accepting that all attempts to integrate Kashmir into India proper have failed and maybe Kashmir can exist within larger frame-work of union brought about by some different politico-legal arrangement.

US businessman, Farooq Kathiawari, who lives in New York, but whose heart is still in Srinagar, had many years ago inspired and organized Kashmir Study Group, by bringing together some of the most informed US experts on South Asia. In 1997 they put forward a report, “Kashmir at fifty”, which in its brilliance and clarity rivals any other document of this sort. In many respects it was an improvement on the vision and understanding of another brilliant Kashmir mediator, Australian jurist, Sir Owen Dixon. The suggestions and solutions put forward by them of giving Kashmir autonomy without the formal status of statehood and with porous borders are still valid.

The writer is a Britannia Chevening scholar at London School of Economics.

E.mail: pirzada@aopp.olrg.

THERE’S no point in writing about anything but ‘terrorism’ even if there’s little useful to be said about the recent rash of attacks and alarms beyond the fact that it was hardly a surprise.

After all, why would conquering Iraq do anything to diminish the terrorist threat? But there is something useful to be said about the scale of the problem.

In media terms, last fortnight was a terrorist blitz: 59 people killed in Chechnya on the 10th, 34 dead in Saudi Arabia the following day, 16 more dead in Chechnya on the 13th, a wave of terrorist bombings that failed to kill anybody in Pakistan on the 14th, at least 41 deaths from bomb attacks in Morocco, and three Israelis killed next day. It sounds like a lot. It’s not.

Around a million human beings die each week on this planet, the vast majority of them from natural causes. Last fortnight was the worst for terrorist attacks since 11 September, 2001, but only 153 people were killed. In these days, therefore, one in seven thousand of the deaths in the world was caused by terrorism. That is far higher than usual, so it made the headlines.

Yet there were no headlines saying ‘750 people dead of gunshot wounds in the US since Monday’ or ‘weekly traffic death toll in India tops 2,000’, and only a very small headline to announce that several thousand people had been massacred in the eastern Congolese town of Bunia. It’s terrorism that grabs the headlines, because it combines violence and surprise in a package designed to do precisely that. Since we’re going to have to live with it for a long time, we need to get both the numbers and the strategy into perspective.

Numbers first. Major conventional wars kill many thousands of people a day (and a nuclear war would kill many millions). Even in the context of ‘national liberation wars’, where subjugated people are fighting to drive out a foreign oppressor, the death toll from terrorism rarely exceeds dozens a day. When it comes to international terrorism (like all of last fortnight’s cases except Chechnya and Israel), the average daily death toll worldwide is under ten. It cannot be said too often that terrorism is the weapon of the weak.

So how do terrorists imagine that they can ever succeed? Because they seek not a military but a political victory, and they know that the mass media of the target society will vastly exaggerate the scale and importance of what they do simply because it is dramatic and violent: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’

Those trying to free a country from foreign occupation by terrorism have traditionally had a good chance of succeeding, because they only had to wear down the foreign occupier, not defeat him militarily. In the decolonisation struggles in Asia and Africa after the Second World War, the rebels could not strike at the imperial homelands and generally lost dozens of their own people for every foreign soldier they killed, but they usually won anyway once they had shown that they could go on bearing that toll indefinitely.

Among this month’s terrorists attacks, only those in Chechnya and in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories more or less fit into the category of ‘national liberation wars’, but they may not have the same outcome. The great difference is that the Chechens and Palestinians are physically next to the homeland of the people who rule over them. That means that they can and do carry out terrorist attacks in those homelands, but also that the likelihood of the foreign ruler just cutting his losses and going home is a great deal less.

Most of these attacks could fairly be called ‘international terrorism’, since the targets and generally the attackers as well were multi-national in composition — but just what do they want to achieve with all this free publicity? Surely the Islamist terrorists who made these attacks cannot believe that they will make the West bow to their will?

Of course not. Their main goal is to overthrow the existing, mostly pro-Western governments of the Arab world and take their places, so their attacks are designed to drive Arab people into rising up against their governments. (Then they would create a united Arab-Islamic state, and ultimately a worldwide Islamic super-state that would take on and defeat the West, but that is a long way down Fantasy Road.)

Sometimes the terrorists are just trying to drive foreign visitors and foreign investment away and cause hardships that will turn Arab peoples against their rulers, as in the attacks in Morocco and Saudi Arabia a dew days ago. Sometimes, as in 9/11, they try to goad the United States into a massive, indiscriminate retaliation that would kill many innocent Arabs and fill the streets with anti-American revolts. In either case, they are only truly dangerous if they can get the target governments to over-react.

Arab governments, understanding this, mostly do not over-react. Neither did the United States in the first four months after 9/11, but that has changed dramatically since the ‘axis of evil’ speech in January 2002. There are several agendas running in the Bush administration, and the one on top at the moment is the hyper-ambitious Cheney-Rumsfeld project that uses the terrorist threat as a pretext for creating a global ‘pax americana’ based on the unilateral use of American military power. But the project of the Islamist terrorists is still running too, and this strategy is playing straight into their hands.—Copyright