TO deal with America — as most countries, no matter where they are situated, must learn to do — it is important to develop a good understanding of the beliefs and values of its leaders and citizens. One way of cultivating such an appreciation is to review what America is reading. In an earlier article in this space (July 1), I discussed the contents of three books that were being read with considerable interest by policymakers and policy analysts in Washington.

The books dealt with the growth of America’s economic and military power that seemed to be leading the country towards the creation of a sphere of influence that may, one day, come to be described as the Great American Empire. If it gets created its reach will be global and America the new hyper power — or uber power, to attach a more meaningful German prefix — would not face any challenge for many decades to come.

America would have created such an empire in spite of the misgivings of several European colonizers. Belgium, France and Russia had empires of their own. These experiences had convinced them that people subjected to foreign rule did not develop into healthy world citizens. The European domination of much of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 19th century and much of the 20th century was deeply resented by the subject people. Many of the problems that these three continents face today can be traced back to colonial rule.

But these experiences, even when they became the basis of the European opposition to the use of force in Iraq did not deter America. Iraq was quickly overrun by a US-led force and America began the second experiment in nation-building in the Muslim world while the first one in Afghanistan had begun to falter. But Washington seems undeterred. Guided by a number of neo-conservative thinkers who are convinced that it is America’s purpose in the world to spread its values and its political and economic systems, it seems that Washington will continue to use its military and economic might to bring the world under its sway.

All this does not mean that this line of thinking is not being challenged by thinkers within America itself. By briefly summarizing the points of view offered by the authors of two other books, I will be able to nicely round off the discussion that I began in the article titled “What America is reading?”

While the books discussed in the earlier article helped define the various dialogues in which the policymakers in America are actively engaged, the authors of the two books I will discuss today seriously question the beliefs of the “imperialists.” Let me start with the book that appeared recently under the title of “At War With Ourselves.” The book’s sub-title, “Why America is squandering its chance to build a better world,” sums up well the main argument presented by its author Michael Hirsch.

Hirsch has sound credentials to write a book of this kind. He was the foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent of Newsweek magazine. He now works at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based policy institute. The main conclusion of the book by Hirsh is centred in the belief that the American penchant to act alone, to show impatience with those who sometimes disagree with the position it is taking, to present its own interests in highly moral tones creates more enemies than friends. He is surprised that Washington has arrived at this point since multilateralism as a philosophy and as a way of managing international affairs has strong American roots.

Even the United Nations which at times got engaged in frivolous projects and pursuits has served a very useful purpose for America. It helped contain and educate potential adversaries like China and Russia. Ultimately, these countries were brought into the multilateral system as responsible members. As for other international bodies, “the WTO is the world’s rule setter, the IMF its credit union, and the World Bank its principal charity. America fully and actively dominates all these institutions and uses them to “take the raw edge of American hegemony,” writes Hirsh.

These institutions, Hirsch believes, have over time become committed advocates of the values America cherishes and the neo-conservatives among its policymakers are so eager to have other countries and people to adopt these. Moreover, often it is better for America to have the organizations in which it has a large presence to influence policymakers round the globe. The United States doesn’t have to bear its knuckles to get others to move in the direction it wishes them to go. This can be done by the international institutions it helped create and continues to dominate.

Hirsch believes that it is wrong for America to throw its weight around as it has done on so many different occasions after President George W. Bush assumed office. The display of raw muscle power may be satisfying for the egotistical but has seldom been an effective instrument of international policy. Having juxtaposed these two points of view — the “you’re with us or you’re against us” line adopted by the current rulers in Washington may have served to create a sense of confidence and purpose in the minds of a population that had been left utterly demoralized by “nine-eleven.” But, over the long run, it has alienated a great number of people and a lot of countries. This approach has not played well with others. Hirsch believes that Washington will need to change this stance in favour of greater accommodation of different points of view.

Clyde Prestowitz, the other author I want to discuss today, is considerably pessimistic about the likely outcome of the policies adopted in recent years by Washington. He tellingly calls his book “Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.” As one of his books reviewers puts it: “If you want to know how the American colossus looks to the rest of the world, ‘Rogue Nation’ by Clyde Prestowitz is your book — an unsparingly but unhysterical catalogue of American behaviour that has made the world see us as self-centred and hypocritical. The counts in the indictment are familiar: We approach free trade but underwrite American cotton farmers at such high prices that we keep African farmers in poverty. We guzzle petroleum and then need a foreign policy that overemphasizes one region of the globe. We preach democracy and dance with tyrants.”

While Prestowitz heaps scorn on the Bush administration, he recognizes that America has always been an outlier, confident that it could, quite literally, go its own way. After all, it started to drive on the right of the road when the British, who invented road rules, were driving on the left. It continues to measure distances in feet, yards and miles while most of the rest of the world switched to the more scientific metric system. It distributes electricity at 110 volts rather than 220 volts. To get the lights on, the Americans flick the switch up rather than down. British eat biscuits, Americans consume cookies.

The British cars have boots, the Americans trunks. The British see films, the Americans watch movies. And so on. Americans are perplexed — sometimes even offended — if people in other parts of the world act differently. As Prestowitz puts it: “Indeed, the chief reason Americans are blind to their own empire is their implicit belief that every human being is a potential American, and that his or her present national or cultural affiliations are an unfortunate but reversible accident.”

How would Prestowitz solve this problem? He doesn’t believe that the rest of the world would become Americans. The French, certainly, will not go for that option in order to produce a more homogeneous world based on give-and-take rather than on take-and-take. And, at this time in history, it does not seem possible that the world of Islam would shed its beliefs and values and adopt those the Americans consider vastly superior. For that part of the world, a bloody clash with the American civilization is already well on its way.

Prestowitz’s solution is centred on America’s spontaneous enlightenment which would lead to the recognition that everything the world and the planet earth have available need to be shared. To give a meaning to this wish the world leaders should take the Americans out of the Hobesian world of perpetual conflict to the one in which supranational institutions and rules of conduct can intermediate between the different and varying interests of peoples and nations around the world. In other words, America has to be tied down as a member of institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court.

Let me now draw some policy conclusions for Islamabad from the books discussed in the articles that appeared in Dawn on July 1 and those covered today. I have used five recent works by highly intelligent and experienced persons to present five different points of view that have begun to be debated in the corridors of power and in the hallways of many think tanks in America. We should tell Washington that it should not be tempted to follow the advice offered by Niall Ferguson and become an imperialist power with its own empire. The world today has been brought together by information technology and cheap communication. As we look at each other from such close distances we have begun to see how diverse we are. There is no one set of values and beliefs that can govern mankind.

It would also be wrong to follow Robert Kagan and try and ignore the lessons the Europeans can glean from their rich history. America is certainly the most powerful nation on earth today. It is not always the wisest. It has much to learn from what its Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has derisively called “Old Europe.” Age does not always mean senility; it can also mean wisdom.

Instead of Ferguson and Kagan, Washington should read Hirsch and Petrowitz more closely. Both make powerful points in underscoring the American attitudes and beliefs that grate on the nerves of other people. Hirsch offers a solution to accommodating American power and global diversity within an institutional setting with a global reach. Taking advice from these authors America should create a new world structure on solid institutional foundations laid by all countries and communities of the world.

Finally, not only the Americans but also the developing world should pay particular heed to the advice given by Fareed Zakaria who, with some powerful analysis, demolishes the romantic notion of developing democracy without first creating legal and judicial systems that govern behaviour; political parties that serve the interests of their members and not just of their leaders; and parliaments, that once elected, will serve their constituents and not only their members. There are some important lessons in this for today’s Pakistan.

THE two-day conference on Kashmir, held in Washington a week ago, at the initiative of Senator Thomas Harkins and a member of the US House of Representatives Joseph Pitts, unfortunately, failed to bring about any fresh thinking on the long festering dispute between India and Pakistan.

The sponsors apparently had hoped that the theme — ‘Beyond the Blame Game’ — would prompt some innovative thinking and throw up ideas which could prove helpful in breaking the ice of enmity and distrust. There is little to suggest that this has happened.

On the contrary, the discussions among the participants remained mired in the familiar exchange of accusations and counter-accusations. At one point, exasperated by the pointlessness of the discussion, one of the senior participants, Sardar Abdul Qaiyum Khan, a former prime minister of Azad Kashmir, threatened to walk out.

India’s indifference to the objective of the conference led to its official decision not to participate. However, several eminent Indian political thinkers and politicians decided to attend the conference in their individual capacity. They included the senior politician Dr Subrahmanyam Swamy, who had for some time served in his country’s central cabinet, and the renowned intellectual and author, Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma.

Pakistan, on the other hand, was supportive of the objective of the conference. Although there was no official delegation from Pakistan, its ambassador in Washington was among those who attended it. A former information minister, Mushahid hussain, was also among the participants, besides Sardar Qaiyum and several distinguished Pakistanis settled in America.

It appears that participants from both India and Pakistan chose not to shed their known mindset on the Kashmir question. Dr Subrahmanyam Swamy, for instance, insisted, even while discussing fresh ideas, that New Delhi had an “iron clad right” to the whole of Jammu and Kashmir as it was at the time of partition, knowing that India cannot force Pakistan to part with Azad Kashmir. The Pakistani participants also made the customary references to the antecedents of the Kashmir dispute, including the relevant UN resolutions. They should be expected to know that the situation on the ground has undergone vast changes since 1948 when the UN was first seized of the issue. Because of the near-absence of any fresh thinking on a problem which is a major stumbling block in the way of peace and stability between India and Pakistan, the conference thus ended as exercise in futility — to the utter disappointment of its sponsors.

At a time when Washington needs to cope with the difficult post-war problems in Afghanistan and Iraq, an atmosphere of discord in South Asia could not but add to its anxieties. The situation in Afghanistan particularly, with the border skirmishes between the Pakistan and Afghan troops is a further complicating factor for Washington to worry about.

American specialists of South Asia generally recognize the implications of the Kashmir dispute for the United States’ relationship with both India and Pakistan. It is accepted that Washington’s relations with the one cannot be at the expense of the ties with the other.

The failure of the Washington conference to shed some new light on a possible solution to the long festering problem of Kashmir must have come as a disappointment to official Washington as well as to those keen on having peace and stability in South Asia.

Perhaps the most tangible outcome of the Washington deliberations was a five-step plan to be implemented over a period of 11-year timeframe is not clear from the press reports of the conference. However, the central point of Dr Swamy’s plan is the proposal that the Azad Kashmir and the part of the state under Indian occupation should elect a joint assembly, with the elections being conducted by the respective election commissions of the two parts of the state. Dr Swamy has also proposed the abolition of the travel restrictions between the two sides over a period of two years.

Dr Swamy also believes that the Kashmiri pandits who once formed a significant cultural and literary community in the Kashmir valley and who were allegedly forced to migrate to Jammu by the excesses of the freedom fighters, should be given the facility to return to the valley.

Since a section of the Indian press tends to hold the Kashmiri freedom fighters responsible for the Kashmiri pandits’ plight, it is relevant to point out that an eminent Indian scholar, Sumuntra Bose, who was once associated with the Columbia University, maintains that the “spectre of Islamic fundamentalism” in Kashmir is largely a “scaremongering myth assiduously promoted by certain quarters to justify a policy of repression.”

Bose also maintains that the proportion of Kashmiri pandits in the state’s population and the cause of their migration have been highly exaggerated in Indian press reports.

Bose is extremely critical of the tendency to represent the Kashmiri freedom struggle in communal terms. In his words, the respect that Kashmiri Muslims have traditionally shown towards Hindu places of worship “has endured for the most part even in these troubled times.”

In his five-step plan, Dr Subrahmanyam swamy places great emphasis on the restoration of trade between India and Pakistan as part of a strategy to defuse tensions. He believes that Saarc provides an ideal forum for evolving a common market similar to the European Union or the Asean.

While normalization of trade relations and of information and cultural exchanges between Pakistan and India would contribute substantially to peace and stability in the region, the resolution of disputes such as Kashmir should not be delayed indefinitely. If these are not resolved to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, tensions will remain to strain relations in South Asia.

A well known American scholar, Robert G Wirsing, recognized as a leading authority on Kashmir, has gone on record saying that the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan has had a broad impact on “a whole range of long-term US foreign policy efforts in the region, including nuclear proliferation, promotion of economic development and the protection of human rights: it has also constantly threatened to escalate into a full-scale war that could force the unwilling involvement of the United States.”