Dreams and delusions

DURING the last days of July, Representative Tom Delay (Republican) of Texas, the House majority leader and described routinely as one of the three or four most powerful men in Washington, delivered himself of his opinions regarding the roadmap and the future of peace in the Middle East. What he had to say was meant as an announcement for a trip he subsequently took to Israel and several Arab countries where, it is reported, he articulated the same message.

In no uncertain terms, Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush administration’s support for the roadmap, especially the provision in it for a Palestinian state. “It would be a terrorist state” he said emphatically, using the word “terrorist” as has become habitual in official American discourse without regard for circumstance, definition, or concrete characteristics.

He went on to add that he came by his ideas concerning Israel by virtue of what he described as his convictions as a “Christian Zionist,” a phrase synonymous not only with support for everything Israel does, but also for the Jewish state’s theological right to go on doing what it does regardless of the fact whether or not a few million “terrorist” Palestinians get hurt in the process.

The sheer number of people in the south-western United States who think like Delay is an imposing 60-70 million and, it should be noted, included among them is none other than George W. Bush, who is also an inspired born-again Christian for whom everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Bush is their leader and surely depends on their votes for the 2004 election which, in my opinion, he will not win. And because his presidency is threatened by his ruinous policies at home and abroad, he and his campaign strategists are trying to attract more Christian right-wingers from other parts of the country, the Middle West especially.

Altogether then, the views of the Christian Right (allied with the ideas and lobbying power of the rabidly pro-Israeli neo-conservative movement) constitute a formidable force in domestic American politics, which is the domain where, alas, the debate about the Middle East takes place in America. One must always remember that in America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.

Thus, were Delay’s pronouncements simply to have been either the personal opinions of a religious enthusiast or the dreamlike ramblings of an inconsequential visionary, one could dismiss them quickly as nonsense. But in fact, they represent a language of power that is not easily opposed in America, where so many citizens believe themselves to be guided directly by God in what they see and believe, and sometimes do. John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, is reported to begin each working day in his office with a collective prayer meeting. Fine, people want to pray, they are constitutionally allowed total religious liberty.

But in Delay’s case, by saying what he has said against an entire race of people, the Palestinians, that they would constitute a whole country of “terrorists,” that is, enemies of humankind in the current Washington definition of the word, he has seriously hampered their progress toward self-determination, and gone some way in imposing further punishment and suffering on them, all on religious grounds. By what right?

Consider the sheer inhumanity and imperialist arrogance of Delay’s position: from a powerful eminence ten thousand miles away, people like him, who are as ignorant about the actual life of Arab Palestinians as the man in the moon, can actually rule against and delay Palestinian freedom, and assure years more of oppression and suffering, just because he thinks they are all terrorists and because his own Christian Zionism — where neither proof nor reason counts for very much — tells him so. So, in addition to the Israeli lobby here, to say nothing of the Israeli government there, Palestinian men, women and children have to endure more obstacles and more roadblocks placed in their way in the US Congress. Just like that.

What also struck me about the Delay comments wasn’t only their irresponsibility and their easy, uncivilized (a word very much in use concerning the war against terrorism) dismissal of thousands of people who have done him no wrong whatever, but also the unreality, the delusional unreality his statements share with so much of official Washington so far as discussions of (and policy toward) the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam are concerned. This has reached new levels of intense, and even inane abstraction in the period since the events of September 11.

Hyperbole, the technique of finding more and more excessive statements to describe and over-describe a situation, has ruled the public realm, beginning of course with Bush himself, whose metaphysical statements about good and evil, the axis of evil, the light of the almighty and his endless, dare I call them sickening effusions about the evils of terrorism, have taken language about human history and society to new, dysfunctional levels of pure, ungrounded polemic.

All of this laced with solemn sermons and declarations to the rest of the world to be pragmatic, to avoid extremism, to be civilized and rational, even as US policy makers with untrammelled executive power can legislate the change of regime here, an invasion there, a “re-construction” of a country there, all from within the confines of their plush air-conditioned Washington offices. Is this a way of setting standards for civilized discussion and advancing democratic values, including the very idea of democracy itself?

One of the basic themes of all Orientalist discourse since the mid-19th century is that the Arabic language and the Arabs are afflicted with both a mentality and a language that has no use for reality. Many Arabs have come to believe this racist drivel, as if whole national languages like Arabic, Chinese, or English directly represent the minds of their users.

This notion is part of the same ideological arsenal used in the 19th century to justify colonial oppression: “Negroes” can’t speak properly therefore, according to Thomas Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; “the Chinese” language is complicated and therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the Chinese man or woman is devious and should be kept down; and so on and so forth. No one takes such ideas seriously today, except for when Arabs, Arabic, and Arabists are concerned.

In a paper he wrote a few years ago, Francis Fukuyama, the right-wing pontificator and philosopher who was briefly celebrated for his preposterous “end of history” idea, said that the state department was well rid of its Arabists and Arabic speakers because by learning that language they also learned the “delusions” of the Arabs. Today, every village philosopher in the media, including pundits like Thomas Friedman, chatters on in the same vein, adding in their scientific descriptions of the Arabs that one of the many delusions of Arabic is the commonly held “myth” that the Arabs have of themselves as a people.

According to such authorities as Friedman and Fouad Ajami, the Arabs are simply a loose collection of vagrants, tribes with flags, masquerading as a culture and a people. One might point out that that itself is a hallucinatory Orientalist delusion, which has the same status as the Zionist belief that Palestine was empty, and that the Palestinians were not there and certainly don’t count as a people. One scarcely needs to argue against the validity of such assumptions, so obviously do they derive from fear and ignorance.

But that is not all. Arabs are always being berated for their inability to deal with reality, to prefer rhetoric to facts, to wallow in self-pity and self-aggrandizing rather than in sober recitals of the truth. The new fashion is to refer to the UNDP report of last year as an “objective” account of Arab self-indictment. Never mind that the report, as I have pointed out, is a shallow and insufficiently reflective social science graduate student paper designed to prove that Arabs can tell the truth about themselves, and it is pretty far below the level of decades of Arab critical writing from the time of Ibn Khaldun to the present. All that is pushed aside, as is the imperial context which the UNDP authors blithely ignore, the better perhaps to prove that their thinking is in line with American pragmatism.

Other experts often say that, as a language, Arabic is imprecise and incapable of expressing anything with any real accuracy. In my opinions, such observations are so ideologically mischievous as not to require argument. But I think we can get an idea of what drives such opinions forward by looking for an instructive contrast at one of the great successes of American pragmatism and how it shows how our present leaders and authorities deal with reality in sober and realistic terms.

I hope the irony of what I am discussing will quickly be evident. The example I have in mind is American planning for post-war Iraq. There is a chilling account of this in the August 4 issue of the Financial Times in which we are informed that Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, unelected officials who are among the most powerful of the hawkish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration with exceptionally close ties to Israel’s Likud Party, ran a group of experts in the Pentagon “who all along felt that this [the war and its aftermath] was not just going to be a cakewalk [a slang term for something so easy to do that little effort would be needed], it [the whole thing] was going to be 60-90 days, a flip-over and hand-off... to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Council. The Department of Defence could then wash its hands of the whole affair and depart quickly, smoothly, and swiftly. And there would be a democratic Iraq that was amenable to our wishes and desires left in its wake. And that’s all there was to it.”

We now know, of course, that the war was indeed fought on these premises and Iraq militarily occupied on just those totally far-fetched imperialist assumptions. Chalabi’s record as informant and banker is, after all, not of the best. And now, no one needs to be reminded of what has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The terrible shambles, from the looting and pillaging of libraries and museums (which is absolutely the responsibility of the US military as occupying power), the total breakdown of the infrastructure, the hostility of the Iraqis — who are not after all a homogeneous single group — to Anglo-American forces, the insecurity and shortages of daily life in Iraq, and above all, the

extraordinary human — I emphasize the word “human” — incompetence of Garner, Bremer and all their minions and soldiers, inadequately addressing the problems of post-war Iraq, all this testifies to the kind of ruinous sham pragmatism and realism of American thinking which is supposed to be in sharp contrast to that of lesser, pseudo- peoples like the Arabs who are full of delusions and a faulty language to boot.

To be concluded

When dictators escape justice

THERE is something deeply ironic about the fact that, as one brutal African dictator breathed his last in exile in Saudi Arabia, another brutal African dictator headed off to asylum in Nigeria.

There is also something deeply disturbing about the fact that both Idi Amin of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia have escaped justice.

For years, Idi Amin’s name was synonymous with brutality and massacres (even cannibalism, according to some reports). In the eight years between seizing power and being forced into exile, Amin presided over an escalating reign of terror. Tens of thousands of people were killed, often in the most horrific manner. No one knows the exact toll of ‘Big Daddy’s’ victims. Many more were forced to flee their homes — among them Uganda’s minority Asian community. They were booted out penniless after Amin claimed God had ordered him to turn Uganda into ‘a black man’s country’.

Idi Amin never had to answer for his crimes. In 1979, following his ouster by Tanzanian troops and Ugandan exiles, he started a life of exile in Libya and then Saudi Arabia. He lived there undisturbed until his death last week. During those twenty-four years, no serious effort was made to bring him back and try him for his actions. With his death has gone any remote hope that he could be held answerable. As Amnesty International put it: ‘Amin’s death is a sad comment on the international community’s inability to hold leaders accountable for gross human rights abuses.’

That history of evading justice is now being repeated in Liberia. Charles Taylor, the guerilla leader-turned-politician who presided over fourteen years of conflict in Liberia and its neighbours, has finally been ‘persuaded’ to leave the country. Within Liberia, Taylor’s disastrous rule claimed some 200,000 lives, with many thousands more forced to flee their homes. In neighbouring Guinea, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, Taylor’s vigorous support of rebel groups fuelled conflict and death on a similar scale.

An understanding of the full nature of Taylor’s crimes — for there can be no other word to describe his actions — can be gauged from Sierra Leone’s brutal conflict. It has been characterized by forced recruitment of child soldiers, young girls abducted to serve as sex slaves, and horrific abuses against the civilian population (including amputation of body parts from young babies). Taylor was one of the main sponsors of the rebels who carried out these atrocities. In June a special court in Sierra Leone indicted him for war crimes. That indictment spurred Liberian rebel groups to make a push on the capital Monrovia and, after weeks of fierce fighting and many deaths, Charles Taylor’s decision to step down from the presidency.

Taylor was ushered into asylum in Nigeria with a face-saving ceremony attended by the region’s ‘great and powerful’. South African president Thabo Mbeki was among those who stood by as Taylor denounced those who were forcing him to leave, and promised to return. The former Liberian president is now safely ensconced in Nigeria, with seemingly no intention whatsoever of appearing before the special court in Sierra Leone to answer the charges against him. Like Idi Amin before him, Charles Taylor has evaded justice.

How can people as bloodied as Charles Taylor be allowed to walk away from their crimes? The argument in Taylor’s case (less so in Idi Amin’s) was that securing his removal from power was vital to prevent more civilian deaths and atrocities. Since Charles Taylor made asylum abroad a condition for his resignation, there was no choice but to agree to it. Had asylum not been offered, Taylor would never have resigned and the fighting and bloodshed would still be going on. In short, peace had to take priority over justice.

This is a deceptive argument. Yes, in the short term some lives probably have been saved. But in the long term many more people will be killed, abused and made homeless because of the decision to let Charles Taylor walk free. For the clear signal it sends is that mass murderers can get away with their crimes: they will not have to face punishment or retribution. What then is the deterrent for tomorrow’s Idi Amins and Charles Taylors? The blunt answer, when one looks at Amin’s two-decades plus spent in comfortable exile and Taylor being red-carpeted to Nigeria, is none. There is nothing to stop them and therefore they too will inflict the same mass suffering.

Those who support the ‘peace-before-justice’ approach point to the many peace processes that have achieved success by adopting it. South Africa and Northern Ireland are the most obvious examples. In both cases past atrocities and abuses were assigned to history (though in South Africa they were acknowledged through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). The general argument is that in conflict situations, warring groups will often only agree to participate in peace processes if they are promised amnesty for their actions. Investigating past abuses stops peace moving forward.

The first counter-argument to this is that it is not universally applicable. Every conflict situation has to be considered individually. In many post-conflict situations, the sense of injustice felt by parties whose grievances have not been addressed (notably human rights grievances) will cause conflict to break out again years, even months, after ‘peace’ is supposedly secured. Ignoring justice is a quick-fix solution that brings temporary peace at best.

The second point is that, even where this argument has merit, it can only apply to ‘small fish’ guilty of localized abuse. It should never apply to ‘big fish’ guilty of orchestrating mass murder. High-profile abusers at the top of the ladder like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Narendra Modi, Idi Amin and Charles Taylor cannot be let off the hook. They have to be punished — not just for the sake of deterrence, but for the sake of their many thousands of victims. The suffering of those victims can never be reversed or compensated for, but at least they can have the satisfaction of seeing their chief abusers punished.

Primary responsibility for letting Charles Taylor off the hook rests with the African (as well as American) mediators who negotiated his ‘retirement’ in Nigeria. But wider responsibility rests with the international community. It has failed to prioritize getting justice in such conflicts (compare the effort put into dealing with human rights abuses with that put into combating terrorism). Nor has it established an effective mechanism to investigate, try and punish mass crimes against humanity. The International criminal court represents an opportunity to establish such a mechanism, but it has been held back by national interests.

Africa’s bloody history has already proved that justice is not an alternative to peace: quite the opposite, justice is the only way to achieve sustainable peace. The failure 24 years ago to bring Idi Amin to justice fuelled conflict and human rights abuse on the continent that continues today. Unless Charles Taylor is brought to justice, Africa can expect more of the same — more conflict, more abuse, and many more innocent victims.

Sanctity of the Durand Line

Some border skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which took place recently following the deployment of Pakistani troops in Mohmand Agency, were erroneously assumed by the Afghan government to be an intrusion into its territory.

Certain elements in that country, not favourably disposed towards Pakistan took advantage of this situation and attempted to poison relations between the two countries.

Their highly provocative statements stirred up anti-Pakistan feelings in Afghanistan, particularly among the youths, which culminated in a mob attack on the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul, on July 8, causing serious damage to it. These unscrupulous elements also made a malicious attempt to revive the long-settled issue of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan by questioning the legitimacy of the Durand Line.

Surprisingly, Hamid Karzai, believed to be a pragmatist, when asked about the status of the Durand Line, parried the question and said that it was up to the people of Afghanistan to take a decision in this regard. One cannot overlook the ramifications of this statement and the likes made by other important Afghan leaders.

Regrettably, since the creation of Pakistan, the successive rulers in Afghanistan, barring the Taliban, have been raising the Durand Line question whenever they considered it expedient to do so. However, Pakistan showed a commendable restraint and forbearance in the face of these periodic provocations and handled the matter with political sagacity and prudence.

The border between British India and Afghanistan was delimited under an agreement between the two countries in 1893, which became known as the Durand Line Agreement. This agreement was confirmed by further treaties, concluded in 1905, 1921 and 1930. Under this agreement both sides also recognized the area between the Durand Line and British India as “free tribal territory”. Since then the inhabitants of this territory have retained their tribal autonomy.

In July 1947, the Afghan government informed the British government that the tribesmen in the “free tribal territory” desire to dissociate themselves from India, meaning thereby Pakistan which was then in the offing. However, the governor of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Sir George Cunningham, after touring the tribal territory, where he met all the Jirgas, declared that these tribesmen wanted to retain the same relationship with the new state of Pakistan as they had with the British India.

Tribesmen, on both sides of the Durand Line, who shared a common ethnic identity, had always enjoyed close economic and political ties with the major states of the Indus valley and regarded Peshawar, which was the hub of their economic activities, as their capital.

Similarly, in the referendum that was held in the NWFP in 1947, under the June 3 partition plan, to ascertain their wishes about their future political dispensation, the people of the NWFP overwhelmingly decided to join Pakistan, which was a shattering blow to those who had demanded that the area between the Durand Line and the Indus, comprising the NWFP and the tribal territory, should be recognized as an independent Pukhtunistan.

When Pakistan appeared on the map of the world, as an independent and sovereign state, the Afghan government opposed its entry into the United Nations on the plea that the newly born state could not inherit the rights of British India.

However, while making this spurious argument the Afghan government completely ignored the fact that under the international law the treaties of extinct state concerning boundary lines remain valid and all the rights and duties, arising from such treaties, devolve on the absorbing state.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties also stipulates that international agreements, once concluded, are not open to question. They cannot be annulled or altered arbitrarily, save by bilateral agreement or force majeure.

The sanctity of international borders is, thus, recognized as a cardinal principle of the international law that antedates the UN Charter which does not even remotely hints at the right of a nation to change the recognized international borders. The recognition of the existing international borders and their permanency contribute to the strengthening of world peace and constitute a landmark in the development of international law and of relations among states.

The UN General Assembly resolution 2625 (1970), accordingly, enjoins the nations to “refrain from any action aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of any other state or country”. It follows from this that the Durand Line, established more than 100 years ago, unquestionably remains the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and constitutes the integral part of Pakistan’s national territory. Its validity, sanctified by the international law, is not open to question.

India is making every possible effort to establish itself in Afghanistan by exploiting the current fluid situation there, particularly by taking advantage of the power and influence wielded by the Northern Alliance in the interim administration which, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, has not been able to limit.

The Indian Embassy in Kabul and its consulates in other parts of Afghanistan are actively engaged in anti-Pakistan propaganda. Pakistan’s failure to protect its national interests in Afghanistan will be synonymous with the failure of its Afghan policy.

House for sale

DESPITE the flat economy, the real estate market is still booming. This is because the divorce rate is at an all-time high.

Eleanor Wildedon, a partner in the real estate company of Homes by the Sea, said, “It is not generally known, but my biggest source of properties for sale comes from couples who are breaking up.”

“I’ll be darned,” I said.

Eleanor showed me a photograph of a beautiful Cape Cod house.

“This is a real bargain. It’s owned by a couple who are having a bitter divorce battle. If you buy it, you can move in tomorrow. The only thing you would have to do is repair the hole in the wall so the rain won’t leak in.”

“Why does it have a hole in the wall?”

“The wife got furious at the husband one day and threw everything in the living room at him.”

She showed me another property she had for sale. “This home is within walking distance of the lighthouse. It came on the market after a wife caught her husband in bed with a waitress from the Bull & Bear Bar and Grill. The wife said she never wanted to set foot in the house again and the husband, for safety, moved to Key West, Fla.”

“Is it expensive?”

“I’m asking one million five because it has a good story to go with it. I can always get more money if the house has history.”

I looked at the photographs of houses she had displayed on her bulletin board.

“That’s a beauty.”

“It was owned by a couple who were very, very rich.”

“Why do they want to sell it?”

“He’s in jail for defrauding his company out of $10 million.”

Eleanor told me, “That ranch house over there is owned by the bank who foreclosed on it when neither wife nor the husband paid the mortgage. The wife said she refused to pay her share of the house for July when she knew the cheating husband would bring his Barbie Doll girlfriend in August for his share. The husband said he could no longer pay the mortgage plus the alimony his wife was asking for.” “How do you get your leads?”

“As soon as I read that a couple is breaking up, I call them and ask if they’re going to sell their home. Nine out of ten times, they’re so mad they say, ‘Put it on the market.’ That is why the price of homes keeps rising.”

“Who are the new buyers?”

“People on their second or third marriages. They tend to believe if they buy a house the marriage will last forever.”

“What happens if it doesn’t?”

“Then I get to sell the house again.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Perceptions and reality

IN India-Pakistan relations, perceptions and reality often dance together but at times they drift apart, like it seems to be happening now. Both sides now perceive prospects of peace and are trying to tie them to reality. But for that to happen they will have to recognize the reality, and try to change it.

The reality on the Indian side is that it has been pursuing a multi-pronged strategy on Pakistan in recent years specially under Vajpayee — diplomatically, to vilify us abroad with accusations of terrorism and religious militancy , and build an international coalition against us; and militarily, come down heavily on the Kashmiri resistance, and hold out a credible threat of direct use of force against us. The broader aim has been to step up international pressure on us, wear us down, erode our leverage in Kashmir, and chip away at our negotiating strength.

India may now be willing to talk to us not because the Americans have told it so; it may suit it also. Indeed India’s coercive diplomacy may have run its course. And there are strategic, economic and diplomatic dividends to normalization of relations with Pakistan. American “pressure”therefore is not something that India may resist or resent. It may even welcome it as long as both sides know the limits to American involvement that has so far been well circumscribed by Indian sensitivities and degree of tolerance. As India needs, and has been getting, the western support to its broader position on Kashmir, it has to from time to time ease up the pressure on Pakistan as a sweetener for keeping the West on board.

If India is ready to talk to Pakistan it is not to decide the future of Kashmir in our favour but to see first of all if it can play us out of the equation so as to facilitate an internal solution. In return it may be willing to offer us only good neighbourly relations including of course tension-free borders, in other words concessions outside the ambit of Kashmir. So much so that even the resumption of a dialogue is being made to look like a concession.

The diplomatic game plan that Vajpayee seems to have is to start off the talks by holding out hope to Pakistan that if it plays ball with India in the short run, by reining in the Jihadis and by bilateralizing the issue and agreeing to normalizing people-to-people contacts and trade and economic relations, and also join in some other confidence building measures, it could be “rewarded”with a slow motion dialogue on Kashmir promising at some point in future some unspecified “solution” of the dispute. No roadmap, nothing. Will Pakistan accept this? No, and nor will India accept our eternal and unchanging stand on Kashmir. So the actual realities, which the two sides have severely internalized, need to be revised to bring them in line with their impressionistic reality of peace.

We know that it is a big political and military challenge for Pakistan to retrieve its leverage on Kashmir without crossing the red light that India has now clearly set up with last year’s massive show of strength on the borders. It is also a diplomatic challenge, specially how to bring our relations with the United States to bear on the Kashmir situation where it too may be facing a diminished leverage because of the war on terrorism. On Kashmir, arguably, in the present situation the US may have come to acquire more leverage with Pakistan, already benefiting from US economic and security assistance and needing more.

We therefore really need to re-assess the situation before we lose our relevance to the Kashmir solution and before the international environment once again becomes unfavourable to us. For that we need to re-think our old patterns of thought. President Musharraf is a bold and pragmatic man and I am confident he and the broad military leadership would recognize the necessity for a change. The civilian dispensation also seems to be open to conviction. So the time to break new ground may never have been more opportune.

It is true Kashmir involves some obvious security and defence interests of ours. And above all it represents a moral commitment. But is this the sum total of our aggregate national interests and obligations? Pakistan’s overall national interests go well beyond Kashmir. Kashmir perhaps does not even fill up our overall interests with India. And as for our interests with India, what about the fate of 140 million Muslims? Should we not be worrying about them, and also should we not worry first about Kashmiris and what is in their best interests rather than about Kashmir.

I think we have to go to the next talks with India with a fresh approach if we want to make anything of them. More of the same will only stall things and suit India. First of all we have to ask ourselves what is it that we want in Kashmir — victory or a solution. Victory is not possible, but solution might be. Should we not therefore, without compromising on principles, move Kashmir from the top of our national concerns and priorities where it is casting a long and heavy shadow on our broader national interests.

Here is what I think Pakistan can do. The Kashmir dispute should be embodied in our overall relations with India rather than it obscuring or absorbing these relations indistinguishably. These relations, of course, should continue to occupy a central place in our foreign policy. We should then try to develop a linkage where progress in one area in the relations with India could be linked to progress in others. Kashmir should obviously get a greater weightage. Composite dialogue is fine but it is a form not the substance of talks. If the two sides do not show genuine flexibility on Kashmir, the whole exercise will come to a stumbling halt, once again. We need movement across the board.

Here language is important. Instead of continuing to denominate Kashmir as the “core” issue or highlighting its “centrality”, expressions that are resistant to flexibility, we could perhaps stress its “primacy”. This may change our mindset without causing a major paradigm shift. So we can risk that change. We should nonetheless continue to give strong and unrelenting moral and diplomatic support to the cause in international forums.

If India also makes a similar policy adjustment we may possibly get some respite from its hostility raising the potential for peace and stability that could allure international business community — tempted by the prospects of an integrated market in the region- to make serious efforts at bringing foreign investment. I do not know about other countries, but in Japan the business community used to tell me unequivocally that they would not bring any major investment as long as the potential for war and instability in the region remained.

All this may never materialize because of India’s failure to reciprocate, but we would have denied it at least one plausible excuse for confrontation. How will we know if we do not give it a try? This confrontation suits India as it provides justification for militarization. Its response in Kashmir has indeed merged with its broader strategy for the fulfilment of hegemonic and big power ambitions.

It is time to change the tack. Our diplomatic efforts have no doubt helped internationalize Kashmir, but at the same time they have helped India in taking full measure of the ineffectual international support for Kashmir. This revelation has further encouraged its intransigence. And even the exposure of the Kashmir issue itself has been mixed; if our story has received media attention so has India’s vicious propaganda against us. So we may have lost as much as we gained through the media as well as diplomatic exposure of the issue in the last 12 or 13 years. And I say that with much anguish as I have seen Pakistan straining under unbearable propaganda pressure internationally in this period and as a diplomat have often wondered if there was not a better way to fight for the Kashmir cause.

A weak Pakistan will not serve the cause of Kashmir well, a strong Pakistan can. A weakened Pakistan also will always consign us to dependence on big powers and obstruct the pursuit of an autonomous foreign policy. Let us build a strong Pakistan first.

The writer is a former ambassador.

NATO’s new role

THE United States and its allies founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe; since the Cold War’s end, the alliance has searched for a mission.

It sent troops to the Balkans to separate ethnic fighters, and, on Monday — for the first time in its half-century history — it dispatched troops outside Europe, to Afghanistan. Keeping the peace in Kabul is a good job for the 19-nation alliance and demonstrates its continued relevance.

NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force, which unfortunately remains limited to Kabul, the Afghan capital. A spokesman said that once the 5,500-person force gets settled, NATO might consider adding 10,000 more soldiers and putting them in other cities.

For well over a year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai rightly has called for stationing peacekeepers outside Kabul. Washington led the allied invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Al Qaeda, which was based in the country then ruled by the Taliban.

The Pentagon initially opposed peacekeepers even in the capital but belatedly saw the need. The Bush administration should press NATO to move beyond Kabul and offer to supply troops and help pay the higher peacekeeping bill.

Afghanistan also needs money for reconstruction. Congress authorized more than $3billion, but far too little has been spent. The administration is considering speeding up expenditures in coming months for roads, schools and other visible projects. —Los Angeles Times