THE road to Kabul is rough and bumpy— a stone-strewn, dirt track full of potholes. Your car has to have specially-made double shock-absorbers to be able to endure the rigours of the drive.

Plumes of dust billow into the sky as you drive past broken-down vehicles that had failed the road’s fitness test. Rusted tanks and army vehicles turned turtle along the road bear testimony to the battles of the past.

The slow-moving goods laden truck-trolleys inching their way up through the narrow-gorges high up in the mountain passes alongside taxis moving at almost bullet-like speed make an interesting contrast.

Life in Kabul is tough. Less than 30 per cent of the population have electricity. Power outages are common and normal. Firewood costs more than the wages of a Grade 16 officer in Pakistan.

Barring the affluent class living in Wazir Akbar Khan and to a lesser extent those living in the Soviet-built Makroryan, it is poverty all around. Bombed out houses and damaged government offices still abound in the Afghan capital.

Reconstruction has brought a bonanza for the few well-entrenched leaders. Rapidly-rising multi-storey buildings and guest houses belong to this or that leader, Kabulis will tell you. Corruption is rampant and international observers say pockets are very deep.

Money is pouring in and there is a lot of it, but only in the hands of a few. With security in the Afghan capital has arrived the US greenback. Go to any supermarket on the famous chicken street (a misnomer) and you will see dollars changing hands. Even the children waiting outside Kabul airport ask for a dollar bill. Afghan currency has taken a back seat.

If speeches by delegates to the 502-member Constitutional Loya Jirga were anything to go by, reconstruction work in Afghanistan has to yet to begin, barring of course the US-funded Kabul-Kandahar highway. There is relative security in Kabul, barring the occasional rocket landing on the city’s outskirts. Roads and markets are busy and traffic is chaotic.

Kabulis are getting on with their lives despite the rising cost of living. There are more FM radio stations in Kabul airing BBC, VOA and other independent news and entertainment programmes than probably all the FM radio stations in Pakistan put together.

In fact, the open-media policy puts to shame the restrictions placed by Pakistan on permitting private stations to use BBC and VOA broadcasts. Indian songs dominate the Kabuli radio channels, followed by Persian and Pashto songs. Pakistani singer Rahim Shah and Pashto singers from Peshawar are the only ones representing Pakistan on the electronic media.

Life is as normal as it could be in the given circumstances. Cinemas are back in business, all showing Indian films. Restaurants are open till late in the evening, blaring out Indian songs. The late-night curfews of the past not invoked any longer, but few Kabulis venture out in the dark.

The city’s people by nature are secular. You wonder how they had endured life under the Taliban. No wonder then that for most Kabulis, Ahmad Shah Masood is a hero and Pakistanis the villains of the piece for backing the mujahideen and later the Taliban.

There is little talk of what Pakistan has done by looking after the millions of refugees than what it did by supporting people like Gulbadin Hikmatyar and the Taliban. A lot of it could be attributed to propaganda by what Pakistani officials like to call the “Punjshiri lot”, but there is also little Islamabad has done to do away with the misperceptions.

Kabulis have more than one reason to thank India. There are 250 India-donated passenger buses plying on the roads in Kabul. The two aeroplanes New Delhi gifted to Ariana, the Afghan airline, are flying high in the skies. The Indira Gandhi Hospital is there to treat patients in a city whose healthcare system is a shambles. India’s contribution to the reconstruction of Afghanistan is all too visible.

What has Pakistan to show for itself? A $10-million cheque whose benefits Kabulis have not seen for themselves. Wheat and urea though useful commodities are a one-time utility. The Torkham-Jalalabad highway? Which the European Union was all-too-willing to build but Pakistan jumped in to do the job and has been trying to complete the paperwork for two years. There is a committee in Islamabad that meets after every three months to review the progress on Pakistan-funded projects in Islamabad.

The babus in Islamabad should have realized the importance of this vital road link between Pakistan and Afghanistan, if not in the interest of Afghanistan than in Pakistan’s own interests.

Despite our negative image in Kabul, trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan has crossed the $600-million mark, and if the road between Torkham and Kabul is built, Pakistani officials estimate, exports to Afghanistan could reach the $1-billion mark next year.

India can never beat Pakistan in terms of trade volume with Afghanistan, but when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan, more particularly Kabulis, Pakistan has to work much harder.

The writer recently visited Kabul to cover the Afghan constitutional jirga.

REPUTEDLY the brain and the principal tactician behind the Kargil episode (Feb-July 1999), Gen Pervez Musharraf’s demarche on Kashmir has substantially reversed Kargil. His statement on Dec 19, about leaving the Kashmir issue “aside” and going “beyond” stated positions, meeting half way somewhere to resolve the issue, was almost as dramatic in its effect as Kargil.

The episode stood as an example of the army’s unilateral initiative to nip the Indo-Pakistan peace process in the bud. Its disclosure shortly after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s historic bus trip to Lahore abruptly overturned the peace train.

Mr Vajpayee’s day-and-night Lahore visit produced the landmark Lahore Declaration and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) amounting virtually to a first draft of a no-war agreement. His historic pilgrimage to the Minar-i-Pakistan, the first ever by an Indian prime minister, was interpreted as re-affirmation to the two-nation theory, the driving doctrine behind the making of Pakistan.

Apart from the Kargil episode in the making, what left a dark shadow on the visit was the absence of the service chiefs from the reception line at the Wagah check post to welcome the visiting dignitary. Not being a formal state visit, the absence of the service chiefs, though understandable, was nevertheless conspicuous.

In the course of an interview with India’s NDTV in the middle of June 2003, Gen Musharraf admitted that Pakistani troops were “directly” involved in the conflict. “Kargil,” he said, “was a decision taken by the Mujahideen and we got involved because of the action taken by the Indian troops.” Either way, it was under his command as the army chief. He, however, went on to reaffirm his conviction that the “Kashmir issue must be solved” without war.

It was not the first occasion that Pakistani troops happened to be operationally involved in armed conflict in Kashmir “in support of the mujahideen”. This was Pakistan’s position even in first Kashmir war of (1947-48) until about May 1948 when then foreign minister Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan admitted that elements of Pakistani regulars were involved. Operation Gibraltar, the commando-type campaign launched in the first week of August 1965, was yet another episode projected as one “in support” of the indigenous Kashmiri freedom fighters. However, it had to be abruptly aborted for lack of support from the Kashmiris, particularly in the predominantly non-Punjabi-Pathan Kashmir valley.

Close on the heels of Gibraltar came Grand Slam, launched by the 12 Infantry Division under Maj-Gen Akhtar Malik. A blitzkrieg type of a fast-paced operation, Grand Slam lost much of its momentum less than half way through to its objective, Akhnoor, the Indian garrison town across the ceasefire line (CFL).

Grand Slam came to be better known for the unfortunate controversy attaching to the change of command midstream. Gen Akhtar Malik was summarily replaced by Gen Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan to upset the thrust of the operation. Yahya was still well away from Akhnoor when India attacked Pakistan along the international border on Sept 6, 1965.

Kargil was therefore not the only operation of its type planned and led by the regulars ostensibly in support of the mujahideen. Its noted feature was that unlike its predecessors, it was predominantly military in concept orientation and actual conduct, with nominal involvement and approval of the political leadership at the highest level. Gen Musharraf did say that “everyone was on board” to mean that the prime minister had been put in the picture. Only marginally, however, as coming events would prove.

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif had to make an air dash to Washington for an emergency meeting with President Bill Clinton to request the latter’s personal intervention to bring the conflict to a stop.

The Kargil conflict emerged as a flash-point internationally between India and Pakistan and also domestically, stirring up much bad blood between the prime minister and the army chief. Less than three months later, the civilian government was toppled and the army chief took over as the chief executive. Circumstantially, the army coup had little to do with the Kargil faux pas. Sequentially, however, the roots of the military takeover on Oct 12, 1999, could be traced back to Kargil.

In a strange sort of a way, Kargil has featured in our military history way beyond its tactical importance would warrant. To our operational initiative the Rann of Kutch in April-May 1965, India reacted aggressively in Kargil and captured three of our outposts over there. These outposts, returned to us under the Tashkent Declaration, were recaptured in 1971 and, in all probability, stay on the Indian side of the LoC. Under the Shimla Agreement, only areas lost or gained by the respective sides along the international border were restored to the status quo ante, whereas those along the CFL (redesignated LoC) were frozen in situ.

Kargil 1999 turned to be an explosive link in a long and vicious chain of events to upset the politico administrative equilibrium in Pakistan and push India-Pakistan into the longest diplomatic and military stand-off of their troubled history. Even the Agra summit, coming as a glimmer of hope, faded out quickly to leave the two groping in the dark for a ray of light without finding one.

Neither would budge an inch from their stated positions on Kashmir— Pakistan calling it its “jugular vein” , India terming it its integral part. In a wide-ranging address to the nation (Jan 12, 2002), Gen Musharraf declared: “Kashmir runs in our blood. No Pakistani can afford to sever links with Kashmir. We will continue to extend our moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiris.”

Nevertheless, he continued to stress the importance and urgency of resuming a dialogue for an amicable settlement of the dispute. India, for its part, refused to respond favourably to Pakistan’s overtures, predicating dialogue on a cessation of what it describes as cross-LoC “terrorism”. That has been in spite of the bold and effective measures on Pakistan’s part against the militant (so-called “jihadi”) groups to root them out as completely as possible.

Gen Musharraf’s bold initiative in reopening land-air travel and normalizing diplomatic relations with India, crowned by his latest demarche on Kashmir, places him in the class of strategic planners with a brave vision. The aura of a tactician, narrowly focussed on a single operation, regardless of its strategic fall-out attaching to him ever since Kargil, must vanish once and for all.

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

THERE seems to be no end to the non-issues the NWFP government readily involves itself in. The most recent of these is now a ban placed on the display of mannequins in clothing stores. In the past few days, police in Peshawar have ordered shopkeepers to take off mannequins or face a penalty for promoting what the provincial government says amounts to obscenity.

First it was a ban on all kinds of dance and singing in the province, which led to most of Peshawar’s prominent musicians and theatre actors either switching professions or migrating to other provinces.

Then, came the administrative thunderbolt according to which male doctors were told not to treat women patients. It didn’t matter whether the patient was on her death bed; she had to be seen by a doctor from her own gender. The decision, according to several stories that came in its aftermath, cost several dozen pregnant women their lives, who died during childbirth because female gynaecologists were not available. The fact that the NWFP is perhaps not the best of places to find female doctors was obviously lost on that province’s government since imposing such a ham-handed decision basically meant shutting out hundreds of thousands of women from medical treatment.

The decision to remove the mannequins is being zealously implemented by the local police in Peshawar. An AFP report (the matter was first reported by this newspaper’s Peshawar bureau last week) quoted a shopkeeper with a store on the city’s bustling University Road that the “strange decision” would be bad for business.

Among the other decisions taken by the provincial government, apparently, to improve the quality of life of residents in the NWFP, the following merit mention: the establishment of a committee headed by the provincial law secretary to make suggestions to bring the existing laws in conformity with Islam; establishment of a committee to Islamize the system of education; banning male coaches for women’s sports teams; making it mandatory for all girl students — from the primary level to university — to wear a hijab; formulating and implementing a rule according to which all businesses must close down at the time of prayer; formulating and implementing a rule according to which all forms of public transport must halt at prayer time, so that passengers and the driver can offer their prayers and making it harder for well-meaning and credible non-governmental organizations to go about doing their job of mobilizing and empowering women in the province.

The zealousness of the provincial government in ramming such edicts down the throat of an already devout population was matched in fairly equal measure by many local governments in the province. For example, in Mansehra (a known jihadi stronghold) the local barbers association, quite ironically, vowed not to cut the hair of those men who did not have beards.

The result of dealing with such non-issues was that the NWFP government got a lot of bad press not only in the foreign press but even inside Pakistan. However, given that the province has a host of major problems like lack of basic education and health facilities, sanitation, clean drinking water, industrial pollution in the urban areas, unemployment in the rural areas, corruption in the police and other government departments, and the presence of a timber mafia that has basically robbed the NWFP of its once-glorious forest cover, something like forcing shops to dispense with mannequins is bound to invite censure and ridicule.

Recently, the province’s chief minister, according to a report in this newspaper, was upset with the way his government had been treated by the media. He had said that the government had done a lot of good work but kept on getting a bad press. Well, what can he expect when his government goes ahead and imposes a ban on, of all things, the display of mannequins?