TO understand the persistence of the decades of cold war between India and Pakistan, one needs to appreciate that India’s “tryst with destiny”, as Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru described independence, was also considered a great misfortune, because it brought partition.

Similarly, everlasting disappointment and anger because Kashmir was prevented from joining Pakistan overshadowed that country’s joy of independence, an achievement otherwise with few parallels in history.

So both India and Pakistan greeted their freedom from colonial rule with starkly contradictory feelings of triumph and defeat. The Hindus blamed the Muslims for breaking up India; the Pakistanis blamed the Indians for cheating them out of Kashmir, with the connivance of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

The bitter sentiments of perceived betrayal in India and Pakistan congealed into rock hard positions on bilateral issues. The Kashmir dispute became a threat to regional peace, a source of destabilization, a gobbler of scarce resources — a cancer in short.

But while Pakistan has recently shown substantial flexibility, India appears far less ready to embrace a just and equitable settlement. Pakistanis wonder, will India ever overcome its grievances and respond positively to Pakistan’s bold peace initiative to bring about a just and honourable settlement, acceptable to all parties, including the Kashmiri people?

So much time has been lost, so many decades wasted. Since 1947, the Kashmir dispute has distracted Indian and Pakistani leaders from tackling poverty, ignorance and disease. South Korea’s per capita income, which was roughly comparable to that of India and Pakistan in the 1950s, increased to over $12,000 per capita by 2003, while India’s rose to an extremely modest $530 and Pakistan’s to a mere $470. India and Pakistan have expended countless extra billions on their conventional armaments. Kashmir has also fuelled a growing nuclear and missile rivalry. The dispute’s adverse impact on the economic and social wellbeing of the South Asian peoples can only be guessed.

Somehow, an elementary yet profound truth has eluded the leaders of the two countries for over five decades. The truth is that India is critically important for Pakistan, while Pakistan is one of the most important countries for India. Without belittling the importance of Jammu and Kashmir to either, India and Pakistan can gain infinitely more from each other through friendship and cooperation than through confrontation.

The proposition that Pakistan thrives on hostility with India is false and pernicious. In fact, had the 1965 war not intervened, West Pakistan could have registered an annual growth rate of six per cent through the 1960s and 1970s.

If Pakistan and Bangladesh had separated peacefully, and had Pakistan avoided the nationalization of industries trap, the growth rate might have climbed to seven per cent. Annual per capita income in Pakistan could have climbed to $3,000 today, instead of $470, and the literacy rate to about 80-90 per cent, instead of 25-30 per cent.

If peaceful, cooperative relations are now allowed to prevail, India and Pakistan would be able to shift their priorities by spending more on schools, colleges, universities and hospitals. They could grapple with the herculean task of renovating the decaying sectors of the economy — railways, irrigation canals, roads, bridges, airports and power plants.

A long overdue modernization and streamlining of the armed forces, consistent with the hi-tech battlefield environment of the 21st century, would be possible. A dramatic drop in the level of tension would not be permitted to wreck military capability, as happened in Russia at the end of the Cold War.

Peace and mutual trust in South Asia would simplify many complex internal problems in India and Pakistan. Prosperity will surely curb extremism better than guns and bullets. Religious chauvinism in India could be tamed and its activities channelled into healthy pursuits such as moral uplift rather than persecution of the Muslim minority. Jihadi culture in Pakistan would lose its steam.

The guiding principle of a peaceful settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute is that concessions by one side have to be returned in equal measure by the other. The overall gains should be striking in order to neutralize any perception of loss.

The search for a mutually acceptable solution requires the two sides to delve a little deeper into the essence of sovereignty in the present day and age. They have to discard zero-sum options which would only inflict pain on one of the parties and look at other options that would confer significant rewards on all parties, including the Kashmiri people, who deserve the blessings of peace after decades of strife.

Pakistan controls about one-third of Jammu and Kashmir, and India roughly two-thirds, excluding the territory in dispute with China. Prima facie, India controls the most productive portion of the disputed territory. Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir has 75 per cent of the total population, with a correspondingly greater share of agricultural and industrial production.

Yet Pakistan’s position is hardly negligible. Apart from its immense strategic value, Pakistan-administered Kashmir also includes the Northern Areas, comprising Hunza, Nagar, Gilgit, Baltistan, and the Silk Route to China. Bounded by the mighty pillars of Nanga Parbat to the southwest and K-2 and the Gashebrum peaks to the northeast, it is perhaps the most valuable and magnificent of Pakistan’s territory. Kashmir may be the crown of the subcontinent, but the Northern Areas territory is surely the jewel of the crown.

If Kashmir were a piece of real estate generating revenue, considerations of size and productivity might have been decisive. The actual situation is the reverse. Far from yielding revenues, Jammu and Kashmir is draining the resources of both countries. India’s Kashmir-related financial burden ranges from one to three billion dollars a year. The extreme example is Siachen Glacier where the cost of a chappati delivered to the Indian troops on the frozen mountain-tops is Rs 600. No projected future revenue can possibly compensate for such extravagance.

Pakistan too has paid dearly. Other than the moral satisfaction of striving for a worthy cause, no conceivable financial revenue can compensate Pakistan for the steep price it has paid for its Kashmir policy. On two occasions, in 1948-49 and in 1965, the leadership staked all of Pakistan for Kashmir. In 1971 Pakistan finally lost East Pakistan, with more than half of its population, partly on account of its disproportionate preoccupation — some Bengalis thought it was an obsession — with Kashmir.

Clearly, the disputed territory has been fought over for reasons other than economic. It is a classic example of two countries locking their horns on an issue on grounds of principle, power, prestige and conflicting religious-nationalistic sentiment, not to mention sheer grudge, and then finding it impossible to disengage, although prudence and good sense requires a just and honourable settlement.

The hidden costs of the Kashmir dispute are even higher. Surely, the long-lasting confrontation with a country one-eighth its size has stymied India’s great power aspirations. The synergy of a prosperous cooperating subcontinent, instead of a bitterly divided and antagonistic cold war zone, could have propelled India to the front ranks of the great powers. South Asia might have been radiating prosperity and hope instead of visions of chronic economic problems and political instability.

It is a matter of regret that Pakistan’s bold peace overtures have evoked a cool and almost dismissive response from across the border. The recent agreement on a bus service across the Line of Control is a notable exception. Now the two governments need to ensure that the advance towards peace is not stalled. This forces one to raise the basic question: is India ready for a just and equitable peace? Or does it expect one-sided concessions from Pakistan?

The groundswell of approval in response to the recent thaw in relations is evidence that the time may be ripe for finding a graceful way out of the present impasse over Jammu and Kashmir. The peoples of South Asia aspire and deserve to share in the pride and satisfaction of a peaceful, thriving subcontinent.

India and Pakistan should benefit from experience that the exercise of sovereignty in this day and age is more often than not a symbolic act. Neither India nor Pakistan can eat the land, nor will the land run away from them, to put it bluntly. The two countries have been struggling over Jammu and Kashmir for 58 years is not because they wish to collect tribute from a subject people, as did the absolute monarchs of old, but because they have diametrically opposed views on the raison d’etre of their statehood.

The extent of the state’s failure to provide basic services and ensure economic and physical security to the people throughout the length and breadth of South Asia exposes the hollowness of the sovereignty argument. How much of this failure is due to the Kashmir dispute should spur the two governments to decisive action, belated though it may be, rather than to quibble over what is not essential.

Non-enforcement of the two states’ writ for the benefit of the people has reduced sovereignty to a largely a theoretical concept, with limited practical consequence in the day-to-day lives of hundreds of millions. At the most it is a sovereignty restricted to protecting the frontiers from foreign aggression.

Everybody acknowledges that the 21st century will be more and more an age of democracy, decentralization, transnational and transcontinental economic integration, globalization of communications, and ever more rapid technological change. But are the leaders of South Asia prepared to accept that disputes over sovereignty, internal and external, will probably lose their sharp edges with the passage of time?

If one remembers the tribal areas, and so many other lawless places in the interior of Pakistan and India, where the writ of the government is virtually non-existent, the point emerges quite clearly that sharing of sovereignty in Jammu and Kashmir will carry no loss for India and Pakistan, either in practical or symbolic terms — only gain.

The first gain would be that India and Pakistan would no longer consider each other as adversaries. An amicable settlement of the Kashmir dispute would be the dawning of a new era of friendship between the two countries, a harbinger of bilateral and regional cooperation, signifying the reversal of South Asia’s decline.

The writer is a former ambassador

THE recently released report on Pakistan by the Department for International Development (DFID), the main aid giving body of the British government, joins a chorus of voices being raised over the government’s inability to tackle poverty despite a major recovery in the state of the economy.

The report came some days after Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz made a statement at an economic forum in Jeddah that he expects Pakistan to achieve a growth rate of about eight per cent in the next few years

Mr Aziz holds the view that a higher growth rate will, in itself, take care of poverty. However, there are many that do not agree with this assertion. One of the strongest critics of ‘the growth removes poverty’ policy is a Karachi-based think tank, the Social Policy and Development Centre.

Economic growth is only one pillar of the plan to fight poverty. Other areas that need to be tackled are improving governance and devolution, investing in human capital and targeting the poor and the vulnerable.

The SPDC view has consistently been that while accelerated GDP growth represents the necessary condition for poverty reduction, it cannot be achieved through growth alone. There is an alternative view that poverty reduction is not only a function of increased economic growth but also of diminished inequality.

In the meantime, the level of poverty increased to 34 per cent of the total population at present as against 30.6 per cent in the 1990s. This tells us that the poor in Pakistan are getting even poorer.

There is no doubt that Pakistan has made an economic turnaround. What remains to be seen is whether the government is able to achieve a similar turnaround in the social sector.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, Pakistan slipped in the Human Development Index (HDI) from 138 to 144. Of particular concern is the country’s high child mortality rate. Overall, the social sector has suffered from years of neglect and under-funding. International financial institutions have commented that Pakistan falls in that category of countries where advances are being made in some areas but resources or policy deficiencies are blocking progress towards achieving several key goals.

In its annual report for 2003, the World Bank disclosed that while Pakistan’s economy has grown more than other low-income countries, its social sector growth in comparison has lagged.

The report also noted that the educated and well-off urban population in Pakistan lived not so differently from their counterparts in other countries of similar income range but the poor and rural population lags behind when the same comparison is made.

This points to a widening gap in the country between the rich and the poor. For its part, the Musharraf government has committed a significant part of its foreign assistance to social sector development. In 2004, the government announced that half of the five year $3 billion assistance plan from the US would be earmarked for social uplift. But how serious is the government about implementing a long term strategy when it does not have a good record of following through with such programmes?

Pakistan is also one of the few countries in the world where the number of illiterate people continues to increase with each passing year. The number of illiterate persons in Pakistan has risen from 28 million in 1972 to an approximate figure of 46 million at present.

To blame is a steadily increasing school dropout rate. This has risen from 40 per cent in 1996-97 to about 54 per cent in 1999-2000. At present, Pakistan is amongst three countries in Asia that have literacy rates that are under 40 per cent. In the South Asian region, Pakistan is at the bottom of the education ranking of countries, with an adult illiteracy rate of about 56 per cent and the lowest net primary enrolment rate in South Asia at 46 per cent.

Pakistan’s failure to realize the importance of human capital formed through education is reflected in the low allocations for education in the five-year plans. In the sixth plan, this allocation stood at less than two per cent. By the seventh plan, this was increased to three per cent. Now, however, in the eighth plan, the allocation has jumped to eight per cent.

The government now plans to open 270,000 literacy centres in the country by 2005. Part of the reason for this is pressure from donors to include education as part of the overall agenda. However, for this to work and produce results, the government needs to ensure a consistency in planning and implementation of the programme.

Embarking on literacy programmes on the insistence of foreign donors is one thing, following these through to ensure that both children and adults not only enrol in these programmes but also complete them, is quite another.

The country may have a huge human resource base but there is a shortage of technically skilled people. In the absence of this labour, it would not be possible for Pakistan to further strengthen its industrial and economic base.

The launch of the second phase of the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) in 2004 came at a time of growing criticism over the manner in which the government has handled the issue of poverty reduction over the past few years.

In its annual report last year, the State Bank had said that the biggest challenge before the country’s economic managers is to create as many jobs as possible in the short term. The report warned that given the carry over of the past legacy, current geopolitical and security situation, a non-supportive external economic environment and weak institutional capacity, it would simply be a pipe dream to expect a sharp fall in poverty levels in the short term.

The argument that the SBP gave was that poverty would not be eradicated unless its root causes, such as deprivation of human capital are addressed adequately.

With over 550 million people in South Asia living below the poverty line, it can be assumed that a large percentage of the world’s poor people live in the subcontinent. In September 2003, a man living in Karachi burnt his four children and then committed suicide. His wife had passed away some time ago, and in his suicide note, the man wrote that without a job, he could not feed his family and had decided to go for this option. Although, some medical circles alluded to the fact that the man was mentally unstable, this form of protest is on the rise as unemployed, desperate men and women make one last statement against the state of affairs that reduces them and their families to utter destitution.

The rise in the number of suicide cases in Pakistan is an indication of the feeling of utter frustration and despondency affecting a growing number of people and their families.

Statistics compiled on suicides reveal that 153 committed this act in 1996 while in 2002, this figure had risen to over 3,100. According to figures compiled by the World Health Organization, approximately one million people commit suicide annually across the globe. Of these 10 per cent take place in South Asia. In Pakistan, one of the main reasons people choose to take their own lives is economic deprivation.

Unemployment and a rise in inflation as a consequence of which a person simply cannot support himself or his family is a predominant reason for suicide. There are millions of people who live in varying degrees of poverty. Abject poverty can be seen in the rural areas of the country, hidden from the powers that be in the major cities of the country.

Ignoring the advice of home grown economists, the Musharraf government accepted the IMF’s prescriptions, which squeezed the Pakistani people under harsh conditionalities, extracted unimaginable sacrifices, ruined the middle class and increased the suicide rate.

Now puncturing the Musharraf progress card, the IMF says poverty is stagnant in Pakistan despite the three “successful” years of PRGF (Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility). It tells Pakistan that factors like extraneous political circumstances combined with local growth and continuing drought conditions in several parts of the country were responsible for poverty levels remaining stagnant. This prognosis and the IMF’s statistical analysis may provide food for thought for the economic wizards of the country although it is uncertain how it will bring relief to the poor.

LET’S suppose Congress approves President Bush’s “personal accounts” for Social Security. The Social Security system would then become the largest single investor in US stocks.

By 2050 Social Security could hold 25 per cent of all stocks, estimate economists at Goldman Sachs. This estimate reflects a modest plan for personal accounts; other proposals would permit bigger stock purchases. Hardly anyone has thought about the economic consequences of concentrating so much stock in the Social Security system. My hunch is that it would turn out to be a huge mistake — or worse.

The idea of personal accounts is that Wall Street should triumph over the welfare state. Just the opposite might occur: The welfare state would triumph over Wall Street. The money flowing into personal accounts would not be invested according to the “free market.” Individuals wouldn’t have the freedom to invest in Microsoft, General Electric or eBay. Instead, it would be invested according to rules made by Congress, influenced by politics. There would be unrelenting pressure from interest groups, “experts” and public opinion.

The danger is that investment decisions would become unduly politicized and that the economy would consequently suffer. The rules governing which stocks could or couldn’t be purchased for personal accounts might become irrational or counterproductive. The reason is that what personal accounts aim to accomplish is inherently difficult, perhaps impossible. The economic and social roles of Wall Street and the welfare state are fundamentally opposed. The attempt to blend them through personal accounts would create massive contradictions.

The role of Wall Street is to move investment funds to their most productive uses. If the process works well, the economy expands, living standards rise and the stock market advances. But inevitably there are losers, because Wall Street is an exercise in collective risk-taking. A free market means continuous trial and error.

By contrast, the welfare state is an exercise in collective risk reduction. It strives to provide some security — aka the “safety net” — against life’s misfortunes and the economy’s upsets. It aims to protect society’s poorest and weakest members. We have many welfare programmes. Social Security is the largest and most popular.

Personal accounts would be a strange hybrid: part “private” investment, part public entitlement. This is a hard straddle. There’s an unavoidable dilemma: Making personal accounts safer for individuals might make the stock market less useful — less dynamic — for society. The conflict has already surfaced. One criticism of personal accounts is that they might subject beneficiaries to huge losses, because stocks fluctuate erratically.

The administration counters that it would allow accounts to be invested only in “index funds” — for example, funds representing the Standard & Poor’s 500 stocks. The idea is to minimize the risk of big losses on individual or speculative stocks. Sounds sensible. But it would bias the market in favour of existing companies, industries and technologies. It would discriminate against the new, exciting and different.

If investment became too hidebound, it might slowly degrade the economy’s performance. Conflicts like this won’t conveniently fade away. Nor would personal accounts, if created, remain fixed for all time. As public entitlements, they would create their own ferocious politics. Millions of Social Security beneficiaries and countless interest groups would periodically agitate to modify the accounts, reacting to their own experiences or interests. The specter of rule changes would constantly hang over Wall Street; the larger the personal accounts became, the more the rules would affect how the stock market behaves.

What looms is a massive expansion of government power over Wall Street. To be sure, it would occur gradually, over decades, and its outlines are murky. The irony is that it comes from “conservatives.” Facing the rising costs of federal retirement programmes, practical politicians seek ways to cover the costs without resorting to unpopular benefit cuts. Putting payroll taxes into stocks seems one painless way out.

But even good stock returns can’t erase the basic problem. The costs of federal retirement programmes are growing much faster than any plausible portfolio of private accounts. Sometime between now and 2030, with the aging of the baby boom generation, the relentless increases in costs will force significant benefit cuts, big tax increases or both. The bipartisan consensus is to ignore this inconvenient fact. In their hearts, the Democrats want to do nothing. Republicans have at least proposed something. Unfortunately, it may be worse than nothing.—Dawn/Washington Post Service

RAFIK HARIRI’s table in the Etoile coffee shop in Beirut is on the right of the door, far back against the wall. Here it was that Mr Lebanon dropped by for his last coffee on February 14, only three minutes before his convoy was bombed.

I sat in the Etoile this week and looked at Hariri’s chair — the waiters routinely point it out to the pilgrims who now follow his last journey, walking from the parliament building across the square to the Etoile and then the last mournful trip to the site of the bombing. And perhaps because I knew Hariri — and had once asked him if he believed in life after death — I find myself much moved by his passing.

I remember the lunches and dinners he invited me to attend which I was too tired or bored to go to, the conversations I ended abruptly because I had deadlines to meet. In his death, he has become more real than in life, which is, I suppose, the only way in which we can be certain that the dead live on.

I suppose we Brits — or at least, the British press — have always been fascinated by life beyond the grave. Our fear of death, our hesitation to confront it while we are alive, our constant, unspoken hope that it remains many years away, seems — out here in the Middle East — a peculiarly western phenomenon. For in a part of the world where a person’s religion is part of their life — as opposed to the cultural bubble in which we have confined it — the end of life does not appear so terrible or so final.

This does not mean that life is cheap in the Middle East — though I suspect that death is — but that this is a continent of believers. In Europe, we close our churches or use them for concerts or turn up for marriages — yes, and death — but mosques in the Middle East grow larger, their congregations ever bigger. Men and women can face death in the Middle East with the same sangfroid as those European divines we condemned to burn at the stake.

I once asked a young Hezbollah fighter how he knew there was a life after death. “I can prove it to you,” he replied. “Do you believe that justice exists? Yes? Well, since there is no justice in this life, it must mean there is justice in the next life — so there is life after death!”

I was still pondering the logic of this when I visited the Iranian battlefront in the Iran-Iraq war. Under shellfire, I found myself in trenches during the battle of the Dusallok Heights, a system of earthworks that looked uncannily like the battlefields in which my father once fought in France in 1918. The dugout in which I sought shelter was small and a thick dust hung in the air. The light from the sandbagged doorway forced its way into the little bunker, defining the features of the boys inside in two dimensional perspective, an Orpen sketch of impending death at the front.

There, however, the parallels ended. For the youngest soldier — who welcomed us, like an excited schoolboy, at the entrance — was only 14, his voice unbroken by either fear or manhood. The oldest among them was 21. I still have my mud-stained notes of our conversation which I realize, now, carried more meaning than I realized at the time.

Yes, said the 14-year-old, two of his friends from Kerman had died in the battle for Dezful — one his own age and one only a year older. He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his own journey to the battlefront. Cried, I asked? A child cries because he cannot die yet? His comments were incredible and genuine and terrifying at one and the same time. But it was an older boy to whom the child soldiers deferred, a young man sitting on a rug by the door, bearded and — how I hate this cliche — intense. His name was Hassan Qasqari and I do not know if he survived — I suspect not — but he wanted to tell me how I lacked faith.

“It is impossible for you in the West to understand,” he said. “Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death — but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another. There are two phases in martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people. Those who create obstacles for God in this world are the enemies of God.”

I could not imagine this speech on a western warfront. Perhaps a British or American military padre might talk of religion with this odd imagination. And then I realized that these Iranian boy soldiers were all “padres”; they were all priests, all preachers, all believers. “Our first duty,” Qasqari said, “is to kill the enemy forces so that God’s order will be everywhere. Becoming a martyr is not a passive thing...”

If I did not understand this, he said, it was because the European Renaissance had done away with religion, no longer paying attention to morality or ethics, concentrating only upon materialism. I tried — in vain — to staunch this monologue, to transfuse this fixed belief with arguments about humanity or love. But no.

“Europe and the West have confined these issues to the cover of churches,” he said. “Western people are like fish in the water: they can only understand their immediate surroundings. They don’t care about spirituality.” I looked at all these doomed youths. “Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes,” wrote Owen, “Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.”

Of course, I tried my own arguments: that the Renaissance was not about the death of faith but about the triumph of humanity; that it remained a tragedy that the Islamic world — with its enemies at the gates — failed to pass through a renaissance of similar proportions; that perhaps Muslims would be less dogmatic in following every line of the Holy Quran so literally if Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Shakespeare — and, yes, Machiavelli — had lived in Baghdad or Cairo. It was to no purpose. Faith ruled.

And then this week, I looked up my notes of a radio programme on Islam that I produced for the BBC in 1996 and, sure enough, every Muslim man and woman stated with total conviction that their souls would live on — not in rivers of honey or surrounded by virgins — but that there really did exist a continuing life. The only Christian I interviewed for the programme was Professor Kamal Salibi, who used to run Jordanian Prince Hassan’s Centre for Interfaith Studies. What happened after death, I asked him? “Nothing,” he said. “We are dust. It is the end.” And I became a little frightened by this and much preferred a Muslim Egyptian woman who told me that not only would there be another life but also that she had some hard questions to ask God when she got there.

I have no wish to change my religion — if, indeed, I have one, for I notice that we always make a distinction these days between the “Muslim world” and the “western world” rather than the “Christian world” — but sometimes, after all the deaths I have witnessed, all the piles of corpses, all the innocents taken from this world, I have asked myself why we cannot believe in an afterlife.

Alas, it may be that the Renaissance which gave us our freedom also provided us with our eternal fear of death. And yes, Hariri told me he did believe in the afterlife. I am not so sure. But when I left the Etoile coffee shop, I did glance across at his table, just in case I saw him sitting there.—(c) The Independent