LISTENING to the politicians in power on the subject of our emerging relationship with India, and placing their declarations alongside the joint statements of the Indian and Pakistani officials, reports of the understandings being reached, and actions being taken, cannot but be a mystifying experience for most observers.

There were times when important policy influencers in the foreign ministry, the military establishment, and politics believed that the continuance of a cold war with India would be advantageous both for the country’s internal cohesion and its foreign relations. This is no longer the dominant view.

It is now generally agreed that peace and amity with India would be more beneficial than mutual hostility. But this change of mind is still contingent upon certain conditions and concerns that remain to be finalized. These relate to a satisfactory resolution of the Kashmir issue, India’s quest for dominance in the region, and the resulting Pakistani interest in bringing about and maintaining a “balance of power” between the two countries.

India’s starting position on Kashmir is essentially the same as it has been since the end of its second war with Pakistan (1965), to wit, that Pakistan may keep the part of the state it controls, India will keep the part it occupies, and that it will not give any portion of it away to Pakistan. Our government’s present position is rather ambiguous, possibly because at this point it is not sure which objectives are achievable, but possibly also because it does not wish to alarm prematurely the more conservative sections of domestic opinion.

Our information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, has stated periodically that his government’s position on Kashmir is the same as it has always been. That, as we all know, is not the case. General Musharraf has been urging all concerned to discard oft-repeated and “hackneyed” positions on the subject. By way of giving the lead in the pursuit of new ideas, he has dropped Pakistan’s long-standing demand for a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people. The implication being that their wishes can be discovered in other ways. One such way would be to include the leaders of the Kashmiri resistance as participants in any negotiations concerning the territory’s future that may take place between India and Pakistan.

It is not clear what Pakistan will do if the Indian government makes a deal with the resistance leaders that neither allows the Valley the option of independence nor that of becoming a part of Pakistan but allows it substantial internal autonomy. Will Pakistan go along with such a settlement or will it challenge the representative character of the Kashmiri negotiators and continue the dispute with India? Nor is it clear how in our present government’s calculations Azad Kashmir figures in all of this. Are we going to instigate its people to start feeling alienated from us and demand independence or extensive internal autonomy?

Let us now turn to another aspect of this issue. Pakistan’s public position is that it should be settled as soon as possible even if it is to be done on the basis of some give-and-take. India does not want to make any significant concessions and would rather leave the issue to be resolved by one of the succeeding generations of politicians in some remote future.

General Musharraf’s government says, as all of its predecessors have said, that no real improvement in relations between the two countries can take place until the “core” issue between them (Kashmir) is resolved. This is the position Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz adopted during his recent visit to Tokyo. The general himself has made the same argument on many occasions. More recently, he has added another dimension to his advocacy. He says an expeditious settlement of the issue will enable him to deal with “extremists” in Pakistan more effectively. I imagine he is implying that a satisfactory Kashmir settlement will strengthen his hands vis-a-vis the more militant segments of the Islamic parties in the country.

But actions on the ground suggest that the general and his associates may have accepted the idea of letting time take care of the Kashmir problem. For even though no signs of an impending settlement are visible, progress in the improvement of relations, called CBMs (confidence building measures) is taking place in other spheres. The line of control between the two parts of Kashmir and the border between the two countries are being made “soft,” facilitating travel across them. Exchange of visits by persons of all descriptions has increased enormously.

There is the likelihood that several transportation links between them (road, railway, and sea) will be established or revived in the near future, and trade will increase. There is talk also of the banks in each country opening branches in the other. We can expect to see Indian stores and restaurants in Pakistani towns. All of this is called the “peace process,” which General Musharraf and Sardar Manmohan Singh have declared to be irreversible. It is happening even though the “core issue” remains unsettled.

One may infer from the above that in actual fact a satisfactory settlement of the “core issue” is no longer a prerequisite to the improvement of Pakistani-Indian relations. Continued references to it, required by the exigencies of our domestic politics, are not to be taken literally. This is not to say that General Musharraf’s government has abandoned the issue, but it does mean that the issue does not have the priority that it used to have.

We may now ask if, the peace process notwithstanding, India is to be viewed, potentially if not imminently, as an enemy, posing a serious threat to Pakistan’s security and integrity, and if Pakistan must therefore keep its “powder dry.” Rivalry, quest for dominance, and conflict are perpetual realities in international politics. Friends of today can be enemies of tomorrow. Even if we assume that the ruling elites in India do not any longer regard Pakistan as a perversity that must be undone, there is no reason to think that they will not want to dominate Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies, and twist its arm towards that end, if they have the requisite power.

Pakistan possesses nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them on targets in India, which in turn possesses the same capability in an even larger measure. This capability gives each side the power to deter a full-scale invasion by the other but it does not give either side the power to compel the other’s compliance with its dictates. Since an exchange of nuclear strikes will cause widespread destruction on both sides, it can be contemplated only as a measure of last resort.

If an exchange of nuclear strikes is dysfunctional because it will leave no arm for anybody to twist, the threat of conventional war could be used as an instrument of pressure to compel compliance. Pakistan wants to be ready to meet this kind of a threat. It wants to maintain a “balance of power” with India in terms of conventional weapons. Is this a viable objective? Let us see how they are currently placed in this regard. Approximate (estimated) figures for their capabilities follow:

 

Each country has a variety of missiles, including the cruise missile, with ranges between 110 and 1,440 miles in the case of Pakistan, and between 94 and 2,180 miles in that of India.

It will be seen that India is ahead of Pakistan in most categories of military capability and, considering that its defence budget is three times as large as that of Pakistan, this gap is bound to grow with time. What do our policymakers have in mind when they speak of a balance of power with India? I think they want to maintain a level of military capability that would deny India an easy victory and make a protracted war with Pakistan much too costly. In other words, they want to have a deterrent capability in terms of conventional weapons.

Pakistani spokesmen insist also that they do not want to have an arms race with India, and they criticize external powers that supply sophisticated high performance weapons to India of instigating an arms race. But the policy of maintaining a deterrent level of preparedness necessarily involves an arms race. It is an open question whether Pakistan can absorb the cost of maintaining this deterrent, considering that India, driven by the ambition of playing the role of a “major world power,” will continue to enhance its military capability.

There is, of course, the possibility that India has no intention of initiating a military conflict with Pakistan, that it wants to be the dominant power in the region, and that it will want to establish its dominance by political and economic, rather than military, means. If this reading of India’s intentions is correct, Pakistan’s quest for a balance of power with India may be misplaced.

The most practical way for Pakistan to resist Indian dominance would be to put its own house in order: build national cohesion, revive the receding sense of patriotism, create the stake of the various segments of the community in the country’s integrity and safety, restore internal peace and order, and provide the basic amenities of life to the people. A nation thus united, and marching on the road to progress, need not fear a foreign foe in the present international environment.

The prospect of India becoming a “major world power” deserved to be examined. It covets that status and its new strategic partner, the United States, is offering to help it become such a power. I do not consider this to be a viable objective of Indian policy but, having run out of space, I will have to defer its further consideration to another time.

E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.com

IT makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous, oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within 50 metres.

In the weird, space-ship isolation of Saddam’s old republican palace, the Kurds and the Shias have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution lest it fail to give them the federations — and the oil wealth — they want. They miss their deadline — though I found no one in “real” Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care.

And that evening, I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the “courage” of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised would be met.

Courage? So it’s courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which is in anarchy. Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is all part of the “road to democracy” in the Middle East.

I am back on the streets again, this time at the an-Nahda bus station — nahda means renaissance for those who want the full irony of such situations — and around me is the wreckage of another bombing. Smashed police cars, burnt-out, pulverized buses (passengers all on board, of course), women screaming with fury, children taken to the al-Kindi hospital in bandages to be met by another bomb.

And that night, I flip on the television again and find the local US military commander in the Sadr City district of Baghdad — close to the bus station — remarking blithely that while local people had been very angry, they supported the local “security” forces (i.e. the Americans) and were giving them more help than ever and that we were — wait for it — “on the path to democracy”.

Sometimes I wonder if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will actually collide. When will the detonation come? When the insurgents wipe out an entire US base? When they pour over the walls of the Green Zone and turn it into the same trashed blocks as the rest of Baghdad? Or will we then be told — as we have been in the past — that this just shows the “desperation” of the insurgents, that these terrible acts (the recent bus station bombing, for example) only prove that the “terrorists” know they are losing?

In a traffic jam, a boy walks past my car, trying to sell a magazine. Saddam’s face — yet again — is on the cover. The ex-dictator’s seedy, bewhiskered features are on the front pages, again and again, to remind the people of Baghdad how fortunate they are to be rid of the dictator. Saddam to go on trial next month, in two months’ time, before the end of the year.

Six deadlines for the ghastly old man’s trial have come and gone — like so many other deadlines in Iraq — but the people are still supposed to be fascinated and appalled at Saddam’s picture. You may sweat at home in powerless houses; you may have no fresh food because your freezer is hot; you may have to queue for hours to buy petrol; you may have to suffer constant death threats and armed robbery and your city may suffer 1,100 violent deaths in July alone (all true) but, just to take your mind off things, remember that Saddam is going on trial.

I have not met anyone in Iraq — save for those who lost their loved ones to his thugs — who cares any more about Saddam. He is yesterday’s man, a thing of the past. To conjure up this monster again is an insult to the people of Baghdad — who have more fears, more anxieties and greater mourning to endure than any offer of bread and circuses by the Americans can assuage.

Yet in the outside world — the further from Iraq, the more credible they sound — George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will repeat that we really have got democracy on its feet in Iraq, that we overthrew the tyrant Saddam and that a great future awaits the country and that new investments are being planned at international conferences (held far away from Iraq, of course) and that the next bombings in Europe, like the last ones, will have nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with Iraq.

The show must go on and I know, when I return to Beirut or fly to Europe, Iraq will not look so bad. The Mad Hatter will look quite sane and the Cheshire Cat will smile at me from the tree.

Democracy, democracy, democracy. Take Egypt. President Mubarak allows opponents in the forthcoming elections. Bush holds this up as another sign of democracy in the Middle East. But Mubarak’s opponents have to be approved by his own party members in parliament, and the Muslim Brotherhood — which ought to be the largest party in the country — is still officially illegal. Sitting in Baghdad, I watched Mubarak’s first party rally, a mawkish affair in which he actually asked for support. So who will win this “democratic” election? I’ll take a risk: our old pal Mubarak. And I’ll bet he gets more than 80 per cent of the votes. Watch this space.

And of course, from my little Baghdad eyrie I’ve been watching the eviction of Israelis from their illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word “illegal” doesn’t pop up on the BBC, of course; nor the notion that the settlers — for which read colonizers — were not being evicted from their land but from land they originally took from others. Nor is much attention paid to the continued building in the equally illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will — inevitably — make a “viable” (Lord Blair’s favourite word) Palestine impossible.

In Gaza, everyone waited for Israeli settler and Israeli soldier to open fire on each other. But when a settler did open fire, he did so to murder four Palestinian workers on the West Bank. The story passed through the television coverage like a brief, dark, embarrassing cloud and was forgotten. Settlements dismantled. Evacuation from Gaza. Peace in our time.

But in Baghdad, the Iraqis I talk to are not convinced. It is to their eternal credit that those who live in the hell of Iraq still care about the Palestinians, still understand what is really happening in the Middle East, are not fooled by the nonsense peddled by George Bush and Tony Blair. “What is this ‘evil ideology’ that Blair keeps talking about?” an Iraqi friend asked me recently. “What will be your next invention? When will you wake up?”

I couldn’t put it better myself. — (c) The Independent

INDIA and the United States are natural allies, but India’s Nehruvian philosophy of non-alignment and its aspirations to play a global role in exploiting the capitalist and communist blocs during the cold war kept them apart. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, that barrier was removed and India and the United States started moving closer to each other. It was only after the nuclear tests of May 1998 that this process met a temporary setback.

But it did not take long for the relationship to revive and in hindsight it seems that nuclear testing was seized upon by Washington and New Delhi as an opportunity to optimize their relationship.

Several rounds of Singh-Talbot talks provided that platform. The visit of President Clinton to India in 1999 was the first manifestation of the emerging partnership in the post-nuclear South Asia.

The lifting of sanctions and increased military cooperation, joint counter-terrorist operations and the setting up of several committees to identify areas of mutual interest followed the president’s visit. In January 2004, the US administration and Vajpayee government announced further steps in Strategic Partner Initiative, which included cooperation on missile defence, lifting of ban on civilian space programme and technology transfer from the US.

Now the 10-year Indo-US defence agreement and enhanced cooperation “in the areas of civil nuclear, civil space and high technology commerce” bring about a qualitative change in their relationship with serious implications at the regional and global level. These agreements will give India access to strategic weapon systems while critical technologies provide opportunities for co-production and collaborative research and development, including close collaboration in missile defence.

It will also enable India greater intelligence sharing as well as increased trade in arms. Whereas the nuclear and space cooperation is in civilian areas, India would fully exploit the dual nature of these technologies for a military advantage as has been the case in the past. The nuclear deal combined with the defence agreement and a whole range of agreements has catalyzed the relations between the two countries.

In bringing the two countries close, expatriates, think-tanks, defence industrial complexes and the US and Indian conglomerates have played a significant role in an orchestrated and well-coordinated manner.

America seems committed to transforming India into a world power as a partner, on the lines of Japan, with the expectation that it will compliment its efforts in the quest for shaping the world, particularly Asia, to advance its global interests. India will be allowed to have access to modern weapon systems and technology. It may also become a conduit for outsourcing of low and medium-technology items. In return the US would expect access to Indian military capabilities.

According to a respected think tank in America, “India can take on more responsibility for low-end operations in Asia, which will allow the US to concentrate its resources on high-end fighting missions”. Washington also expects that “India will collaborate with it in dealing with the strategic challenge of China”, notwithstanding the fact that both governments deny that Beijing is a factor in their calculations. But it cannot be denied that both consider China as a potential rival and wary of its growing strength.

Currently China has a balance of about 130 billion dollars annually in its trade with the US, which is a source of friction between the two countries. Recently a retired Chinese general remarked that China would not hesitate using nuclear weapons if the US ever sided militarily with Taiwan in the latter’s bid for independence.

This statement sent jitters in the corridors of power in Washington. Ironically, despite these undercurrents, neither country can afford to have bad relations with China. New Delhi has agreed to a strategic partnership with China and has joined the Shanghai Initiative and its trade with India is fast growing. The United States cooperates with China on a vast range of issues. Nonetheless, New Delhi would like to believe that it has not compromised its foreign policy nor has become too dependent on Washington. It will play the balancing act of emerging as an independent power and yet be a US strategic ally.

Despite the congruence of vital national interests between the two countries, India would not get everything it wants from the US This was manifest in Washington’s opposition to India’ bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, taking the plea that UN reform should take priority.

Although it is very much possible that US may support that India (and China) are brought in the G-8 grouping in the near future.

Moreover, it has to be seen to what extent the aims of the framework agreement will eventually be approved by the legislators, as the devil is in the detail and Indians and Americans are not known for being easy negotiators. There are other major global and regional implications of Washington’s cooperation with New Delhi.

Cooperation in civilian nuclear energy, which India needs for its sustained economic growth, is tantamount to legitimizing its de facto status as a nuclear power.

Cooperation in space and missile defence and sale of sensitive military technologies will weaken Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence and conventional capabilities. It would also erode China’s nuclear deterrence with both India and the US. In addition, there are political and psychological ramifications of the relationship.

India will have to swallow a lot of its national ego and pride to act as a second fiddle to the US., in spite of the fact that some analyst have commented that it is “not in India’s DNA to play a subservient role” to the sole superpower.

What then are the options for Pakistan in the emerging scenario? Despite the Indo-US alignment, Pakistan must continue to foster close and friendly relations with the US and expand them in areas of overlapping vital national interests. These include fighting global and regional terrorism and enhancing military-to-military cooperation, including co-production of military hardware, besides developing close economic and trade links and easier access to US markets.

Also important is seeking support in developing education and our technological infrastructure. Having good relations with the US in a unipolar world is by itself a positive factor in international relations.

At the same time, Pakistan should broaden its options by fostering closer relations with China, opening up to Russia, as there are no inhibitions or limitations of the cold war.

As excellent relations already exist with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, we need to build greater economic and trade links with these countries and seek avenues of cooperation in defence production. Islamabad should remove the irritants in relations with Iran and Afghanistan, giving them no opportunity for concern such as the safety and security of Iranians in Pakistan and the safety of Shia community here.

It is important to strengthen economic, political and cultural ties with the two countries and overcome past suspicions so that a new era of relationship based on mutual trust and respect can be built. In particular, ties with Afghanistan must be deepened and their concerns, whether real or perceived, removed through deeper engagement at the government and the people’s level.

These two countries need us as much as we need them. With India too Pakistan should continue to fully support the peace process and the process of normalization without compromising the aspirations of the people of Kashmir.

For Pakistan to gain international respect it is vital that its democratic institutions are strengthened. Democracy and human rights are now global norms and Pakistan will remain at a great disadvantage until democracy is genuinely restored. To face these new challenges the government would need the support of the people. Equally important is strengthening the economy and a sound educational and technological infrastructure.

The foreign policy of a country is closely linked with its domestic situation. A case in point is South Korea, which has a smaller area and less population than us, but is among the twelve largest economies of the world and commands wide respect and can stand up to powerful neighbours.

Pakistan’s geostrategic importance, its unique standing among the Muslim nations and its nuclear capability will have a significant impact if the country is seen to be free of terrorism, is a responsible nuclear state and has a stable democratic system. This may seem a tall order for a faltering society but true leaders are those who convert challenges into opportunities. Surely the fast changing global and regional scenario around us provides us with one such opportunity.

The writer is a retired lieutenant-general of the Pakistan Army.