BEING a Safma visitor to India — Safma being the premier travel agency for high-minded journalists...great visits, Kathmandu, Dhaka, Delhi, soon perhaps Colombo — this piece should have been dedicated to the two-day talk-shop on conflict management (or was it resolution?) held at the Hotel Ashoka, Delhi, on October 9 and 10.

Serious talk-shop, unending papers, some of them rather good and informative, but at the end just a bit too much. Was tempted to say, and did indeed at one point when desperation got the better of prudence, that why not cut the crap and come to the point. If talking could produce peace, India and Pakistan would be the world’s foremost peacemakers. We just love to talk, and at length be it remembered. But talking alone, while often stimulating to begin with, leadeth in the end, as you can imagine, to ennui and a bleak view of things.

Any likely Kashmir roadmap emerging out of all the foam? You might be forgiven for thinking that with so many talk experts around, heavy names with serious faces as if the subcontinent’s fate depended on their talk, some plan or model would have been put forward. If there was one, it escaped me.

The talking done and the lunches and dinners eaten — very good food, by the way — I at least had had enough of India, Pakistan and Kashmir. Iron-bottomed diplomacy: Stalin’s foreign commissar, Molotov, was supposed to have an iron bottom. Used to be said he could wear anyone out. There was nothing of the kind here but in the end felt like one of Molotov’s victims: just couldn’t take it anymore.

Which of course validates the principle that to be cured of something, you must have an excess of it. Those who sow their wild oats early are as likely as not to grow up into responsible fathers and citizens. Those who miss out on what youth has to offer, usually end up carrying a hungry look round their eyes for the rest of their lives.

For some time at least, I stand cured of the Indo-Pakistan subject. Peace in the region, the lowering of tensions, the dawn of reason? Things which we all desire but which can come about at the bullock-cart pace at which all things move in the subcontinent. A farewell to talk-shops then, at least for a while.

I woke up early instead for the last of the Bush-Kerry debates to just see whether Kerry, who for the life of him can’t talk straight about Iraq — the number one fiasco the United States is mired in — could deliver the knockout punch which alone would give him a clear lead in the race.

He spoke well although looking, as I thought, a bit dour and funereal when the debate started: long face looking pasty and rather long. He clearly won on points. But then a mere technical victory was never going to take him very far. He needed a clear one to the jaw, with Bush down for the count. That didn’t happen.

He couldn’t really trash Bush the way he had to. Nor was he inspired enough to sound imaginative and visionary, to produce the kind of effect which would set him apart from Bush and persuade anyone watching to say, wow, that’s our man, that’s who we want in the White House, Commander-in-Chief Kerry.

No it wasn’t like that. Just about even, a draw, and therefore, looking at the campaign as a whole, a victory for Bush. For while Kerry needed a knockout, all Bush had to do was not fluff his lines, not smirk or scowl, and not look at a loss for words. This he managed to do rather well. Far from being inarticulate, he spoke clearly and even managed some good lines, such as “...a litany of complaints does not make a plan.”

Anyone else would be embarrassed by the regular run-ins Bush has with the English language. Not Bush who manages to draw laughs when referring to this inadequacy.

Speaking at the Republican convention in New York, he said that he had his faults like his swagger: “...in Texas we call that walking.” Then he said he was aware his English could be faulty. “When Arnold Schwarzenneger corrected me, I knew I had a problem.” (Arnold, remember, is an Austrian by birth.) During the debate when asked about his wife’s contribution, he said, “And her English is better than mine.” Self-deprecating wit never hurt anyone, something politicos in this part of the world could learn.

And so the winner is...not just in the debate but in the contest on November 2...George Dubya. This was the last chance for Kerry to score a knockout punch and emerge as the clear favourite. While he carried himself well, it just wasn’t good enough. Therefore, unless the gods intervene, it looks as if Bush is going to be around for four more years.

It didn’t seem like this when the campaign started and Kerry won the Democratic primaries. But it sure looks like this as the US presidential race draws to a close.

Iraq should have skewered Bush. Instead, it seems to have skewered Kerry for Kerry, just couldn’t bring himself to say hard and loud enough that Iraq was a disaster which should never have been started in the first place but having been started, should be ended as quickly as possible — an exit strategy more important than reinforcing failure.

True, Kerry has criticized the starting of the war and pointed out the lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks, but almost as if in passing and not hard enough. He spent more time and energy in trying to convince the American public that he would wage a better war with more allies on America’s side. If a continuation of the war is what both candidates are agreed on, what makes Kerry all that different from Bush?

This has been Kerry’s biggest failure: not being able to present a clear alternative to the American people. Bush is a known quantity, someone all too familiar. But what does Kerry stand for?

Debates in the end are not about policy details — which, in any case, stick in few people’s minds — but about eroding or reinforcing perceptions, the triumph of style and presentation over substance. Kerry was the clear winner in the first debate but hand it to Bush for having worked hard to overcome his disadvantage.

At the end of this debate, my feeling is that Bush recovered lost ground. It’s still almost a dead heat according to most of the polls. But with the polls this close, gut feeling becomes important and this is what my gut feeling is: Bush in the lead.

Which really means that Bush and his war party get away with murder. They have destroyed Iraq and brought death and destruction to its people. The issue was never Saddam Hussein. Leaving hidden agendas alone, the war was sold on different premises, all of which have turned out to be false.

Yet, instead of facing some kind of retribution, richly deserved in the circumstances, the proponents of one of the most callous military undertakings in recent times stand to be vindicated. The meek may inherit the earth in the long run but certainly not any time soon.

As a friend wrote to me from Washington, a Kerry victory would be nice if only to see the prayers of the Musharraf government not answered. Now it seems as if the Musharraf government will have the last laugh: the horse on which all their bets were laid winning. Four more years for Bush and an equal number if not more for “real” democracy, Musharraf’s gift to his country.