A general paradox: NOTES FROM DELHI

THE lady at the counter of the Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow on that Friday night looked up at us, her eyes brimming with sympathy, her voice down to a hush.

Did we know that the British government had just issued an advisory asking all British citizens to leave India as well as Pakistan because of an impending war that could go nuclear? She looked bemused when we began to laugh.

We were going home, we said; and if that was the way the cookie exploded, well, what could be done about it? Home would remain home, even under a nuclear cloud. I am pleased to report that ours was not a singular reaction. The Virgin flight to Delhi was full to capacity. I learnt that Air India, flying at about the same time, had been forced to offload 40 passengers.

My very reliable guide to matters of life and death, Veenu Sandal, informs me that on May 15 something happened in the heavens above that made things down below a dangerous place. Mars, Mercury, Moon, Venus, Sun, Saturn and the ever-uncomfortable Rahu were placed in Taurus. Something similar happened in 1942, and the sky fell over the British in Singapore and the Russians across a wide front in Europe. This turmoil in the skies is scheduled to last through June. There may be a story to tell after that if India and Pakistan do not blow each other up first.

The conflict between the two is a war between frustration and hypocrisy. India is frustrated by its inability to settle its longest and most cancerous problem, over the status of the Kashmir valley; and Pakistan has spent more than fifty years using this problem to spread the cancer across the region. Given the values of our age, it is perfectly in order that hypocrisy should hold the edge. Our prime minister often resorts to poetry to express his frustration, although it is a moot point how many time you can cry “Wolf!” in verse. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee does give the impression that he would rather be a poet than a prime minister, a useful suggestion in a country that prefers power to be leavened by some degree of self-denial. At times of crisis he whips out one of his own poems in the hope that they are of some therapeutic value.

During the awful and awesome carnage in the state of Gujarat, when Muslims first fell on Hindus on a train, and were punished with rape and death by arson afterwards, the PM complained that he had been stabbed in the back by a dagger shaped like a moon under the influence of Saturn. When dealing with the terrorist attacks launched by Pakistan-supported elements, he has returned to the skies for imagery. There was a point when he could not see any war clouds, but just in case you went away relieved he added that lightning could always strike from a clear sky.

He has, less poetically, also suggested that the restraint he showed when suicide-missionaries from Pakistan attacked and nearly destroyed the Indian parliament on December 13 last year was a mistake. That was when the famous million soldiers mobilised along the world’s most dangerous border. As it happens the mobilized armies have remained immobile since then. That by itself is an unstable fact. Armies can stare at each other only up to a point without someone squeezing a trigger.

India and Pakistan would probably have finished their fifth war by now if they had not been nuclear powers. There is still hope that the prospect of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) will maintain the peace, but there is also the fear that someone may yet be too mad to worry about MAD. There are growing whispers from hawks on both sides that the nuclear option was created in order to be used. There is enough residual and continuing hostility to make this a real possibility.

Pakistan has a first-strike policy that it does not pretend to hide, and has said that it will implement it if India’s forces succeed in a conventional war. So India loses if India wins, with unimaginable consequences when it retaliates. The rough estimate of nuclear capabilities made by western experts is that Pakistan has some 35-odd nuclear warheads capable of reaching India by missile, while India has between 100 and 150.

The present crisis is a continuation from the one that began in December, but significant and even critical differences have occurred along the way. General Pervez Musharraf brought the temperature down in January with a much-admired speech whose candour was even more impressive than its courage. He accepted that fundamentalists and terrorists had created a “state within a state” in Pakistan and warned that they were as much a threat to his own country as they were to India. He arrested hundreds of fundamentalists, banned their organizations and set the mood for a new phase of relations between the warring neighbours. But a paradox has overwhelmed him after that brief moment of glory. In January Pervez Musharraf was a man of destiny. By May he had become only another general who had stolen a country.

The central purpose of General Musharraf’s policies and politics this year has been survival. Like so many of his predecessors, he promised a return to democracy when he seized power in a coup in 1999. The courts gave sanction to his rule but with a two-year limitation, which expires in October. Musharraf has managed to convince George Bush and Tony Blair that he is indispensable to their war in Afghanistan. But that was the easy part. He also had to convince the people of Pakistan, who are more sceptical about generals, that he was useful to them.

The sham referendum as a fig-leaf convenience was initiated and perfected by General Ziaul Haq, who used it often. His situation was very similar to that of General Musharraf. The world was far from happy at the coup. Zia ignored the world and hanged his predecessor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Musharraf ignored the world and banished Nawaz Sharif. Both were rescued within two years by Afghanistan, Zia by a Soviet invasion and Musharraf by an Anglo-American one. Both generals became “indispensable” to the western cause (the Soviet Union was also a western power). However, both had to pretend that they were indispensable at home as well. The sham referendum was the preferred methodology.

The comparison begins to weaken after this. The nature of the two wars in Afghanistan is different. Zia could use Islam, as well as the “state within a state” in the service of his Afghan war, with full approval from America and Britain. Zia could reserve his vast resources of duplicity for others. Musharraf is required to confront powerful Islamic fundamentalist forces within his own country as part of his obedience test. Zia could depend on this constituency. Musharraf cannot. Army dictatorships are never popular. Musharraf has to walk without a single crutch. He clearly never conceived the possibility of walking away from power. So out popped a referendum meant to legitimize his rule.

It flopped. The referendum weakened him, instead of strengthening him. The turnout was abysmal. Even political parties normally sympathetic to the army shunned this sham.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of General Musharraf’s much-awaited speech on May 27 was the time he took to apologize to his country for this sham. He was defensive and looked wounded. And so when he switched to belligerence against India, it was more shrill than powerful. At times he chose to make debating points like an ebbing politician. And you don’t really have to go on national television to repeat what you tell your cronies over breakfast.

The flat denial of any Pakistan support for terrorists in India was just that — flat. He reiterated Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri separatism and vowed that every Pakistani would become a holy warrior if India attacked. He did not mention nuclear weapons but his fellow generals have not been remiss in their promise to blow everything into a cloud if war comes. The general ended his speech on a plaintive note: You have always shown faith in me, he told Pakistanis, show faith in me in this crisis too.

Always? How long is always? A question frames the dilemma faced by the dictator-generals of Pakistan: if you do not represent the people, then what do you represent? What is your rationale for seizing and then holding on to power? Patriotism becomes the first refuge of the general. And patriotism is synonymous with confrontation against India.

This time around the generals of Islamabad have some help from the hawks flapping at the outer regions of the ruling BJP in Delhi. These hardliners have taken control of the agenda ever since they cowed down the prime minister over Gujarat, and prevented him from changing Narendra Modi for fomenting riots against Muslims. Mr Vajpayee may have thought then that he was taking one step back in order to move two steps forward later, but he has been trapped.

The world would probably not bother too much if India and Pakistan destroyed each other if they did not also threaten to contaminate the oil-rich world around them. In the past the world has waited for the two to exhaust their ammunition and return to sense, but the first sign of nuclear war came in 1999 when Bill Clinton had to inform the then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that some generals were planning a nuclear attack on India during the brief but intense conflict over Kargil. Sharif stopped the fighting and ordered Pakistani infiltrators to return home. One of the chief architects of that war was Pervez Musharraf.

A London postscript: Much to my dismay, I cannot blame the British for our ills this time around. There is no divide-and-rule policy to hang out as an excuse for our murderous, or suicidal, tendencies. But I do blame the British for one thing. They could have taught us better football than cricket. While the rest of the world exhilarates over a festival of football in June India and Pakistan talk of nuclear war. Would we have gone to war if we had qualified for the World Cup? Maybe Britain can still do something useful. Instead of sending Jack Straw Britain could have sent David Beckham to the subcontinent. He would certainly have had a better chance of reaching a goal.

Waiting for the budget

IT IS budget time and a helpless government hemmed in by an IMF breathing down its neck, Indian intransigence on the border, competing demands for scarce resources and administrative and political compulsions to keep additional resource mobilization measures simple and to a minimum is trying desperately to balance its books while maintaining a strategic policy direction in line with the dictates of globalization.

That the objective of greater fiscal discipline is to be achieved through instruments designed by our external creditors on whose goodwill we continue to live, only complicates matters as it leaves the government little room for manoeuvrability. This article examines the options and purposes the direction that the government should adopt on tax and expenditure-related measures.

It is instructive that whereas successive governments have been pursuing tax reforms under the watchful eye of the IMF for over a decade, yet, rather like Alice in Wonderland, we have not moved an inch forward from where we had started.

Although this fiscal adjustment process has sharply increased the share of direct taxes in total tax revenues (having almost doubled over the period), thereby reducing the overwhelming dependence on customs duties and trade-related taxes, somewhat broadened the tax base and introduced moderation in tax rates, the tax-to-GDP ratio has remained stubborn at 11 per cent, the level when the reform process was initiated.

This outcome is partially attributable to the failure to expand the tax base quickly enough to cover the services sector, sales tax exemptions to the so-called informal sector and the slower growth in import duties because of a lower rate of growth.

There used to be a time when everyone awaited the announcement of the budget with bated breath to see what was in store for them. Almost every year, there were changes in laws and rules relating to tax structure and rates. The purported purpose of the comprehensive tax reform was to create a relatively stable, economically rational tax structure that was to satisfy the criteria of economic rationality, fairness and simplicity.

Once these changes to institutionalize these reforms were to be completed the tax structure was supposed to remain stable. Then the rational interest in the budget, associated with tinkering with the tax rates, was expected to end. Unfortunately, however, we continue to see the old combination of the acceptance of the principles of tax theory in parts and continuance of the adherence to old practices in other aspects. It is time this uncertainty was addressed once and for all. So what should the government be doing in the next budget? To begin with it should extend the base of GST on services. Although the share of the services sector in the national income has increased, its contribution to tax revenues has not risen proportionately. As a result, the commodity-producing and organized sectors have had to bear a disproportionate burden of taxation. This has violated the principle of neutrality in taxation between goods and services.

The assignment of taxation powers in Pakistan is done according to the principle of separation. The Constitution assigns the powers to levy a sales tax on goods to the federal government and on services to the provincial governments. The contribution to GDP of the service sector, excluding public administration and defence, is close to 40 per cent of the GDP but GST collected from this sector is less than 1 per cent of GDP and less than 5 per cent of revenues from GST. The services sector is the largest and fastest growing source of income and its continued absence in the sales tax system has narrowed the tax base and made it difficult to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio.

That the federal government has not done this hitherto is because it has partly been reluctant (if not scared) to bring professionals, especially the holy cows, the lawyers, within the net and partly because the incentive, and hence the benefit, for it to do so is weak compared to the political cost of widening the base, since revenues from GST on services are, under the Constitution, reserved exclusively for the provinces.

The artificial distinction between goods and services has also kept alive an uncoordinated system for GST, opening up opportunities for evasion of taxes, and through collusion with traders, the sale value of post-manufacturing services can be inflated, especially in respect of transportation, installation, after-sale-service and warranty. Since these services enter into the production of goods, developing a non-cascading system for taxing consumption will only be possible when all services are taxed.

An exemption from GST breaks the chain of tax credit and deprives the subsequent buyers of the benefit of GST credit. If a real benefit is to be conferred without disturbing the chain, the commodity would have to be zero-rated. Relieving the tax on inputs and reaping the advantage of zero-rating of taxes on exports is also not possible unless all the services are taxed. Therefore, for establishing a modern and rational tax system the selective approach to taxing services will have to be abandoned immediately.

In the case of Pakistan, a feasible reform is to have a dual GST in VAT mode and a pure unadjustable sales tax — a GST in VAT mode of 12 per cent on both goods and services collected by the federal government and a destination-based consumption type retail stage non-adjustable sales tax at three per cent levied by the provincial governments. Again, the US, Switzerland and Canada follow the principle of concurrency with regard to levy of personal income tax, partly because mobility of individuals and households tends to be less than that of businesses.

This writer would strongly recommend that the income tax rate imposed by the federal government be lowered and the provincial government be empowered to levy an ‘add-on’ on the federal governments tax base of income tax. If this step calls for amending the Constitution, so be it. The point to stress is that the financial woes of the provincial, and recently established local, governments cannot be addressed without a clear move in this direction.

Next, the government needs to withdraw most of the income tax and the remaining GST-related exemptions, excluding food, financial services, health and education. The excessively high tax rates for banks and financial institutions should be brought down while the tax exemption limit for personal/individual incomes derived from non-agricultural activities should be raised to Rs.80,000 (from the present Rs.60,000) to bring it at par with that available to incomes earned from agricultural operations.

Notwithstanding the ambitious targets on growth in industrial output, there is little basis for any expectation of sustained high industrial growth. There is certainly no evidence of a sustained growth in domestic investment and demand or in manufactured exports, nor is there any notable improvement in supply-side factors. On the contrary, investment rates have actually declined over the last three years.

As has been repeatedly argued — and by now accepted by almost all stakeholders — the causes of export stagnation have a lot to do with the attitude of the bureaucracy towards the private sector and the structural bottlenecks that domestic procedures face, like a poorly functioning system for processing of tax and sales tax refunds and duty drawbacks claims. There are also the bureaucratic tangles that confront manufacturers on a regular basis when it comes to the implementation of government policies and the rapacious behaviour of the labour-related departments like EOBI and Social Security.

It is also time that both the federal and provincial governments to move to multi-year budgeting. Apart from the obvious need for conducting such exercises, a move in this direction is also essential to make an assessment of the requirement of funds for on-going projects (most of which are, on average, taking five to six years to complete), which in a sense represent the non-performing assets of the government.

The size of the bureaucracy needs to be trimmed drastically because we cannot justify one government servant for every 45 Pakistanis! The government has clearly acted as an employment bureau. It is mind-boggling that despite an over-size army of government servants, the quality of services continues to be so poor. The level of inefficiency must be astounding for such a huge number of public servants to add so little value.

It is instructive that the top 20 multinationals of the world produce an output 28 times larger than Pakistan’s GDP. To produce this output they use only 3.6 per cent of the workforce that produces Pakistan’s GDP. We, therefore, need to cut down the size of government. This step alone will speed up the processing of decision making as layers of vetoing powers are eliminated. However, for political and social reasons retrenchment would have to be carried out in a phased manner, starting with the civil bureaucracy.

Finally, since a large part of the finance minister’s speech is long and tedious, being devoted to detailing the outlays for development schemes, howsoever small and trivial the allocations, it is important to exclude such information from the ritually tiring annual budget speech. Instead, the government should release revenue estimates based on existing rates and expenditures on development programmes for the next year in advance of the budget speech, leaving the speech to address only the new taxation proposals.

The writer is former finance minister of Punjab.

Triumvirate of terrorism

IF you can’t beat them, join them. Russia has wisely decided to accept junior membership in NATO and link itself to Europe at the recent Rome summit rather than challenge the overwhelming might of the United States and its allies.

As President Lyndon Johnson pithily noted, it’s better to have someone inside your house spitting out, than outside spitting in. The Bush administration has followed this sensible dictum and is to be congratulated for steering Russia into Europe’s arms. The alternative would be a sullen, isolated, dangerous Russia.

So far, so good. But a cloud hung over the heavily guarded Rome meeting. The new US-Russian entente may be more a temporary liaison of convenience driven by sharing a mutual enemy — Islamic militancy (known as ‘terrorism’ to its enemies) — rather than common goals or ideals. As the Arabs say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In 1999, George Bush denounced Russia for its savagery in Muslim Chechnya thus: “When the Russian government attacks civilians, killing women and children...it can no longer expect aid. The Russian government will discover it cannot build a stable and unified nation on the ruins of human rights.” Now, in May, 2002, Bush lauds Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, as a friend, ally in the war against terrorism, man of peace and respecter of human rights. The same Putin whose forces invaded independent Chechnya, razed its cities, killed over 70,000 civilians, and continue to destroy it. Recently, Amnesty International again accused Russia of ongoing torture and human rights violations in Chechnya.

Just as Chechen fighting 300 years of brutal Russian occupation are now branded ‘Islamic terrorists’ by the Bush administration, so, too, Muslim Kashmiris struggling against Indian rule. As India and Pakistan teeter on the verge of war, the White House, whose hamhanded diplomacy helped ignite the current Kashmir crisis, has swallowed India’s claim that militants fighting its occupation of Kashmir are ‘Islamic terrorists.’

Any armed resistance by Muslims to oppression or denial of their basic rights is now deemed ‘terrorism’ by Washington, which has conveniently forgotten America’s creation of Cuban rebels, Nicaraguan Contra guerillas, and Afghan Mujahideen. India accuses Pakistan of terrorism while forgetting its support for Bangladeshi insurgents, Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, and dispatch of saboteurs to Pakistan.

As a result of 9/11, Chechen and Kashmir independence fighters have now joined Palestinians in a triumvirate of evil. According to the new Bush interpretation, any Muslims who resist the status quo, no matter how unjust, may be terrorists — especially if they use their own bodies or bombs as weapons.

Political militants who blow up buildings and airliners, or slaughter civilians, are terrorists. Unfortunately, revolutionary warfare always involves a certain degree of terrorism. Let’s recall Jews who waged a campaign of terrorism against the British in Palestine; India’s bloody suppression of Sikh separatists; the Irish uprising against British rule, and so on.

There is no clear line between ‘clean’ legitimate resistance and terrorism. Terrorism remains the weapon of the poor, unarmed, and oppressed. If Muslim militants had tanks and helicopter gunships like the Russians, Indians and Israelis, they would use them instead of suicide attacks. But they do not. How is an oppressed people without arms to resist?

Pakistan has armed and supported many of the Kashmiri Mujahideen operating against India. But India is a major violator of human rights in the Kashmir Valley, as Amnesty International also reported the other day. In 1948, the UN mandated that India and Pakistan hold plebiscites in their portions of divided Kashmir to determine the wishes of the population, 80% of whom were Muslims.

India has persistently refused to hold the vote and instead annexed its portion of Kashmir, insisting the disputed state is purely an internal matter. India’s claims that the current uprising in Kashmir is entirely due to Pakistani machinations are as false as Pakistan’s claims that it gives nothing but ‘moral support’ to Kashmiri militants.

In fact, the current Kashmir uprising spontaneously ignited in 1989 and caught Pakistan as much by surprise as India. But India, like Israel and Russia, has jumped on George Bush’s anti-terrorism bandwagon in order to crush enemies who are fighting as much for land and freedom than they are for Islam. Trying to demonize and dismiss the legitimate grievances of Palestinians, Muslim Kashmiris and Chechens by branding them terrorists is immoral and will ensure that ever more terroristic acts become the norm.

To the Muslim world, America has now joined Russia as its main oppressor. As the Israeli thinker Uri Avnery observed, the US is now acting like the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1830s by ruthlessly enforcing an unjust, repressive, and politically reactionary status quo.

Three decades ago, America was regarded as a friend and saviour by the Muslim World. In the 1990s, the United States saved the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from genocide — a noble act insufficiently recognized by the world’s Muslims. Today, after 9/11, America is now seen as the leading enemy and oppressor of Muslims, a fact underlined by the new US-Russian entente. Such is the continuing tragic fallout from 9/11. —Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2002

Malice on purpose

I JUST read where satire could be dangerous to your health. Two officials in Texas are suing a weekly newspaper for printing a story that a reporter wrote. It was a satirical piece, which pretended the officials had sent a 6-year-old to prison for reading a book in class.

The basis of the satire was that a judge and a district attorney had actually sent a 13-year-old to jail. The plaintiffs claimed they were libelled because the story was not labelled satire.

This article scared the heck out of me because satire is my business and I can’t afford to defend myself — particularly at the prices lawyers charge these days.

Let me give you an example of how satire works.

I read where the Republicans sent out invitations for a fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. In the invitation was a letter saying donors could also buy three patriotic photos of the president taken on Sept. 11, which they could have as souvenirs for $150 extra.

Now this is the kind of story I love because it makes you realize how tacky politics can really be.

I interviewed a Republican fund-raiser (fictitious, of course), accusing him of cashing in on what was one of the saddest days in our history, and he replied, “It wasn’t political — it was patriotic. Besides, President Clinton did a lot worse. For a fee he let his guests leave their dirty socks in the Lincoln Bedroom (I am bringing the Democrats into it to give the Republican side, which is a brilliant idea.)

He added, “The only ones who think the photo idea was smarmy were the left wing liberals who are critical of anything the president does.” (That’s what we in the satire business call a “zinger.”)

I said, “Some critics say the Republican fund-raisers are sucking up to the right wing.”

He said, “Why shouldn’t we? They were the ones who got Bush elected.” (Bull’s-eye.)

The question, dear reader, is how someone can be fair if he writes satire. The answer is, he can’t. Satire is malicious, and until now, protected by the First Amendment.

It is a way to express an opinion and also make the reader laugh. The important thing is for the person reading to have knowledge of what is being satirized so he/she can be in on the joke.

I remember once during the McCarthy days I wrote an article saying that almost every town in America had four or five organizations to fight Communists — but the towns didn’t have any Communists. I suggested each one import a Communist to come there and be the threat. He would throw garbage on people’s lawns, demonstrate at the courthouse and agree to have his phone tapped by the FBI.

The column caused a tremendous reaction, some negative, some positive, but I think I made my point.

We live in a country where writers can satirize anything they want to, even their own satire.

It’s a malicious business, but someone has to do it.

—Dawn\Tribune Media Services

Message from Almaty

WAS the Conference for Interaction and Confidence Measures in Asia (CICA) summit at Almaty a failure? That is how many in Pakistan feel.

If the expectation was that diplomacy on the sidelines of the summit would bring India and Pakistan rushing immediately to the negotiating table to discuss the future of Kashmir, CICA was a disappointment. But this organization which has been born after a long gestation period of a decade has achieved more than one could have hoped for in its very first high-level moot.

It was not the conference itself that was directly involved in the task of peacemaking. But it certainly provided the forum for some high-level international diplomacy. The post-summit statements by the leaders of India and Pakistan made it clear that the prospect of an imminent nuclear war in the subcontinent had receded — at least for the moment. The standoff has been somewhat defused. But with a million armed troops in an eyeball-to-eyeball position on the India-Pakistan border, the danger is not over.

The world does not want a nuclear war in South Asia. But that is what the two neighbours have been threatening to unleash on each other. Their own peace movements are not strong enough to make an impact on the policy-makers. Pakistan and India have retracted somewhat from their earlier position that they would use nuclear weapons if the need arose; the risk is always there that any outbreak of hostilities will spiral out of control and turn into a nuclear war. It is the element of uncertainty which has compounded the crisis, because the two sides have preferred not to define their red line — the strategic and political tolerance level — beyond which if either of them steps, there will be war.

It was this fear that galvanized the Russians and the Chinese into action. The Americans have already been involved in mediatory diplomacy. The force of international opinion and the behind-the-scenes pressure on the two rivals has obviously driven some sanity into them compelling them to pull back from the brink. The CICA summit proved to be timely for it provided the opportunity for the Russians and the Chinese to impress on the two leaders from South Asia the importance of not going to war.

But what is next on the cards? It seems likely that some headway will be made this time to break the cyclical pattern of the standoff between the two countries. Of course the push will come from all the big powers, with Washington playing the leading role. But in the background is CICA which has been rather downplayed as the India-Pakistan crisis stole the limelight at Almaty last week. In fact, New Delhi and Islamabad would do well to take note of the emergence of this new organization on the Asian scene.

The first significant aspect CICA is its membership. The sixteen members which comprise CICA are cumulatively home to nearly half the world’s population, that is 3.5 billion people. It accounts for 55 per cent of the world’s GNP and has 40 per cent of the world trade. But above all, six of its members (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrghyzstan) are also members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and have been fighting “cross-border” terrorism on their soil.

The composition is interesting in another way. Two major trouble spots of the world find representation in CICA through the presence of their interlocutors. For instance, apart from India and Pakistan who are the key actors in the war drama being played out in South Asia, Palestine and Israel have also been brought in.

True, when the first foreign ministers’ conference was held in September, 1999, these two regions were relatively stable.The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not figure at Almaty in a prominent way. But one hopes it will be addressed sooner than later. This means that CICA hopes to take seriously its role of a forum for dialogue envisaged for the conference by its founding members.

Since the concern about terrorism is shared by a number of the member states, they have a common interest in joining hands to tackle this problem. Although analysts have done a lot of semantic hairsplitting to point out that Pakistan’s concerns over Kashmir have been recognized, the fact is that the declaration adopted at Almaty describes as “criminal” any act of “terrorism” launched and financed from foreign territory. However, Pakistan can take comfort in the declaration’s reference to the right of self-determination of people under foreign occupation.

But considering that many of these states have been plagued by conflicts unleashed by extremists operating across borders, the thrust has been primarily against terrorism as defined by them and not us. It is in this context that the battlelines have been drawn and Pakistan is likely to find itself isolated.

The pressure at the moment is mainly on Pakistan, which has tacitly conceded that the militants are operating from its side of the Line of Control in Kashmir. It has also promised to take necessary action. The Jaish-i-Mohammad and the Lashkar-i-Taiba have not made matters any easier by making claims from this side of the border about their heroic exploits in Kashmir and even beyond. In the post 9/11 period, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies may not actually be facilitating the activities of these groups across the LoC as has been assured by the government. But has it really cracked down on them? Failure (or inability) to do so has provided India with the pretext to up the ante and bring the whole world scrambling to the region to counsel restraint. India which began the military build-up has not come under particular pressure to pull back.

We do have a point when we appeal to the world community to look into the basic cause of the violence. Hence our demand for a solution to the Kashmir dispute. This touches a sympathetic chord in international circles. But nothing more. Nobody wants to pay much heed to this demand in the din of the sabre-rattling that is going on in South Asia. The focus inevitably shifts to war prevention and denuclearization.

In this scenario, do we stand to gain by persisting with our present policy of putting pressure on India through the militants? The general attitude towards terrorism has changed after what happened in New York in September. The new disclosures about the disastrous failure of the American intelligence in pre-empting the Trade Centre attacks has also shifted the emphasis to the need for tackling terrorism with full force rather than looking for its underlying causes in a particular case.

The right questions continue to be asked about the root causes of terrorism but the answers focus more on policing rather than on remedial politico-economic measures. The first has acquired an immediacy if further violence is to be stopped. Henry Kissinger’s insightful analysis (Dawn June 6) should alert us to where the American interest lies.

It is time for some rethinking in Islamabad. General Musharraf’s over-dependence on religious groups for bolstering his position in domestic politics and in the context of his Kashmir policy will not pay him any dividends in the long run. The militant groups spawned by the ISI may no longer be subject to the law or discipline of the state. A U-turn is needed in these two areas.

The president feels threatened by the mainstream political parties at home and is playing into the hands of the religious groups in Pakistan as well as the fundamentalists and non-secular parties in India. It is a paradox that the religious fanatics on either side of the border are tacitly and unwittingly in league as they promote each other’s cause.

In the rumpus about infiltration and cross-border terrorism many failed to take note Prime Minister Vajpayee’s offer to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including Kashmir, after the “cross-border terrorism” has ceased. This reflects quite a shift from India’s traditional stand that Kashmir is an integral part of the Indian Union and cannot be discussed with Pakistan. Indian leaders have a penchant for making dramatic offers and then backtracking on them when the time comes for testing them. But should we not test them? We provide New Delhi the escape route by putting our own preconditions and reservations which often make one wonder whether Pakistan also wants the status quo to continue, however perilous it might be.