Pakistan has lost its Kashmir plank with India bringing on centrestage the need to counter terrorism,
The message from Yekaterinburg
Before the 9th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), India’s official line on Pakistan was: do something about terrorism first and then expect the resumption of dialogue with India. The message on Tuesday from Yekaterinburg was that the “primary issue of terrorism will be discussed by the foreign secretaries of the two countries before the leaders of the two countries meet again in mid-July on the sidelines of an international conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt”.
Pakistan’s spin was more positive: the stalled peace process between the two countries had got a “fresh lease of life”. Spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that President Zardari had “reiterated Islamabad’s desire to punish the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage”. India is keen to get action against terrorism; Pakistan wants to get back into dialogue. Both can’t do more than that because of the pressure of public opinion back home. It is intensely negative on both sides. Indians are riled over the Mumbai attacks; Pakistanis are riled over Indian interference inside Pakistan.
There was a time when Pakistan wanted “movement” on Kashmir from India. Now India wants “movement” first, on terrorism. One phase is over whether Pakistan likes it or not. The next phase is upon us and that is Pakistan’s war against Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Al Qaeda. One reason phase one is over is that even for Pakistan, the priority now is getting rid of the terrorists. Beyond that is a new model of relationship in South Asia between its two big nuclear-armed states and with the threatened countries that lie on the edge of the region.
President Zardari said some very significant things at Yekaterinburg about what he would like to see happen. He said: “Pakistan needed help to evolve a security mechanism to meet the threats of terrorism, narcotics and organised crime, and a mechanism on energy would help it utilise the energy surplus of other countries in the region.”
In his address, he offered a security mechanism not only to India but also, without naming countries and the organisations involved, to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, that would stop the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) from attacking Central Asia from its stronghold in South Waziristan. (Uzbekistan was attacked by IMU last week again.) More significantly, he offered a vision for the region that would include “economic cooperation that would help Pakistan build trade and communication corridors within the region”. One starting point for the trade corridors is of course Gwadar; the other is India.
The SCO is fast becoming an organisation that would link the security concerns of South Asia to those of Central Asia. That means that whatever happens between India and Pakistan will draw the attention and consultative intervention of China and Russia, who are the prime movers of the SCO. It is Russia that has enhanced the status of “observer” states like India and Pakistan and made them more or less permanent fixtures. And China has made India’s presence there easier by claiming it as its “strategic partner”.
India was supposed to be America’s strategic partner against China. After getting AWACS from Israel, it is an important observer member of the SCO and of BRIC, an economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The big agenda in the region is terrorism. South Asia is embroiled in it; Central Asia feels it is next in line. Pakistan says it is also a victim but the world sees it differently together with Afghanistan. This means that terrorism is also seen as emanating from these two states. This perception has lessened the importance of the old Indo-Pak dialogue that Pakistan wants resumed officially.
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
The war against terrorism should not be an India-Pakistan war. So far it is, with Pakistan blaming India for mischief in Balochistan and its “consulates” in Afghanistan; and India blaming Pakistan for sheltering terrorists who attacked it last year and will continue to attack it unless punished. If some media analysis is to be believed, the operation against Baitullah Mehsud is also a kind of India-Pakistan war. A new kind of dialogue between the two countries is essential. And it can’t be a rehash of what happened in the past, in which some optimists saw “great progress” but which yielded no results. *