Musharraf « Prospect Magazine

Power’s world: Now is the time for a deal on Kashmir

Jonathan Power

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: time for a bold move

With the election behind it, it shouldn’t be back to square one for India in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three wars and once brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war.

India missed its great opportunity to settle the burning dispute while the military president, Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until his overthrow last year, was in power.

According to diplomats I talked to eighteen months ago, both British and American, in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalisingly close. One British ambassador told me that the main barrier to a deal was “psychological” and that India had to make very few concessions to make a final deal.

If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But India, despite the seemingly friendly diplomacy of the Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the unwarlike prime minister, Manmohan Singh and, in the background, another unwarlike figure, the chairwoman of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, couldn’t bring itself to go the extra mile.

Observers had different explanations for Indian intransigence- that Musharraff was trying to force the pace; that the Indian army, the intelligence services and senior bureaucrats in the foreign ministry were resisting an accord; that the leadership had not made an effort to educate the electorate as Pakistan’s had done; that the prime minister was weak and over preoccupied with the economy; that his (successful )attempt to lower the grinding poverty in the rural areas was also a preoccupation; that the time consuming nuclear deal with the U.S was critically important; and that India rather liked the status quo, since stubbornness fitted in with its self-image of being the sub continent’s super power. There was also the failure of the Bush Administration that was, in Singh words, “loved” by India for pushing a deal through Congress that lifts the long standing embargo on selling nuclear materials and reactors to India. America could have used the muscle that the nuclear deal gave it to help push India to sign on to Musharraf’s magnanimous offer. Read more »

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Power’s World: why the West is losing the opium trade to the Taliban

Jonathan Power

The West's approach to opium farming is allowing the Taliban to control the drug trade.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-370BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control.

If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today. No one is in need of an enlightened attitude more than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income, the poppy crop.

The tough, no nonsense, eradication programme has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. A more sensible option would be to buy the poppy crop. That is the opinion of the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, as well as the former finance minister Sartaj Aziz, who probably knows more about the economics of agriculture in Pakistan than anyone else (see my interview with Musharraf for Prospect from March 2007).

It would solve two problems in one blow. First, it would help deal with the world-wide shortage of medical opiates which, according to the World Health Organization, are causing a “global pain crisis”, particularly in Africa, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying in agony for lack of pain relief. Second, it would prevent the opium farmers of Afghanistan being driven into the arms of the Taliban.