India's prime minister has taken an initiative to open a way out of the tragic, bloody morass that passes for relations between India and Pakistan. It implicitly recognises the fact that there is no military solution to the Kashmir issue?Pakistan lacks the muscle to wrest Kashmir from Indian rule, and India cannot win decisively over Pakistan in difficult, mountainous terrain.
This remains as true today as in 1989 when India's unconscionable manipulation of Kashmiri politics led to a popular uprising. Pakistan was quick to translate India's losses into its gains and the military establishment hit upon the "bleed India through jihad" policy, to be accompanied by denials of involvement. It was imagined as a low-cost option leading to eventual victory.
Post-Iraq?and 70,000 Kashmiri, Pakistani and Indian lives later?it is opportune for Pakistanis to ask whether this unacknowledged strategy is working. For the last decade this question has been off limits. So it was to my surprise that Pakistan's president, General Musharraf, recently met with a diverse group of Pakistanis for what turned out to be an intense debate focusing on Kashmiri policy. That the president is willing to listen to dissenting voices such as mine is of some encouragement.
Pakistan's rationale for covert war in Kashmir has been twofold. The first objective of the low-intensity war was to "bleed" India so that it would cut its losses and quit. But there has been no evidence of a weakening of resolve. In fact, an unprecedented show of national unity emerged in India in response to Pakistan's infiltration of troops and jihadis across the line of control.
More significantly, confounding the expectation of Pakistani strategists, India's economy did not collapse but boomed. Indian foreign exchange reserves stand at over $70bn and IT companies alone earn India $10bn a year, equivalent to Pakistan's total foreign exchange holdings. This figure is expected to double in the next few years. Indian scientific institutions are now among the world's best. Pakistan's reborn economy, on the other hand, owes more to Musharraf's adroit handling of 9/11 than to any inner strength. Its industry is barely crawling, while education and scientific research seem incurably ill. In a technologically driven world, this is a devastating weakness.
The second Pakistani rationale was to keep Kashmir in the news. The implicit hope was that a high level of tension between two nuclear states would sufficiently alarm the international community?especially the US?that India would be forced to see reason. To raise fear levels, Pakistani leaders worked to cultivate an image of Pakistan as a defiant, nuclear-armed state ready to commit suicide. But at other moments, they sought to project an image of being calm, assured and responsible. Such signals made the threat of nuclear apocalypse real enough to keep a steady stream of foreign leaders coming to Islamabad and Delhi at the peak of the tensions last year. Pakistan felt the world would rush to solve the dispute. This turned out to be a miscalculation. In fact, the principal international alarm has been over the Kashmiri mujahedin and Pakistani nuclear weapons. This attitude preceded 9/11, but now dominates thinking. The US state department's recent declaration of over 20 jihadist organisations as terrorist includes the Hizb ul-Mujahedin, the largest mujahedin group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, with no history of attacking US interests. And in the international press Pakistan is often accused of playing the nuclear card to provoke fear, while India is blamed less often than in the past.
The consequence of waging covert war has been steady loss of international support for the Kashmiri struggle. This fact is known to all Pakistani diplomats who represent the country in the world's capitals, including those of Muslim countries. The moral high ground?the most powerful weapon of the weak?erodes after every massacre of Hindu civilians in Kashmir. India, the occupying power in Kashmir, has successfully portrayed itself as a victim of terror.
There is little to suggest that Pakistan has any new game plan. Resistance to change has many sources?a possible backlash from the religious parties and extreme elements within the military, and a large standing army that needs an enemy. Inertia and default dominate planning and design.
Where should new directions point? The two countries must abandon positions fixed 50 years ago and the your-loss-is-my-gain-mentality must be exchanged for one that values prosperity and social stability. This requires Pakistan to live up to its officially stated position?that it will provide only diplomatic and political support to Kashmiris struggling against India.
Kashmir watchers have counted over 30 long-term solution plans. One that makes particular sense envisages two Kashmiri entities straddling the line of control with their own governments and constitutions. These two entities, one associated with Pakistan, the other India, would have soft borders allowing for easy transit of people and goods. The details can be worked out by all three parties: Kashmiris, Pakistanis, and Indians. The US could act as facilitator.
The Pakistan/India conflict is like a cancerous growth, an organism with its own logic of development, in which deadly hatreds thrive and nourish each other. With Prime Minister Vajpayee's forthcoming visit, which he describes as the "third and last" peace effort of his lifetime, it is essential that another failure is averted.
