from Afghan Journal:
Ahead of Lisbon, soul-searching in Pakistan
For all of former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's faults, the one thing you would have to give him credit for is the emergence of a free press. It's every bit as fearless, and questioning as its counterpart across the border in India, sometimes even stepping over the line, as some complain.
Indeed east of the Suez, and perhaps all the way to Japan, it would be hard to find a media that is as unrestrained as in India and Pakistan, which is even more remarkable in the case of Pakistan given the threat posed by a deadly militancy.
And so in the run-up to the Lisbon summit where NATO leaders will decide, among other things, the way forward in Afghanistan, a few Pakistanis have spoken forcefully. They touch upon Pakistan's role as a conflicted ally in the war there and the extreme danger that the state itself faces now because of its refusal, or inability to break ranks with militant organisations. More striking, they challenge some long-held beliefs relating to India and Pakistan, in ways you would think was unthinkable.
One of them is an influential Pakistani newspaper editor, who according to Arnaud de Borchgrave in a piece carried by the Atlantic Council, has just made the rounds of Washington, delivering a stunning indictment of some of the players involved in the Afghan conflict. He can't be named and his comments were off-the-record, but meant for public use, Borchgrave says.
He has listed some of them, and I can do no better than sum them up here, given they speak so directly to the issues at the heart of a troubled region.
- All four wars between India and Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999) were provoked by Pakistan.
India-Pakistan “secret pact” – was Kashmir accord just a signature away?
India and Pakistan held secret talks for more than three years, reached an accord on the thorny Kashmir issue and had almost unveiled it in 2007 before domestic turmoil in Pakistan derailed it, former Pakistani foreign minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri has revealed.
Kasuri says the two nuclear-armed rivals, who rule the Himalayan region in parts, had agreed to full demilitarisation of both the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir with a package of loose autonomy on both sides of the Line of Control, a military control line that divides the region between two nations.
“We agreed on a point between complete independence and autonomy,” Kasuri told Times of India.
Almost all Kashmir leaders except hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani came on board and agreed on the accord that was to be signed during a visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Islamabad scheduled for February-March 2007.
It never happened. The then Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, lost power and the country plunged into turmoil.
The “secret deal” had come despite six decades of distrust and other festering disputes between the two countries who have fought wars over Kashmir.
Has Kashmir, the region that has bled for twenty years, lost an opportunity for peace and permanent settlement?
I would suggest that both India and Pakistan allow the leaders of Kashmir from both sides to convene a conference and find a solution. Both countries should pledge to support both sides politically, economically and financialy in their endeavour to find the solution. Leaving aside the differences of Indian Muslim league and Indian congress party, Kashmir has been the source of enimosity between these two countries and could also become the source of friendship.
The mission should be to let the Kashmiri population go free of dominations by their non kashmiri neighbours. I have not seen Kashmir but it was regarded by the Moghuls as a paradise on earth. Perhaps the new millenium would end their sufferings!!
Indian PM’s media coup at Yekaterinburg
“I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism.” This was how Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh began his crucial meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in Russia’s Yekaterinburg on Tuesday.
The comment, made in the full glare of the media, hit Zardari like a well-aimed arrow as the embarrassed Pakistani leader quickly interrupted to ensure the reporters were asked to leave the room.
Those few dramatic moments may have served Singh two crucial purposes: Pakistan could not showcase the meeting as proof that it was again business as usual between the two countries. Second, Singh managed to preclude any criticism back home that India had capitulated before Pakistan.
Indian newspapers such as The Hindu prominently speculated if Singh’s comments were by “design or happenstance”.
The Times of India too highlighted Singh’s acerbic comments with a front page photograph of the two leaders.
In their 60 years of hostilities, one weapon that India and Pakistan has used with much success is the media.
When then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf famously offered a handshake to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at a South Asian summit in Kathmandu in January 2002 — while the two countries mobilised for war following an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 — he was aware of the media arc lights.
The reuters folk did not publish my earlier comment. It was a lengthy one but a beautiful summary of Pakistan. But anyways, in brief, Rajeev, don’t you think that you are unduly optimistic based on media reports about Indo Pak talk success by AB/ Nawaz/ Mush/ Singh whereas in realty the result was Kargil conflict, Parliamentary attacks, Mumbai attacks?Basics of Pakistan have not changed so the results should also not change… We can wait, watch and see what would be the result of the US forced dialogue between India and Pakistan.Mumbai attacks killed some people we can say were influential and destroyed property of influential. So a lot of hulla gulla erupted and The entire leadership and media created a war hype. Mukerjee fooling around with “All Options are Open” statement. Singh fooling around with “No Relationship With Pakistan till terrorists are caught and deported to India”.Where are we now? All this proves that the leaders of India as W Chuchill said “Will be men of straw”
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
When India and Pakistan shake hands
As encounters go between the leaders of India and Pakistan, the meeting in Russia between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari -- their first since last November's Mumbai attacks -- was a somewhat stolid affair.
It had none of the unscripted drama of the handshake famously offered by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when they met at a South Asian summit in Kathmandu in January 2002, while the two countries mobilised for war following an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001. Musharraf's gesture made little difference in a military stand-off which continued for another six months.
Nor did it carry the warmth of a summit meeting between Vajpayee and then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore in 1999, which raised high hopes of a breakthrough peace deal between India and Pakistan. Those hopes were dashed months later when the two countries fought a bitter conflict in the mountains above Kargil, on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir.
But for all its absence of drama, or more precisely because of this, did the meeting between Singh and Zardari lay a more solid foundation for what is likely to be a long and difficult process of repairing relations?
The two leaders stopped well short of resuming a formal peace process broken off by India following the Mumbai attacks, and Singh delivered a stern warning to Zardari that Pakistan must not allow militants to operate from its territory. "I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism," he told Zardari at a meeting on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Yekaterinburg, in Russia.
But officials nonetheless held out the prospect of another meeting between Zardari and Singh at a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Egypt in July and said that senior officials would hold further talks to exchange information on terrorism. Semantics aside, that means the two countries are talking again after a deep crisis in relations following the Mumbai attacks, although India has insisted it will not reopen the so-called composite dialogue peace process until Pakistan takes action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for the assault.
So where do they go from here? Analysts see little hope for now of the two countries being able to pick up where they left off in a peace process which some say had nearly led to a breakthrough on Kashmir.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
India and Pakistan’s missed opportunities on Kashmir
India and Pakistan aren't always bickering, including over Kashmir, the dispute that has defined their relationship over more than six decades. Away from the public eye, top and trusted envoys from the two countries have at various times sat down and wrestled with the problem, going beyond stated positions in the public and even teasing out the contours of a deal. In the end of course, someone's nerve failed, or something else happened and the deal was off.
Beginning 2004 and up until November 2007 India and Pakistan were embarked on a similar course and very nearly came to an agreement on Kashmir, says investigative journalist Steve Coll in an article for the New Yorker. Special envoys from the two countries met in secret in hotels in London, Bangkok and London to lay out a solution and after three years they were ready with the broad outline of a settlement that would have de-militarised Kashmir.
An abstract of the article is here and the Washington Post has a story on it.
Under the plan, the Kashmir conflict would have been resolved through the creation of an autonomous region in which local residents could move freely and conduct trade on both sides of the territorial boundary. Over time, the border would become irrelevant, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops that now face one another across the region's mountain passes, Coll writes.
He quotes Pakistan's then foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri as saying that the back-channel talks had by 2007 become "so advanced that we’d come to semicolons."
"It was huge -- I think it would have changed the basic nature of the problem," the article quoted a senior Indian official as saying. "You would have then had the freedom to remake Indo-Pakistani relations."
mauryan
“there is an Indian in every Pakistani,”
—well maybe, care a damn – there’s nothin paki in indians-but it’s traitors like you who nuture a pakistani in their bosom that’s dangerous.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Musharraf planning to visit India
Former President Pervez Musharraf was always one for the grand gesture. So it should come as no surprise that after a period of relative obscurity following his resignation in August last year, he will visit India as part of a series of lectures he plans to give worldwide.
In an interview with the BBC, Musharraf, who has just returned from a trip to the United States, said he was enjoying his retirement and had been invited to give lectures on Pakistan and the South Asian region around the world. "He said the first invitation he had accepted was from India, where he expected to speak at a conference in Delhi next month," the BBC said.
“I love this life. I am relaxed and satisfied. And I am enjoying my lecture tours," he told Pakistan's Dawn newspaper. "Next month I am going to India for the same purpose. Let’s counter the Indians on their own home ground.”
India always had a rather ambiguous attitude to the Delhi-born former general. After blaming him for the 1999 Kargil war, it later began to see him as a man with whom it could make peace and it was under Musharraf that a formal India-Pakistan peace process was opened in 2004. By the time he resigned, as I noted in the post I wrote at the time , India was fretting that his departure could unleash tensions if it created a vacuum which could be exploited by Islamist militants.
So it will be interesting to see the kind of reception he is given in the sour atmosphere between India and Pakistan following last year's Mumbai attacks. Interesting too to ask whether the worries expressed by Indian analysts about a rise in tension proved prescient, or if it was simply an accident of timing that the Mumbai attacks -- which according to media reports could have taken up to a year to plan -- happened just months after he quit.
@Punjabiyaar,
Muslim kings defeated Hindu kings. Thats the way it was back in the day. Those defeats and 1,000 years of Muslim rule is part of the Indian inferiority complex till this day.
- Posted by Aamir Ali
–One major reason for a Muslim–whether in India or Pakistan-to look at the 1200yrs history objectively & without chest tumping is that you never know you are a converted. Aamir perhaps your ancestors were Hindu and who knows how they were (mis)treated that you are a Muslim today–there are several ways conversion can be done–first make sure of your ancestory before making claims. Just a suggestion.
Now about your point, we are not in denial-No denying that Muslims invaded India and ruled–perhaps that’s why we know the meaning of freedom more than a Paki does–we do not gift away the land to China, nor cede to Taliban. If I was a Paki I will say Indians ruled Muslims for >1000yrs! Any way, ASSUMING Mughals were great, what does that has to do with Pakistan’s improvement?, what is your contribution-ZERO? You can not even hold onto your country for 20yrs and broke into 2 pieces-remember 1971 Bangladesh and in 2009 SWAT is lost and the grip is losening and experts expect a total collapse in short time–But I wish you well. That is the hallmark of a loser–to live in the past–sadly you do not even know. Today. Pakistan in its entirety has zero contribution to itself, its neighbors and the whole world. You are living in the past which you do not even know. India was doing well in the past and is doing well now. We are in fine shape. In your message, I see between the lines the meaning that Pakistan is suffering from an inferiority complex because Mughals were kicked out by Brits.
Timing of Jaipur blasts will raise suspicion of Pakistani hand
Are militants, or even hawks within the Pakistani establishment, trying to undermine the peace process with India, now that President Pervez Musharraf has removed his uniform and civilians are squabbling for power?
The dust has scarcely settled on another horrific bomb attack in India, and the investigation has only just begun into the synchronised blasts in Jaipur that killed around 60 people .
It is still far too early to be drawing any firm conclusions, but the timing of the blasts is already making some people wonder whether Pakistan was involved.
The explosions came a week before India‘s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was due to visit Islamabad to review the peace process, his first visit since a new, civilian government took over in Pakistan.
It also came just a few days after some of the worst violence this year in Kashmir . India was unhappy that its soldiers came under heavy fire from Pakistani last Thursday along the Line of Control as armed militants tried to sneak into Kashmir .
It was also ten years since India conducted five nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13, 1998.
Now that the army is no longer running Pakistan, is the powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, flexing its muscles again and warning its new civilian “bosses” to abandon the cause of Kashmir at their peril?
How long Indian keep blaming Pak for the problems they have in their society or country,like cast, injustice in ruling other ehnics, unfair class systems, poverty. It is time for Indian to face reality and fix these very difficult problems.
PS
And like the joke goes, he should take many others like Musharaf take with him.
Rex Minor