“There is a little bit of Indian in every Pakistani and a little bit of Pakistani in every Indian and I speak today as a Pakistani, as much as the little Indian in me”- Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari quoting his assassinated wife Benazir Bhutto.

Words spoken straight from the heart, and directly to the millions of families on either side of the border,  mine included, with common customs, language and roots until severed by Partition into two nations, two people unable or unwilling to live at peace with each other ever since.

 Zardari was addressing a conference in New Delhi via videolink where he also unveiled a proposal to commit his smaller nation to a no first use nuclear policy, highlighted in an earlier post on this blog.

But he also spoke about making it easy for people to travel to each country, perhaps with some kind of an electronic card.  Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has also proposed visa free travel between the two countries, an idea so daring given the tortured India-Pakistan relationship in which most of us grew up up thinking the other to be enemy number 1, that it has been quietly allowed to languish.

But what of India ? Is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, one of those whose ancestral home falls on the other side of the border, up to it ? (more…)

 U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has assured Pakistani President Asif Al Zardari of his support for democracy in the frontline nation during a telephone call on Friday, Pakistan’s official state agency said.

Obama’s conversation was part of a round of phone calls he made to world leaders including Britain, Israel, Japan, Australia, France and Germany, mainly to thank them for their messages of congratulation following his victory.

Pakistan’s The News in a report from Washington said Obama conveyed his full support to help Pakistan overcome its financial difficulties as also face down the threat from militants.

He said he was keen for better ties between the two allies in the war against militancy and to settle differences arising from U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan, the newspaper said.

The call came days after Pakistan’s leaders told the head of the U.S. central command, General David Petraeus, to stop missile strikes into Pakistan because they were counter-productive and difficult to explain in a democracy..

How will this play out? There are lives involved, and if women and children are going to continue to die in these strikes, the cautious enthusiasm with which  Pakistanis have greeted Obama’s ascent to power will quickly dissipate. 

Obama himself several times during the campaign said that he was willing to strike targets inside Pakistan if Islamabad was unable or unwilling to do so. Will that hold?

Meanwhile over the border in New Delhi, the press at least is working itself up into lather over the Obama phone call that never came.  The idea that the U.S. President-elect called leaders of 15 nations and especially Pakistan, and not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, doesn’t help advance India’s great power ambitions.

But The Times of India quoted an Indian diplomat as saying that New Delhi shouldn’t be over-reacting, arguing that it should consider itself better off that it was “not in the same crisis league”, referring obviously to Pakistan

And in any case, India has cried itself hoarse in the past that U.S. relations with India and Pakistan should not be a zero-sum game. So why this re-hyphenation?

In the aftermath of the deadly hotel bombing in Islamabad, amidst fresh tensions with the United States over  helicopter intrusions in Pakistan’s northwest, and in spite of reports of fresh cross-border firing in Kashmir, negotiators from India and Pakistan met in New Delhi and agreed to open trade across Kashmir. There could hardly have been a more unlikely time for the two countries to agree to crack open one of the world’s most militarised frontiers, where a ceasefire which has more or less held since 2003 is beginning to fray at the edges.

To be sure, the neighbours have a passenger bus service twice a month that links the two parts of Kashmir under their control, but it is heavily restricted and travellers are subject to all sorts of clearances before they can get anywhere near it.

So opening up trade, and at a time like this when Pakistan is battling multiple challenges, does seem like a significant step. Does this mean there is a glimmer of hope in the otherwise pervasive sense of gloom spreading across the region? Or is this another one of those false dawns that the people of the two countries have seen too often in the past, and especially the people of Kashmir?

What the two countries will trade is the first question that springs to mind. And are these goods that are meant to be traded without any tarriffs to be produced in the two Kashmirs or will they be coming from somewhere else?

And then above all, is this initiative going to work at this point when unrest in Indian Kashmir over a land row involving Hindus has snowballed into massive anti-India protests of a scale last seen in 1989?

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who said at his inauguration earlier this month that he expected some “good news” on Kashmir soon, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are expected to meet in New York this week where the details will likely become clearer.

One of the more recurrent themes in U.S. political punditry these days is the need to nudge India and Pakistan towards peace. The theory is that this would bolster the new civilian government in Islamabad by encouraging trade and economic development, reduce a rivalry that threatens regional stability, including in Afghanistan, and limit the role of the Pakistan Army, whose traditional dominance has been fuelled by a perceived threat from India.

So what are the chances of progress? (assuming the latest bombings just being reported in Delhi do not trigger a new downwards spiral)

President Asif Ali Zardari has got everyone talking by promising that there will soon be “good news” on Kashmir. An expected meeting  between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Zardari on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month would also give the two leaders the chance to repair relations soured by the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July.  

It seems unlikely however, that India and Pakistan can make any real concessions on Kashmir, at a time when the people of the Kashmir Valley at the heart of the dispute have renewed their protests against Indian rule. In Pakistan this would be seen as a betrayal of the people of Kashmir, while in India the government would be accused of caving in to the protests.

One alternative would be to try to resolve the dispute over Siachen, an idea revived this week by Zardari , as a way of building trust and creating an atmosphere to make progress on Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought for control of the mountains overlooking the Siachen glacier since 1984, although there has been a ceasefire since 2003. Apart from the troops stationed on the world’s highest battlefield, there is nothing there but snow, ice and rocks (believe me, I’ve been there), and many commanders on both sides have long accepted the region has no strategic value.  Siachen, in the Karakoram mountains, is quite geographically distinct from the Kashmir Valley — it would take you three days to drive from the Kashmiri capital Srinagar to the Indian base camp in Siachen, and then only if you were lucky — and it is a far less explosive issue to tackle.  What has been lacking is the trust and political will to agree a mutual withdrawal.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi came tantalisingly close to reaching a deal on Siachen in 1989 when they were young prime ministers seeking a fresh start for the region. With both now assassinated, it will be interesting to see whether their widowed spouses now in positions of power — Zardari in Pakistan and Sonia Gandhi in India as head of the ruling Congress party — try to complete what they started. 

The irony is hard to miss. Just as Pakistan is struggling with the fallout of the first known breach of its territorial sovereignty by U.S. ground troops and all the odium associated with it in a proud nation, India has been welcomed into the nuclear high table, almost entirely at America’s behest.

Two unrelated events but coming days apart seemed to underline the divergent paths the two nations are embarked upon.  One has a gun pointed to it; the other is being wooed.

On Saturday, America railroaded whatever opposition there was from smaller countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to civilian nuclear trade with India, despite its refusal to give up nuclear weapons and sign the NPT. As far as New Delhi is concerned the approval is a momentous decision as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, because it ends 34 years of sanctions and isolation following the first nuclear test in 1974.

I remember an Indian defence scientist telling me way back that the sanctions were so pervasive that some institutions blacklisted by the United States on suspicion they were involved in the nuclear weapons programme couldn’t even import a toothbrush from there.

In one stroke, and in line with the way in which the Bush administration has gone about remaking the world in its own image, all that has changed. India’s nuclear weapons aren’t a problem any more as America builds a new strategic partnership that many see as aimed at balancing China.

And what of Pakistan ? A seat at the nuclear table is probably the farthest thing on anyone’s mind including perhaps Islamabad’s as it struggles with  more fundamental issues of territorial integrity at this point. The raid this week by U.S. forces may signal an even more intense attacks as this report says.

But the Pakistan government, says Gary Leupp, a history professor at Tufts University, has provided more assistance to the United States than any other as it pursues its goals in southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation.
 
“But not only does the U.S. political class take this disastrous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will,” he writes. And ominously it’s not just the Bush crowd; Senator Barack Obama has been saying that the United States must do more to press Pakistan to act against the Islamist militants as an earlier post on this blog pointed out. 

One of the questions that repeatedly came up during Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s rather eventful trip to the U.S. last month was who was in charge of the Inter-Services Intelligence , especially after the botched attempt to bring the powerful spy agency - that critics see as a state within a state - under the interior ministry.

But at home, Pakistanis are asking an even more fundamental question: Who really is in control of  their country ? A very rough poll conducted by All Things Pakistan among people who visit the blog found that nearly 40 percent thought nobody was in control of the nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 160 million and from where at least the Americans are convinced the next major militant attack is coming.

About 28 percent said Pakistan People’s Party chairman Asif Ali Zardari was in control while 18  percent saw President Pervez Musharraf still calling the shots. But nobody, not one person, thought Gilani who, by all accounts was given a rather blunt message by his American hosts about his government’s failure to fight militants and their allies within, was in charge.

For Pakistan’s transition to democracy after nine years of military rule this is hardly inspiring. “The image of a prime minister who noone thinks has any power is sad and disturbing,” ATP notes in a later post and asks whether he is on his way out. Or, it asks, is the poll a broader warning of a country sliding further into chaos?

Gilani’s government is faced with Islamist militancy across Pakistan’s northwest and an America that is breathing hard down its neck asking for action. On top of that tensions with India on the eastern borders have suddenly and inexplicably risen, which doubtless increases the pressure on an army already overstretched on the Afghan frontier

 Gilani’s four-month-old coalition is fractured following the withdrawal of ministers belonging to Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League over the issue of reinstatement of judges fired by Musharraf. On Tuesday, the two sides were meeting to break the stalemate.

Adding to the sense of crisis, is an economy at risk of meltdown with acute power shortages, and higher fuel and food prices that have hit hard the poor majority.

Time magazine called Gilani an “accidental” prime minister leading a government too weak to act on any front including the faltering campaign against militancy or even the economy. Pakistan’s respected Dawn newspaper has gone to the extent of questioning Gilani’s authority in promising Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an investigation into allegations that the ISI helped plan the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul last month. How could he have done that without taking the country  into his confidence, the newspaper asked.

Not surprising then, that the Daily Times reports that Gilani may quit if he is not allowed to function as a chief executive with a definite say in government.

The leaders of India and Pakistan have a chance this weekend to stop things from spinning out of control when they gather in Colombo for a summit of South Asian nations.

The mood has decidedly turned sour in India, especially after the bombing of its embassy in Kabul which the Indians, the Afghans and now the Americans - according to a report in the New York Times- have blamed on Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence. Attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, a day apart, and then the most serious eruption of gunfire across the Line of Control in Kashmir since a 2003 truce have further increased concern that a four-year peace process is rapidly coming apart.

Pakistan, hemmed in by an increasingly restive American force on its doorstep over the border in Afghanistan, and militant groups chafing within, has its own and perhaps even more serious set of problems. On Thursday a bomb went off outside its consulate in the western Afghan city of Herat,  and you begin to wonder if the foes have turned Afghanistan into a full-blown proxy battleground 
like it was during the Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States.

In a sign of the chill that has crept back into the relationship, the two sides even delayed an announcement of a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani in Colombo, which is the custom at the annual summits of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and which invariably overshadows the conference.
 
But meet they will, say most analysts and editorialists,  if nothing else to stop a further slide in ties. For all the outrage in India over the bombing in Kabul followed by the impersonal, indiscriminate and savage attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, there isn’t an appetite for ratcheting of tensions with Pakistan.

There should be even less so in Pakistan, as it grapples with even bigger threats on its western borders with the Americans threatening to go after al Qaeda and Taliban, if its fails to do so, with or without permission from Islamabad.