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. 

But there is increasing debate about how the two countries might improve the way they engage with each other to get out of the on-again, off-again turbulent peace process which has failed to deliver a settlement in more than 60 years. 

And that is where the Yekaterinburg meeting — stolid, cautious and lacking in drama — might prove to be a turning point.

“Mr. Singh is trying to set out a coherent Pakistan policy,” former Indian ambassador G. Parthasarathy wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “To resume the formal dialogue process, careful preparatory work behind the scenes would be necessary.”

“As we learn from the recent past and look ahead, India must reconsider three core assumptions about the peace process. The first is the belief that we are negotiating with a coherent entity that is capable of making rational choices. Whether we should engage Pakistan or not is a question that makes sense only if treat our western neighbour as a black box,” wrote Indian strategic analyst C. Raja Mohan in the Indian Express.

“New Delhi must instead recognise the enormous internal divergence in Pakistan towards India and develop an approach that helps reasonable voices across the border prevail over the incurably hostile ones,” he wrote. ”In short, the very purpose of our engagement must be to produce a systemic change in Pakistan. It stands to reason then that we must not suspend the engagement every time India’s adversaries put up an obstacle.”

 Signs of a new and more methodical approach that might yield results for people in both countries seeking peace?  Or too slow and too cautious for Pakistan’s civilian government, which would like to see an early breakthrough to ease tensions on its eastern border as it tries to beat back Taliban militants on its western border with Afghanistan?

(Photos: President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajapayee shake hands in Kathmandu, January 2002; Vajpayee meets Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at Lahore summit in 1999; Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari in Yekaterinburg, 2009)

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.

(more…)

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.

(Reuters file photo of former president Pervez Musharraf)

The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf has, as expected, unleashed a new power struggle within Pakistan’s fractious coalition. Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and widower of Benazir Bhutto, has staked a claim to the presidency, setting him on a collision course with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) sees Zardari’s candidacy as an attempt to garner more power and delay the restoration of judges sacked by Musharraf last November. PML (N) officials are already saying the row could break up the six-month-old coalition cobbled together after elections in February.

So will there be a fight to the finish between Zardari and Sharif that will drag Pakistan deeper into the mire? Or are the two men simply manoeuvring themselves into the best position they can find in the post-Musharraf era?

Indian writer M.J. Akbar says Zardari and Sharif, having set aside Musharraf, ”have begun the far more vicious process of trying to eliminate each other. This is a power-play in which there can be only one victor. Musharraf was the semi-finals. Islamabad is not a big enough town to find space for both Zardari and Sharif.

“The final resolution of this conflict will only come after another general election,” he writes. “In the meantime, the two will try to maximise their control over the instruments and institutions of state. Sharif has his sights on the Supreme Court, which has become the only reserve bank of credibility in a nation where the Constitution has been amenable to the doctrine of necessity — in simpler words, where the judiciary has legalised events rather than law being the determinant of fact. Zardari is more audacious, seeking the supreme office in the land, that of the President, since he is surely convinced that he will not get office through a popular vote.”

In an op-ed in the Daily Times, U.S.-based lawyer Rafia Zakaria bemoans the lack of leadership in Pakistan, creating what she calls a stagnant and elitist political system which is driving young talented Pakistanis abroad to join the thriving Pakistani diaspora. ”Politics in Pakistan, plagued as it is by political opportunism and expedience, has devolved to a level of absurdity where even Ms (Paris) Hilton would be a viable candidate for president,” she writes.

But is the current row the beginning of the end for Pakistan’s latest experiment in civilian democracy or its opposite — ie. evidence of a new and perhaps chaotic vigour in Pakistani politics as the country re-emerges from years of military rule?

Juan Cole in Informed Comment writes that “although the wrangling over who will be president is being reported in the U.S. press as a crisis, I don’t see it that way. It is, rather, an ordinary political process in which eventually there will be a winner who will garner enough votes to be elected. No one is brandishing a gun over all this to my knowledge. You might as well call the current presidential campaign in the U.S. to determine who will succeed George W. Bush a crisis.”

And leaving ideological debate aside, would Pakistan’s closest allies — China, Saudi Arabia and the United States — really be prepared to stand back and let the country descend into chaos?

Saudi Arabia, facing a challenge of its own from al Qaeda, has no interest in seeing it growing stronger in Pakistan, and may demand stability in return for its pledge to defer oil payments, as I wrote in a previous post. China has always called for a stable Pakistan, although like Saudi Arabia, it has been careful not to be seen to be interfering in its domestic politics. 

And the United States so badly needs Pakistan’s help in tackling the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan that it is likely to work hard to build a good relationship with whoever emerges as the strongest leader in Pakistan, including Zardari. According to the New York Times, doubts are growing among American officials over the level of cooperation they can expect from Pakistan Army chief Pervez Kayani “who has appeared less interested in how to deal with the Taliban than with the sagging morale of his undertrained, underequipped troops”. Sharif, the newspaper says, is seen as too close to conservative Islamic forces in Pakistan. ”To the surprise of many here, the civilian with the trump card, then, may be Mr. Zardari,” it says.

Winston Churchill famously noted: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Cause for optimism in Pakistan’s new civilian democracy? Or have the hopes raised by February’s elections been dashed?

Democrat Senator Joseph Biden, chosen by Barack Obama as his running mate, said famously early on that America needed to have a Pakistan policy, not a Musharraf policy.

“There’s a vast majority, a significant middle of the population of Pakistan (that) is democratic and middle-class. But what’s happening is, absent free elections, you’re forcing them underground, radicalizing them, and you’re giving great sway to that portion of the population that’s already radicalized,” he was quoted as saying.

In a post of his own on The Huffington Post last November, Biden condemned the imposition of emergency rule by then President Pervez Mushrraf and described Pakistan as  ”probably the most dangerous and complex country we deal with”.

With Musharraf gone this week and a fractious but democratically elected civilian government in place in Islamabad, Biden may now get a chance to shape the next administration’s Pakistan policy. The chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee clearly brings the foreign policy expertise which would be needed by a future Obama administration in its relations with Pakistan.

“Arguably, the most dangerous waters to be waded through internationally in the next few years will be the tribal areas of Pakistan and its border with Afghanistan. There is probably no one in the Senate who knows more about these issues than Biden,” the blog sepiamutiny wrote.

An Obama-Biden ticket would bring together two individuals with a strong track record of supporting democracy and development in Pakistan, The Pakistan Policy Blog said, adding that both have consistently argued that Pakistan’s democratization and cooperation in the tackling al Qaeda and the Taliban are interconnected.

It also means that the vice president’s office will play an active role, if not dominant role in shaping U.S. policy on Pakistan. A bill that Biden has authored on tripling non-military assistance to Pakistan will likely get momentum and could be an early foreign policy success for a young administration.

In short, a positive sign in the gloom that pervades the region at this time?

A comment recently by Asif Zardari, the powerful head of the Pakistan People’s Party, that the country’s next president could be a woman has set off speculation that he might propose the name of one of his sisters, both members of his party, to succeed President Pervez Musharraf.

What better way to burnish Pakistan’s credentials as an enlightened democracy than have a woman as head of state at a time when the power of Islamist militants is growing, especially in the vital northwest region where they have been burning down schools for girls.

Besides, installing either Faryal Talpur or Azra Fazal Pechucho as president would help tighten Zardari’s grip on power with a handpicked president and prime minister, as The Pakistan Policy Blog notes. The name of National Assembly speaker Fahmida Mirza has also been mentioned as another possible woman candidate.

But then again, and reflecting the pressures on them, Zardari and coalition partner Nawaz Sharif might turn to the troubled North-West Frontier Province, choosing a candidate from there as one way to counter the expanding influence of the Islamists. One of the frontrunners would be Asfandyar Wali Khan, president of the Awami National Party, a regional group with liberal credentials, based in the NWFP. Candidates from Baluchistan, the other region where a low-key insurgency has raged, have also been mentioned in reports

Linked perhaps to the eventual choice is also a decision on whether the presidency should be returned to its ceremonial post as was traditionally the case, or continue with a much more powerful institution as was the case with Musharraf.

Under Musharraf, the president retained the authority to dismiss parliament and make top military and judicial appointments, source of much of the political turmoil that engulfed the final years of his rule. The president is also the head of the country’s nuclear command authority.

Given how little many people in the west seem to know about Pakistan — at most that it has nuclear weapons and, possibly, Osama bin Laden; rarely that it has 165 million people (not too far off three times the population of Britain) with individual day-to-day challenges of earning a living and bringing up children like anywhere else – it’s encouraging to see the range of debate in the U.S. blogosphere after President Pervez Musharraf announced his resignation.

Here are just a few that caught my eye, in no particular order, and with apologies in advance to anyone I’ve mislabelled as U.S.-based:

Larisa Alexandrovna writes that Musharraf’s departure could lead to a “catch-22 of epic proportions” for the United States because of the threat of terrorism and the nuclear black market: “Forget the Russian-Georgian conflict for a moment. Forget Iraq for a moment. Forget everything for one moment and understand, that if Pakistan explodes into a power struggle, that struggle/conflict will be the match that lights a world war of epic proportions. A war that we are not equipped to deal with anymore,” she says.

The Punditburo agrees that Pakistan is “far more important than Iraq as far as the issue of terrorism and Al Qaeda go”  but draws a different conclusion: “Democracy managed to arise in Pakistan, even though the Bushies fought it tooth and nail, and failed to even embrace democracy even when it was clear that Musharraf had no future. This should be tonic for our arrogance.”

Sepia Mutiny highlights an article in counterpunch by Fatima Bhutto, the niece of the late Benazir Bhutto, from whom she was estranged. In it she attacks both Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif – who forced Musharraf to quit after their parties won elections in February.  ”We have options,” she says. “Zardari is not an option. Sharif is not an option. The army is not our one and only option. The mullahs have not become an option yet. There are close to 200 million of us: I’m sure we can think of something better.”

But it would be wrong to suggest that Musharraf’s departure for once overshadowed the U.S. presidential election. The Huffington Post used it to attack presidential candidate John McCain, arguing that he had been an “outspoken” supporter of the former army general.

While Pakistan and indeed much of the world has been transfixed by the political power play that has seen President Pervez Muaharraf go, a refugee crisis is unfolding in its troubled northwest.

The numbers fleeing escalating fighting between the Pakistan Army and militants holed up in Bajaur on the border with Afghanistan vary but they are all huge. The Daily Times said that the provincial government had set up relief camps for 219,000 people displaced in the latest wave of fighting.

Pakistani television has shown thousands of people streaming out of Bajaur, Mohmand and Kurram agencies, the Australian reported, calling it a “human tide.” Tens of thousands of people are camping on the perimeter of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Region Province, and some have reached Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjoining Islamabad.

As one blogger noted the crisis unfolding in the troubled corner of Pakistan - seen as the staging ground for the next big attack on the West - deserves attention, all the more so given that the number of people affected rivals, if not exceeds, refugees from the conflict in South Ossetia this past week. The number of people displaced there is estimated at 100,000, according to this report in the Los Angeles Times.

Given the scale of the problem, Pakistan would be well-advised to seek international help, the News argued in an editorial . It said in the past Pakistan had tried to cover up problems by denying experts such the Red Cross access to internally displaced people. This is the time for the state to show a ‘kinder face” to people whose homes have been bombed, or ordered to be evacuated in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, their maize crops cut down so that the militants didn’t hide in them to carry out ambushes, it said. 

UPDATE - President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation has been greeted with jubilation from supporters of the ruling PML-N and PPP parties (see picture right), and sparked a rally in the stock market. But reading through the comments on this and other blogs, I can’t see any clear theme emerging, with some praising and others condemning Musharraf’s legacy, some regretting and others welcoming his departure, and many fretting about the future.

I rather liked this comment on All Things Pakistan which seemed to sum up the many contradictions of people struggling to work out how to rally around a common cause:

“We celebrate on arrival and departure of the same person.
We praise those who left the scene.
Dead become heroes and living and serving are being accused.”

India, meanwhile, has been muted in its response. But Indian analysts who once derided Musharraf as the architect of the 1999 Kargil war are now fretting that his departure could unleash fresh tensions from Kashmir to Kabul if it is allowed to create a vacuum which can be exploited by Islamist militants.

There is much speculation too about what Musharraf will do next, and where he will go.  Some have read his feisty resignation speech — a long defence of his legacy — as evidence that he might eventually try to re-enter politics; others see in his final “Goodbye Pakistan” remarks , a sign he is preparing to leave the country. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain and Turkey have all been touted as possible destinations. (You can see some of the stories on his likely next home here, here and here.)

In the end, Musharraf has turned out to be as unpredictable in his departure as he was throughout his career both in the army and in politics. Looking through his memoirs, “In the Line of Fire”, for clues to his next move, I was struck by the following quote from another former general which Musharraf cites as a maxim in his own life:

“Napoleon said that two-thirds of decision making is based on study, analysis, calculations, facts, and figures, but the other third is always a leap in the dark, based on one’s gut.”

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President Pervez Musharraf announced his resignation, ending months of speculation about the fate of the former army general after his political allies were trounced in an election in February.

But even before he said he would step down, analysts were already beginning to look to the challenges of a post-Musharraf era — spiralling inflation, food and fuel shortages; al Qaeda and Taliban militants on its border with Afghanistan; political in-fighting among the civilian politicians who took power in February. (You can see my last post on this here.)

So will Musharraf’s resignation help bring stability to Pakistan? Or are the problems faced by Pakistan — sandwiched between a turbulent Afghanistan and a resurgent India, both of which blame it for failing to curb Islamist militancy — too great?

How much will the three countries with the closest ties to Pakistan — China, Saudi Arabia and the United States — help or interfere? And what of the main domestic players in the unfolding drama: the judiciary, the civilian government and the Pakistan Army?

Amid the feverish speculation about when, how and where President Pervez Musharraf will go, analysts are already looking beyond to the future of Pakistan in a post-Musharraf era. One theme stands out: while the consensus appears to be that the Pakistan Army will not step in to save Musharraf, it might well intervene in the not so distant future if it believes it needs to save the country.

“Musharraf’s departure will highlight the problems that confront the country, which is in the grips of a food and energy crisis. Inflation is out of control,” writes Tariq Ali in the Los Angeles Times. ”The price of natural gas, used for cooking in many homes, has risen by 30%. Wheat, a staple, has seen a 20% price hike since November 2007 … According to a June survey, 86% of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour on a daily basis, for which they blame their new government.”

He adds that over the last 50 years the United States has preferred to work with the Pakistan Army rather than civilian rulers. ”Nothing has changed. The question being asked is, how long before the military is back at the helm?”

Shuja Nawaz, who has just published a book about the Pakistan Army, writes in the Washington Post that the military “would rather not be drawn into the current political squabble. They want to give the civilians the ‘time and space’ to operate government as best as they can.”

But he says the civilian government must take action quickly to restore stability in Pakistan. ”If it fails, there is talk in Pakistan of another cycle of military intervention in the offing, this time on the Bangladesh model: of a longer duration, and using a civilian facade to restore the country’s economic health.”

“With inflation running at 25 per cent, the economy is a shambles,” says an editorial in the TimesOnline. “Investors are fleeing Pakistan, and the rupee has fallen to a record low against the dollar. Separatists, Islamists and extremists are gaining ground in the restless border areas, and Islamabad now seems incapable of imposing its authority. Twenty years after the suspicious death of Zia ul-Haq, the former military ruler, feuding politicians are again set to squander their chances. A restless army is waiting.”