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Editorial: Indo-Pak dialogue: some basic questions

The Sunday meeting between Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and the Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna in New York has predictably produced no results. Both had separately said that they did not expect much to come out of it. Mr Krishna repeated the line India takes on the resumption of the peace dialogue that came to an end with the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. He was also dismissive of the possibility of a “back-channel” dialogue: “There is no need for back-channel diplomacy with the front channel open”. He, however, dubbed his discussion with his counterpart as constructive and useful. Mr Qureshi on the other hand brought up all the issues Pakistan wants resolved, including the water issues such as the Wullar Barrage.

India puts “action against terrorists” before the formal dialogue and seems to have retreated from the high point of the Sharm al-Sheikh prime ministerial summit, after testing the waters of protest back home. Recent statements from India that more terrorist attacks were being planned in Pakistan have deepened the bilateral chasm, so to speak, for the time being.

In an ideal world the country that wants dialogue in a tense bilateral situation should have the moral upper hand. The world should supports dialogue in an environment of conflict and bring the reluctant party under pressure. But the world is not an ideal place. In the given case, because the West is afraid of terrorism and wants to put it down without really addressing its causes, realpolitik dictates that it be in sympathy with India. This is why Indian lobbying has been successful on the Hill where the Senate just passed the Kerry-Lugar legislation with conditionalities that seem to be more in keeping with India’s interests than the US’.

India backtracking on the Sharm al-Sheikh joint declaration is partly to placate critics at home who accuse the Congress-led government of getting too soft on Pakistan and partly because there is no pressure on it to mend its ways. This is why Pakistan thought of the “back-channel” device, giving India and itself a chance to “come clean” on what the two really want to do. It appears that India has not reached the point in its domestic politics to allow even that.

But that of course doesn’t mean that the “overture” of a back-channel process was useless and has gone off the political radar. But before ex-foreign secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan starts his preparatory discussions in Islamabad, some points must be made clear. These are questions that are normally asked before beginning a process of bilateral talks.

One, if Pakistan is calling for talks, what does it want from them? Does it need them to get India to move towards an overhaul of bilateral relations, or does it want a resumption of the long-stalled “composite dialogue” just for the sake of talking? In short, does Pakistan want this exercise to be meaningful or is it simply to concede to more of the same which, in terms of results, was almost nothing?

Two, does Pakistan need the dialogue more than India. Because if that is the case then, by the logic of it, it will have to give ground rather than expect India to conform to strict “reciprocation”. This issue must be addressed because India will not have peace with any of its neighbours except on her terms. So, we need to figure out what we want the dialogue for and whether we can realistically expect any “reciprocity”.

Three, a re-examination of the regional status quo among the stakeholders in Pakistan must be conducted before resuming talks with India. If disputes are not settled, as they are unlikely to since India, for the most part does not even accept them as disputes, what are Pakistan’s options? Since the talks will not happen in a vacuum, attention must be paid to global opinion about this issue. If the “composite” dialogue ran out of wind despite the bilateral “equalisation” of the nuclear test in 1998, will it start breathing now when the world is siding with India?

Simply wanting to talk means nothing. And at a time when India is quite clearly uninterested in talking, Pakistan too needs to rethink whether it wants a dialogue with India which, like previous such rounds, is likely to trail off into nothingness. Talks become meaningful only when either both or all parties are interested in give and take or one party is clearly a winner and can dictate terms. Neither of these conditions obtains in the case of India and Pakistan. *

Second Editorial: Why Arabs fund terrorism in Pakistan

We all know that the Taliban and Al Qaeda get their “terror money” from diverse sources inside the region, including drugs in Afghanistan; but that is peanuts compared to the money that comes in from the Middle East. According to a CIA estimate, the Taliban leaders and their allies received USD106 million last year from donors outside Afghanistan.

Last time the US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke was here he said the money came in substantially from the Gulf countries during the 1990s. And that continues to flow and is much more than the USD70 million the terrorists make from heroin. It is even more than the money they make from kidnappings, “taxes” and selling of local natural resources.

The main culprit is “hawala” which is almost impossible to stamp out despite recent efforts to bring the known middle-men into some kind of overt system. The people who send in the money believe in the “project” of Al Qaeda and admire the Taliban as warriors of Islam. In Pakistan, many now-banned jihadi organisations were funded by the Arabs in the Middle East.

In the case of Fazlullah in Swat, not only was the warlord able to get the women of the province to donate their ornaments for his madrassas, he even got money from expat Pakistanis in the UK to build his big mosque. Why is the money coming in?

The “Al Qaeda project” has two sides, one negative and the other “positive”. The negative aspect is based on a sense of injustice emanating from the conflict in Palestine; the “positive” aspect is the realisation of an Islamic universal utopia that will fill the world with happiness and remove all its grief. *

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