The Musharraf-Singh talk in a world terror context

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

India’s new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf will meet for the first time at the UN General Assembly in late September. The result could be a deciding factor in the war against terrorism.

They are an odd couple. Singh, a lifetime economist bureaucrat, UK educated, phlegmatic, a “nonmechanized” Sikh replete with turban, playing second fiddle to the glamorous Italian-born Sonia Gandhi who put his electoral victory together and took [at least] a nominal backseat in running India’s 1.1 billion. Musharraf, Napoleon-sized lifetime soldier, once [at least] harboring dreams of being his country’s Ataturk, harassed, but [for the moment at least] all-powerful leader of Pakistan’s 145 million Moslems. They do share a horrendous experience: both were born in the other fellow’s country, members of a minority, who fled their ancestral homes during the slaughter that followed partition of British India in 1947. One would hope it adds insight to find a peace between their countries which have fought three and a half wars, almost another three years ago. Stuffed with nukes and missiles, they constitute a constant threat to world peace as well as to each other.

But the world is now more than ever intertwined, so they play important roles in the curse of Islamicist terrorism and any hope of getting it under control. It was from Pakistan’s obscurantist madrassas – religious schools – Taliban cadre first erupted. If Afghanistan’s war against Soviet domination was the cauldron out of which came its hosting of Osama Bin Laden, it was Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus and military whose logistics made it all possible.

It was one more step for Islamabad to use Islamic fanaticism to try to break Indian intransigence on Kashmir with an insurgency based in Pakistan. Whatever New Delhi’s original claims, terror and counter-terror have led to an impasse. Both sides see the issue as crucial; to Pakistan because it has made it a national cause, to India because defection of a majority Moslem region would threaten unity in a country seething with regional nationalisms.

9/11 reframed all of this in the subcontinent as it did in the rest of the world. Musharraf, who seized power from corrupt, discredited feudal politicians [as his army forebears had done through much of Pakistan’s history], reversed course. President Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan forced Musharraf to choose the Americans’ coalition against worldwide Islamicist terrorism, and once again to become Washington’s ally. Musharraf pledged to root out terrorist infrastructure, particularly in border areas with Afghanistan. And when the U.S. caught redhanded a Pakistani bazaar of nuclear technology and equipment selling to pariah states such as Libya and Iran, he closed it down [claiming disingenuously his military had no hand in it and denying swaps for missiles with North Korea].

India, meanwhile, continuing to try to breathe life into its Cold War Moscow alliance, sought to move away from traditional hostility to the U.S. For although peacetalk was in the air there too, there was the continuing perceived threat of China on its northern frontier in Tibet. The possibility of a U.S.-India alliance was even floated.

Improving relations with India made Washington, for the first time, an interlocutor between the two. How much the U.S. can actually do to defuse this convoluted relationship is open to question. But one thing is clear: it is not only in the U.S. interest but in India’s perhaps even more that Musharraf succeed in holding Pakistan to a moderate course. Not only because it is Islam’s second largest state, but historically India’s Moslems have influenced world Islam toward a more catholic and humanitarian ethos.

Musharraf’s fandango to work with the Americans, present a negotiating front to the Indians, and clobber homegrown terrorists while fending off the civilian politicians by courting the traditionally small [and equally corrupt] religious parties, has been a consummate act. But it is showing strains. He is apparently reneging on his promise, reached under Anglo-American pressure, to doff his uniform and bring “democracy” back to Pakistan. That is probably because Islamicist elements in the army of unknown strength do exist despite the Raj tradition of professionalism.

Singh, desperately trying to restart liberalization of the Indian economy but anchored to Communists for his parliamentary majority and “poverty wallahs” who want to restart failed 1950s social programs, hasn’t much room to maneuver either. The fractious Kashmiris, themselves, now want in on the act. And marginal concessions on the Line of Control to recognize de facto occupations which New Delhi is apparently willing to make would probably only hand Musharraf’s opposition an axehandle.

But progress to strengthen Musharraf’s hand and quiet India’s own 150 million Moslems [increasingly showing signs of restlessness] is as essential to the worldwide effort on Islamicist terrorism as success in Iraq as well as its eastern outcroppings in Southeast Asia.