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Pakistan flexible, India inflexible
Khaled Ahmeds AnalysisA lot of people in Pakistan say that the Indo-Pak process of normalisation is at an end because India has not reciprocated Pakistans flexibility on Kashmir. Pakistans foreign minister Mr Khursheed Kasuri has gone so far as to say that Pakistan and India may go back to being hostile towards each other. He actually pointed to the tendency in the bilateral relationship to dip suddenly into the negative, meaning thereby that if it happened this time, it would be nothing new. Musharrafs policy towards India has come under attack because of Indias failure to match Musharrafs flexibility. It was a tough choice for President Musharraf when he began violating the catechism on Kashmir. He may have started veering away from the traditional stance on Kashmir after the Kargil Operation, but the change came more overtly after 9/11. There was a sharp reaction against him for this, but a number of factors helped him change the hard line on Kashmir. First of course was the factor of the failure of covert war. It was virtually declared terrorism after 9/11, and the world balked at a reference to it after that. The mercenaries, labelled as mujahideen, had been successfully prevented by India from separating Held Kashmir from India and joining it to Pakistan. The second factor was the emergence of the indigenous Kashmiri resistance as the third party to the dispute outside of the UN resolutions. Posted by: john 2006-07-21 |
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