He Spoke For Posterity

PAKISTANIS are not the only people whom President Clinton’s televised address from Islamabad has left shell-shocked. Most Indians also feel the same. If the predominant feeling in Pakistan is dismay, in India it’s anxiety. Even as the realisation dawns in New Delhi that the US has really changed its subcontinent policy, people have begun wondering whether it may not be confined to President Clinton, and therefore subject to being reversed when he leaves office next February. Pakistan fervently hopes that is so. As outspoken academic Shireen Mazari said on Pakistan TV before Clinton’s broadcast that he seemed to have been "de-educated" during his India visit. Indians too fear that this may indeed be so, and that the next president will be banefully influenced by the state department, the Pentagon, and the powerful Pakistan lobby - which have been so effective.

Both the hope (in Pakistan) and the fear (in India) are unfounded. Clinton’s was no new policy. He only articulated US’ known stance. His speeches didn’t reflect a personal tilt - he is far too astute a leader to allow such a thing. They expressed the rapidly crystallising American view of the global political order in the 21st century. The purpose of this new order is exactly the same as that of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and of the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin in 1815 and 1870 - to maintain international stability. The four pillars of this new order are the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 freezing the boundaries of European states, now being extended to the whole world; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to prevent drastic shifts in military power; an open economic system for unimpeded development of a global market and the propagation of democracy as the most stable and peaceful form of government. It is only as a convenient byproduct that this new order will legitimise the current distribution of power in the world.

But Clinton knows that having fallen off the wall, Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again - neither India nor Pakistan can be expected to forswear nuclear weapons completely. But he urged both countries in unequivocal terms to minimise the damage their quest for nuclear weapons status had done to the npt, by subscribing to the global non-proliferation regime in its broader, looser formulation of a comprehensive test ban, a cap on the production of fissile materials and export controls. Implicit in this message was a threat of severe displeasure if either country did something that made present signatories to the npt renege on their commitments.

Every facet of the shift in US policy on the subcontinent reflects one or other of these four pillars of the new world. According to a rapidly hardening consensus in the international community, in the new and highly interdependent world of today, international boundaries can be changed by negotiation but not unilaterally by force. That was the warning that Clinton delivered in Islamabad. The rest of the US’ stance on Indo-Pak relations follows logically from this. The fact that the status of a territory is in dispute doesn’t mean that the line dividing the parts of it controlled by the disputants is fluid. So long as it’s defined by a prior agreement between the disputants, the same rules apply to it as to international boundaries. Since it’s Pakistan that is trying to change the status quo in Kashmir, the warning was meant for it. Clinton reminded it that force and negotiation are mutually exclusive ways of settling a dispute. If Musharraf wants the second, he must forswear the first.

If the principles that the US is invoking in its subcontinent policy are not new, why then did it rediscover them only in the past nine months?

If the new stance reflects a change in the US’ perception of its own self-interest, then what is there to prevent another change in the future? The question is justified, but an analysis based purely on realpolitik further reinforces the conclusion that the change that Clinton enunciated runs deep and is unlikely to be reversed in the near future.

THE US’ so-called even-handedness towards Pakistan and India in the early post-Cold War years reflected the belief in the state department that Pakistan could be a valuable conduit for the West to Central Asia. Since that required the taming of Afghanistan, and since Pakistan was trying to use Wahabi Islamic fundamentalists to gain control of Afghanistan, the US turned a blind eye to what these same fundamentalists were doing in the World Trade Towers in New York, Algeria, Egypt, Kashmir and the Philippines. The fact that Wahabi fundamentalism was being nurtured by the US’ staunchest ally in West Asia, Saudi Arabia, made a change of policy even more difficult.

There were manifest contradictions between this policy and avowed US goals like the promotion of democracy, the elimination of narco-terrorism and the defence of women and minority rights, some of which ran so deep that this policy remained mostly sub rosa for the six years that it was pursued, from 1992 to 1998. But four developments since 1998 put an end to it. The first was the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. The prospect of a nuclear war was immeasurably strengthened by Pakistan’s intrusion into Kargil followed by the military coup there. They brought the need to discourage adventurism on the subcontinent into sharp focus. The second was the US’ realisation that far from taming the Taliban, Pakistan was in danger of succumbing to it. The third, which is in its early stages, is the improvement of relations with Iran. The last is a growing unease in the US over the developments that are taking place in China. None of these developments is likely to be reversed in the near future.