By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, Pakistan, Mar 20 2004 (IPS)

A major outcome of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to Pakistan this week was the announcement of the country’s associate membership in the rapidly expanding North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

Pakistan does not become a full member of the military alliance with equal liabilities and privileges of ordinary members, of course. What Pakistan can expect occupies good length of wordage, none of which obliges the U.S. government to do more than sell military equipment, provide training and ask the Export-Import Bank to accept Islamabad’s guarantees for U.S. exports to Pakistan.

It is a more tenuous relationship: to be associated with carrying out NATO tasks in its own area of effectiveness. What the privileges would be is not clear.

The U.S. government had offered this relationship to India also. Since a national election is due in April and May there, Washington’s decision appears to have been deferred until after the vote.

But Pakistan’s full-throated yes is now a part of history.

Powell’s visit on Mar. 18-19 was awaited in Pakistan with trepidation. He was supposed to discuss three main matters.

First was the world’s largest scandal about the proliferation of nuclear know-how and technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya by Pakistan’s Mr Bomb: Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Pakistani opposition entertained many other fears of what the U.S. government was likely to demand because Dr Khan’s mea culpa and Pakistan President Gen. Musharraf’s pardon seemed an improbable finale to the story.

But the Bush Administration has accepted Pakistan’s official action as final and continues to do business with Islamabad.

In any case, Pakistan was satisfactorily cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, to which agency’s lap the U.S. government seems to have thrown the responsibility for investigating and rooting out the black market in nuclear knowledge and technology.

The second issue was the level and adequacy of Pakistan’s role in the U.S. ‘war on terror’. On this also, Pakistanis saw new pressures and demands coming from the U.S. government.

But the U.S. government has gone on expressing satisfaction with what Pakistan was doing. However, key officials like Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. deputy defence secretary, took pains to explain that while Pakistan was adequately helping the capture of al-Qaeda fighters, it goes on protecting fugitive Taliban leaders who, after regrouping their forces, are now attacking U.S. and Afghan targets in Afghanistan.

Musharraf was thus hustled into an action he would have avoided: not only to send in troops in the nominally independent Federally Administered Tribal Areas strung along the long Pakistan-Afghan border, known as Durand Line, but also entrusted them to arrest all those al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives of whom U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services know.

Such action by Pakistan Army and its paramilitary forces had not been attempted since independence in 1947. The British colonial masters, like Pakistan until major clashes on the Afghan border this week, always depended upon an especially discreet political service in this well-armed wild west.

This involved the use of money as its most potent weapon, reinforced by diplomacy with tribal elders or ‘sardars’.

Armed tribesmen are resisting. By Wednesday, 39 casualties – including 15 Pakistan troops – have been reported. Media reports on Saturday said 100 fights at the border had been arrested.

These Pashtun tribesmen are fiercely independent, are well armed and regard themselves independent of both Pakistan and Afghanistan – largely a fib that the British had encouraged them to believe. Normal Indian laws did not apply in these areas earlier, and Pakistan’s also do not apply.

The jury is out about the usefulness of Pakistan’s current military operations.

The U.S. government want results more quickly and are more prone to use physical force – too early in the proceedings, many Pakistani officials believe. Local officials fear a backlash and the army may have to fight its way out bloodily.

The terrain favours irregular individual fighters or small groups engaging in hit and run skirmishes. In most areas, heavy weapons cannot be easily used. But once large-scale military operations become necessary, the original purpose of capturing al-Qaeda and Taliban becomes secondary to fighting, with the army required to defend itself rather than to flush out the fugitives and insurgents.

The political backdrop is now quite different in tribal areas. The transistor revolution in tribal areas means more popularity of groups like al-Qaeda and Taliban- they are seen as valiant fighters for Islam against a godless west.

What Musharraf and the U.S. government are encountering in Pakistan’s tribal areas or nearby Afghan areas is a lethal combination of Islamic fanaticism, racial pride, illusion of not being subservient to a modern codified law and being well-armed. The third major subject of interest to the U.S. government is that India and Pakistan should continue to go on normalising their relations and go on talking about their disputes, especially Kashmir.

Hitherto they have acted their part, though last week Musharraf’s two-hour long harangue to ‘India Today’s’ seminar in New Delhi came close to testing the Vajpayee government’s patience to the limit by his emphatic "centrality of Kashmir problem". However, the matter did not go beyond formal criticism by India and Pakistan’s rejection of it.

The U.S. government has taken upon itself to keep the two quarrelling nuclear powers from going at each other’s throats. Such occasions are frequent because of a territorial dispute over the ownership of the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley.

Pakistan politics has been all about getting the valley. India’s bottom line is the valley is its integral part. They constantly collide.

It so happens that the controlling agency in Pakistan, the army, cannot conceive life without friendship with the U.S. government – and economic and military aid from it.

India, under the government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has clearly opted for close friendship with the U.S. government. Both major South Asian states are vying for close friendship with Washington a la a new partnership deal with NATO for both.

It is hard going for the U.S. government to keep Pakistan and India in harness together in the larger ‘war on terror’. But the U.S. government can do it and the specific needs of either will help Washington no end.

Even so, the Kashmir issue will not go away. The confidence-building measures the US suggested are working. Newly-resumed cricket games between the two rivals is extraordinarily popular and is now confidence-building measure number one.

Still, hard work awaits Washington over the Kashmir issue. Some workable solution has to be brokered – chiefly by the United States.

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