PAKISTAN is soliciting world support for its stance on the current situation in Kashmir. Pakistan’s stance is superior to India’s in terms of law, human rights and the wishes of the majority in the occupied Valley of Kashmir — which happens also to be the majority in India-held Kashmir. The enduring but as yet unexercised right of self-determination of the people of the whole of the former Jammu and Kashmir through a plebiscite is based on resolutions of the UN Security Council.

The so-called accession of Kashmir to India has been condemned as invalid by a resolution of the UN Security Council. Whatever policy errors Pakistan may or may not have made the inalienable rights of the people of Kashmir cannot be derogated from.

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi

But the world is far from being a politically, legally or morally perfect place. Power, national interests, specious arguments, and changing priorities and concerns play a far greater role in shaping political developments. Pakistan has never cared to develop a longer-term policy or strategy towards Kashmir in which law and morality can have a larger impact on outcomes. It eschews longer-term approaches largely because it is an elitist and class-based security state. Accordingly, it shies away from popular movements even when they are for causes it formally espouses.

As a result, economic transformation, participatory and institutionalised democracy, the full range of human rights and entitlements for all the people, and support for the ‘Kashmir cause’ are all rhetorically and symbolically espoused, often with great passion, while our leaders ensure no organised and sustained popular movements for their achievement are allowed to develop. Why? Because the power and class elites fear such movements would undermine the political status quo that sustains them.

Accordingly, we have the paradox of an unjust status quo-based ruling elite pretending to seek a just solution to the Kashmir dispute. If a short-term solution was available this contradiction might not matter. But since there is in reality no short-term solution only a longer-term strategy can hope to alter the parameters of the Kashmir dispute. This has never been acceptable to the ruling elite in Pakistan because it would inevitably require change in the parameters of the political status quo in Pakistan itself.

India as a largely status quo political entity seeking to preserve the status quo in Kashmir does not have to deal with this contradiction — especially in the real world — and even more so in the short term. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s Kashmir policy — as an extension of its domestic politics — has been little more than an accumulation of unsuccessful shorter-term policies that have never added up to a longer-term strategy. Accordingly, it has never been able to exploit the longer-term weaknesses of the Indian stance and policies towards Kashmir.

Moreover, other developments have favoured India over Pakistan. Both countries have acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. The international community is, accordingly, more concerned about preventing conflict and promoting even sterile dialogue and a modicum of interaction between them than forcing a just resolution to the Kashmir dispute over India’s adamant opposition. India has also emerged as a potentially major player on the regional and global scene that none of the major powers wish to alienate. Pakistan, by contrast, has emerged with the image of a challenged and possibly failing state whose advocacy of the Kashmir cause has accordingly become a liability for the cause itself despite its validity.

Instead of addressing these realities, the current frenetic diplomacy is aimed at answering domestic critics of the government’s directionless Kashmir policy. India is indeed in a tight spot as a result of its abhorrent savagery in the Valley. The major powers are well informed about the human rights situation and have in varying degrees conveyed their concerns to India. But they remain by and large firmly committed to the view that only a territorially status quo-based ‘solution’ to the Kashmir dispute is feasible. This is true even of our dear friend China.

Our delegates sent to various capitals will inevitably be confronted with the question: is Pakistan prepared to work towards a solution within these parameters, and if not, how will it bring an end to the agony of the people of the Valley and avoid a calamitous conflict with India? If their responses are largely statements about the moral and legal obligations of the international community to press India to implement the UN resolutions on Kashmir they will return with little to show. This does not imply Pakistan should itself disown these resolutions.

What is the alternative to frenetic and fruitless diplomacy? It is a viable longer-term Kashmir and India strategy. There is of course no guarantee that a longer-term strategy will bear fruit given the extent of India’s obduracy. But unless we can credibly commit to such a strategy there will be no chance of eliciting a positive and sustained policy response from the capitals of the world that could eventually impact on India. We shall be playing to our own political gallery. The Kashmiris of the Valley will have their worst suspicions of Pakistan reconfirmed. Their renewed faith in Pakistan will be dashed. Modi’s cynical strategy of playing on a Kashmiri sense of isolation and hopelessness could ultimately begin to undermine the heroic resistance of an essentially abandoned Kashmiri youth.

How will our delegates contextualise their advocacy of the immediate imperatives of the Kashmir situation within a longer-term strategy for a settlement acceptable to the Kashmiri people as well as India and Pakistan when we have no such strategy?

No matter how difficult and risky it may be to contemplate any improvement of ties with India today, an exploration of this possibility combined with an alleviation of the human and political rights situation in the Valley and a search for a longer-term compromise settlement acceptable to Kashmiri opinion is the only way forward. All other approaches are insincere. The prime minister, accordingly, needs to make a seminal statement delineating the outlines of a longer-term Kashmir strategy.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Offshore accounts are nothing new. Their semi-legal and unethical status is well known. Corporate and crony capitalism produce outrageous inequality and concentrations of economic and political power. The wealthy and powerful of the world have secretly stashed away in excess of $20tr in offshore and other tax havens. Moreover, the vast majority of such activity is criminal, illegal or politically unacceptable. Even the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld might agree all this is a “known known.”

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.

So our embattled prime minister can well say he is in good (or bad) company both at home and abroad. His jiyalas may well ask ‘what else is new?’ Pakistan’s ‘political norm’ has long embraced criminal and self-serving political leadership. The general chorus has been ‘God will somehow take care of the country He brought into being!’

Accordingly, the frequency of such ‘political and ethical crises’ has risen to almost one a week. This, of course, accounts for the brief shelf-life of any scandal no matter how egregious it may appear to the untrained eye. It also explains why at any one time several such scandals occur making it extremely difficult for moral outrage to focus sufficiently on any one of them. Thank heaven for small mercies!

The Panama outcome will be of national consequence for the people of Pakistan.

After all, the prime minister has not been named although his daughter was reportedly described as “politically exposed” by Mossack-Fonseco. His elder son has owned up to owning substantial properties in London and elsewhere — al Hamdulillah! His explanation of how and from where he got the money to buy these properties and invest in shell companies set up in international tax havens may be somewhat wobbly. But then whose explanations of undeclared and untaxed billions are not? Ask David Cameron. However, in his case the sum involved — £30,000 — is frankly ‘peanuts’ for our political leaders and their brilliant business tycoon offspring. It is possible some Pakistani or non-Pakistani admirers of the statesmanship and foreign policy leadership of the elder Sharif gifted the younger Sharif millions if not billions which he had no legal reason to refuse or obligation to declare to Pakistani authorities as he was living abroad — Mashallah!

As for the ‘judicial’ commission to be set up to inquire into the matter, apart from legal and procedural quibbles, the question arises: what is there to inquire into? Is it the business acumen of a non-Pakistani who may be related to a Pakistani politician? If so, a whole lot of us could become liable on that basis! There has to be something more to justify the cacophony of national indignation without reading the small print.

Some incorrigibles insist there is. Pakistan has around 200 million people. According to revised methods those living in poverty add up to considerably more than a third of the population. The national social indices are the worst (Afghanistan excepted?) in South Asia which has the worst regional indices in the world.

Pakistan has five different class-based educational systems which collectively produce an inability for its people to understand and communicate with each other, mutual animosity, and collective dysfunction despite an abundance of talent and love of country. Higher or tertiary education is minimal and almost devoid of creative field work and conceptual innovation. Globally productive and gender-inclusive jobs — essential to survival and success in the 21st century — are not being generated by the educational, vocational and economic systems in Pakistan. No money equals no priority.

The population will reach 350 million by 2050. Environmental, economic, population, nuclear, sectarian, gender and cultural challenges threaten to overwhelm the country much before 2050. No priority is given to averting the prospect before us. Human resource development and fundamental policy reforms over a broad range are of little or no concern to most political leaders, except in speeches and policy declarations. The country is engaged in a conventional and nuclear arms race with a much larger and more resourceful neighbour without considering the inevitable longer term implications.

The country has no consistent and viable strategy for handling issues and relations with India which could offset its disadvantage in numbers and size without relying on doomsday scenarios. This in turn is because the country’s foreign and security policies have largely been hijacked by unaccountable, unqualified and unimaginative domestic constituencies that equate their institutional agendas with the national interest. A rampantly corrupt, indifferent and fearful political leadership can never risk challenging and rectifying this situation. None of this bothers them in the least. What could be more hostile?

It is in this context that the latest dereliction of our ‘elected’ political plutocrats reaches us. The fate of David Cameron is a matter of political importance for the UK. The fate of our political delinquents is of ‘existential’ significance for Pakistan. The effectiveness of legal hair-splitting and political sleights of hand to escape consequences may be of personal significance for the UK prime minister or, at most, his party. The Panama outcome will be of national consequence for the people of Pakistan.

International bookies reportedly rate the chances of our prime minister surviving the Panama leaks as roughly 90pc. It is not clear whether this is an assessment of his innocence or the state of political development in Pakistan. However, it does suggest that politics in Pakistan as pajama games including zero-sum games against the people entails costs that will eventually overwhelm the country. Remaining spectators of the endgame is no longer an option.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan