Agra summit high on hype, low on substance

Pakistan military dictator Pervez Musharraf's India tour has set the stage for weekend peace talks by the side of the Taj Mahal, the famed monument to love. Given the bitter history they share, can India and Pakistan be expected to suddenly bury their hatchet and smoke the peace pipe? India is seeking to entice the cash-strapped Pakistan with a more alluring peace pipe that will not go off in smoke but bring in hefty royalty flows of $500 million a year.

If a deal for an overland gas pipeline from Iran via Pakistan goes through, it will mark another U-turn by New Delhi, which had been loudly insisting that it wanted energy security, not energy insecurity by allowing Pakistani political control over the supply channel. An alternative underwater, continental-shelf pipeline route that bypasses Pakistan will be more expensive, but in the long run India could save both money in transit fees and potential disruption in supply. Yet India appears willing to back the overland route.

The history of India-Pakistan summit meetings is a chronicle of pious declarations followed by intensified conflict. In 1989, the bonhomie that marked the meeting of the youthful Indian and Pakistan prime ministers, Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto, raised hopes that these two leaders would reach a historic accommodation to bring peace to the subcontinent. But soon thereafter Ms. Bhutto turned anti-India under military pressure and bilateral relations reached a new low by 1990 following a bloody insurrection in Indian Kashmir.

The 1999 Lahore summit between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif was followed by the Pakistani invasion into the Kargil region, triggering a 10-week ground and air war.

The latest Taj Mahal diplomacy by moonless light follows a break of more than two years in official contact. The decade before that, however, was marked by regular dialogue, summit meetings, and adoption of important confidence-building measures. Yet that decade, far from promoting a reduction of tensions, was marked by escalating conflict as India fought a Pakistani proxy war in Kashmir.

The fight between India and Pakistan is rooted in history, religion and the politics of revenge, epitomising competing visions, clashing worldviews and conflicting goals. Kashmir is the symbol rather the cause of the conflict. In any case, in today's context, what "solution" can there be to Kashmir other than the acceptance of existing realities that the division of the state into three parts held by India, Pakistan and China cannot be undone or even modified?

Yet, as then Indian foreign secretary K. Raghunath publicly stated in Islamabad in 1997, Pakistan has maintained "a neurotic obsession with a single-point agenda," holding normalisation of bilateral relations hostage to a "solution" of the insoluble Kashmir problem.

It is obvious that no solution in absolute terms is possible. Any compromise has to be shaped within existing realities. Yet it is the commitment to an absolute solution that is the cause of conflict, terrorism and jihad on the subcontinent.

Therefore, expectations should not be allowed to rise too high about the outcome of Vajpayee's latest peace initiative, which he unveiled like the rabbit out of the hat. The Taj Mahal diplomacy has involved no joint agenda or preparatory work. The two rivals have publicly squabbled over the agenda right up to the eve of the summit. The Pakistan ambassador's propriety in disregarding New Delhi's advice and inviting some Kashmiri separatist figures to his tea party in Musharraf's honour has been publicly debated more than any issue of substance.

To make matters worse, Musharraf and Vajpayee have constricted their negotiating leeway by building summit-related political consensus at home on diametrically opposite positions: For Pakistan, Kashmir is to be the core issue in the discussions, but for India that matter will not be central. As if to slight their hosts for their desire to discuss trade and economic cooperation, the Pakistanis left their commerce minister in Islamabad.

In theory, the setting for the latest peace talks could not be better. The anti-India Pakistan military and the anti-Pakistan Hindu nationalists are in power in Islamabad and New Delhi. Only they can sell a peace deal to their nation. While Vajpayee has not only failed to arrest violence in Kashmir but also aggravated the situation there through his botched initiatives, the Pakistan military is chastened from both its Kargil experience and its difficulty in managing a bankrupt economy.

In reality, however, neither Musharraf nor Vajpayee has the political room for reaching any bold compromise. Despite usurping the presidency, Musharraf is the weakest military dictator Pakistan has had. Forced to constantly look behind his shoulders at the other generals in his junta, his hold on power remains tenuous. The India-born Musharraf is an outsider in an army made up mostly of Punjabis and Pathans. Moreover, he did not stage the coup himself but was put on the throne by the coup executors. In India, Vajpayee is politically and physically weak and faces growing intra-coalition challenges.

For Pakistan, dialogue with India is tactically wise and politically advantageous. It is valuable for improving its global image and building its military regime's legitimacy in the eyes of the West. It also meets a key condition set by multilateral and bilateral creditors for further debt-service rescheduling. Clearly, the Musharraf regime is interested in the process rather the product of dialogue. Continuing dialogue with India will help Pakistan to improve its global image, which currently conjures up images of fanaticism and religious extremism.

Neither New Delhi nor Washington can ignore the Islamabad-Beijing-Rangoon axis and the growing Chinese leverage over Pakistan. Moreover, India's internal problems, especially in Kashmir, make New Delhi less of a potentially promising ally to the United States. Given the high priority current U.S. policy accords to the termination of Islamabad's links with the Taliban, Washington is loath to leave its long-time ally Pakistan in the cold as it warms up to India. All these factors, plus India's ambitions to be a permanent member of the UN Security Council, validate Vajpayee's search for peace with Pakistan.

But Vajpayee cannot proceed on the basis that what is good for India is good for Islamabad. Peace with New Delhi will marginalise Pakistan regionally and internationally, allowing India to emerge as the undisputed regional giant and peer competitor to China. The Sino-Pak nexus will cease to hold strategic value – to the detriment of China's containment strategy. A Pakistan stripped of its core cementing element – eternal enmity with India – will be reduced to a battlefield for its five feuding ethnic groups.

Such potentially asymmetrical peace dividends is a key reason why dialogue in the 1990s brought no progress. Today, Pakistan genuinely believes that it is because of the trump card it holds – its ability to bleed India – and the consequ