By M K Bhadrakumar
Discourse between India and Pakistan can be deceptive – like when cats hiss. You can never quite tell dalliance from discord. The fact remains that at different levels, despite their occasional shrill rhetoric, contacts have been going on between Delhi and Islamabad, including some unprecedented highly sensitive lines of communication, which neither side publicizes. India has also kick-started parallel efforts aimed at reaching out to Kashmiri opinion, with Pakistan in the loop.
At the responsible level of leadership in both India and Pakistan, there is a realization that extremism and terrorism do not and should not provide scope for zero-sum games, given the acuteness of security threats. There is no attempt on India’s part to take advantage of the pressing need for the Pakistani military to redeploy from the eastern border to the Afghan border.
Washington is privy to the alpha and the omega of what is going on, and yet it got a pithy paragraph inserted into the summit statement by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao:
The two sides welcomed all efforts conducive to peace, stability and development in South Asia. They support the efforts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight terrorism, maintain domestic stability and achieve sustainable economic and social development, and support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan. The two sides are ready to strengthen communication, dialogue and cooperation on issues related to South Asia and work together to promote peace, stability and development in that region.
The untimely articulation raised eyebrows in New Delhi, as both Washington and Beijing know only too well that it isn’t in India’s DNA to accept minders or mentors – Western or Asian. Delhi lost no time brusquely rejecting mediation.
However, the Sino-American affair over South Asia presented Delhi with another puzzle. The fact remains that US and Chinese interests are so patently at odds in the region that the two countries cannot easily mate. Washington is actively undermining the stability of the Mahinda Rajapakse government in Colombo, with which both Beijing and Delhi enjoy close ties. The US has just begun a robust thrust in Myanmar to contest China’s influence.
Conceivably, China has a good grasp of the situation in Pakistan and can estimate how deeply unpopular the US has become in that country. Ironically, the day the Obama-Hu statement was released in Beijing, a Gallup poll revealed that Pakistanis see the US as a bigger threat (59%) than India (18%) or the Taliban (11%). Why should Beijing stake its “all-weather friendship” with Pakistan to salvage America’s reputation?
Meanwhile, a concerted media campaign has begun in the US to discredit Chinese policies toward Afghanistan – that China is involved in “brazen examples of corruption” to grab Afghanistan’s wealth of mineral resources. Quoting US officials, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that state-run China Metallurgical Group Corp (MCC) paid a bribe of US$30 million to the concerned Afghan authorities for receiving a $2.9 billion project to extract copper from the Aynak deposit in Logar province.