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Well in many ways they are quite apparent, and clear, and one only requires the courage to identify them as they really are. One doesn't have to be a super genius decoder, but rather just a little application of common sense on what one feels is right, or not quite right:
The Kashmir question
This 87,000 square meters area, which is not economically important and populated by a few million people (there is no emotional attachment for me to the Kashmir question), after 62 years has taken far too long and a bit too much energy from the productive capacities of India and Pakistan. Both nations have elevated the issue to such extreme levels that real flexibility on both sides has not been forth coming, but instead gesture politics and minutiae concessions of a bus link here, and road access there......but nothing substantive.
It is a shame that the land of Gandhi, the original one who gave us independence, the Buddha, Asoka, Kautilya and Akbar the Great cannot solve this simple problem, either through a "Grand bargain" which elevates beneficially and reinforces the respective leaders of each country (with possibly Noble Peace prizes beckoning)........or incrementally, cautiously implementing policies which are irreversible which makes eventual peace inevitable in Kashmir, despite whatever is happening in the rest of South Asia. (In this case you find the points of mutual agreement and you push those, and sign up on those....then you build on that and move on to another issue) This gives the stallers, and saboteurs on both sides of the border, both internal and external less chance to throw a spanner in the works.
Emotionally, historically and aesthetically speaking I prefer the "Grand Bargain" option. The image of both leaders of India and Pakistan meeting in a military tent exactly on the border of Indian Kashmir/Azad Kashmir, and signing peace over Kashmir finally, hugging, shaking hands, after so many years will have a symbolic healing effect for the whole of South Asia. Historically it turns a new page.
This can be done. It is logical. One only needs to overcome the gross unimaginative lethargy of the Congress Party, and the negative interference of the Pakistan military, in the past.
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Pakistan was created by the British to clip independent India's wings, to reduce its strength as a possible future power in Asia which could challenge British interests. The trumped up Muslim League established in Dhaka in 1905 with the urgings of Lord Curzon, a talking shop consisting mainly of Muslim aristo's totally loyal to the Raj, and against any talk of Indian independence and Gandhi's movement, disconnected from the Muslim masses mainly.(See post about Jinnah)
However, whilst the Muslim League was used as the tool by the British to create Pakistan, it is the Pakistan army that has been the main tool of control of Pakistan for the British, and later the Americans from 1951, and the passing of Laiqat Ali Khan. Training of certain key officers, personal patronage, substantial arms aid and person to person friendship of British/Pak senior officers mainly, with the British creation of the ISI in 1948 which have all been the avenues through which Britain and the USA exercised control over Pakistan, under military dictatorships and even during civilian rule.
However it is now 2009, and Pakistan is a failed state under the military's watch (1999---2008) with an unofficial population of 180 million people, and 400 million by 2050. The military realise that the old game cannot work for ever, and something new must be tried. Pakistan faces substantial internal security, social, political and economic problems which the Pak military with the best will in the world won't be able to solve by themselves. In addition in Afghanistan a foreign force is massing with the objective of occupying Pakistan, and securing Pakistan's nukes for Israel........something for which Pakistan militarily must prepare the nation.
The Pakistan military can wish for all the arms in the world, and the billions of military aid given free.....maybe unofficially $10 billion since 2001, which have all mostly gone into systems targetting India, and the Americans know it, as much as they know that "al-Qaeda" does not exist, and the Taliban are "controlled opposition" created in the insistence of the Clinton administration from 1994. The Pakistan military know that they can never capture, secure and hold the whole of Kashmir viably, as a nation with an economy one eigth of India. The Soviet Union by 1989 had 65,000 tanks, 55,000 APC's 30,000 artillery TOW, 8,500 frontline jet fighters, and 40,000 nuclear warheads, backed by a 700,000 strong KGB, the best intelligence service in the world in its time. BUT IT ALL COLLAPSED.........within a matter of a few years it went from being a totalitarian superpower to a divided disentigrated nation that in the 1990's became almost part of the Third World...........most of it is still Third World except Russia with its petro -dollars.
Pakistan's national strength does not just come from the military, but that there are other factors which contribute to making Pakistan finally successful. Such things as the economy, industry, finance, agriculture, art and culture, civil society and Democracy......................along this road to success for Pakistan, away from security question and the military center stage, of which decades after decades after decades have been tried and wasted, and which have resulted in the GREATEST CATASTROPIES in the nations history (I'm including Kargil as an operation not scantioned by Sharif)........Then therefore logically a new road must be tried to protect and safeguard Pakistan's future, and that road involves peace over Kashmir with India, and an FTA with India.
So in this critical light, to relieve Pakistan of its negative energies, legalising the LoC, and signing a comperhensive peace deal over Kashmir is absolutely logical, and urgent. Then the Pak military can focus on the Western border, and civilian politicians can get on with the business of sorting out Pakistan's internal problems.
In my opinion a comprehensive FTA between Pakistan and India before the peace deal, something that is less contentious should be entertained as an initial step to the main objective. One agreement reinforces the other.
As to India, the Civilian politicians are very mediocre, corrupt, slow and in the case of some working for foreign intelligence as Mir Jafars. BUT at least India is a fully functioning democracy, and India unlike Pakistan does not initiate wars against her neighbors, and subsequently lose them humiliatingly, one after the other, and still not get it who is manipulating who. The Indian politicians for all their faults are more responsive to the needs of the ordinary Indian in comparison to the Pakistani military and ordinary Pakistanis.
So we must seek peace between India and Pakistan over Kashmir through civilian governments with popular mandates in both countries. Zardari is a puppet of the USA/UK, and he has been ordered by his foreign masters not to visit India, and he obediently has not. So we must look else where for movement in this area.
