Something better than nothing

Constant low-level state of conflict between India and Pakistan acts as a handbrake of the development of the region

Handshakes, a variable interpretation of body language and wishful thinking by a creative media rarely add up to diplomatic advancement. Such was the case when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in the Russian city of Ufa in July.

During the recent UN General Assembly session in New York, the best the pair could manage was a distant wave to each other. All too much is often read into these tangential meetings that are off-agenda and usually just between the two people involved without their advisers present. Both men acknowledged this after the meeting and Nawaz Sharif went on to another fence-mending exercise with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan.



Despite a healthy scepticism as to what might be achieved in these fleeting moments, we welcome them because everything has to start somewhere and the current state of relations between Pakistan and its neighbours to the east and west, India and Afghanistan, could not be much more fraught. Much turns on the three states, in particular the condition of regional security in the broadest sense, as well as the trio in many ways holding the keys to economic and social development in the decades to come. The constant low-level state of conflict between India and Pakistan acts as a handbrake of the development and security of the entire region. With Afghanistan, the situation is different. Along with long-standing conflicts and disputes, today there is also a threat to the vital China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Transnational projects such as the CPEC open possibilities in the collective futures of billions of people. They are the way forward in a modern world where ancient conflicts defy resolution, even allowing for there to be the political will to do so. Pakistan has a pivotal, indeed essential, role to play across this broad canvas. If ever there was a time when Pakistan needed statesmen at the helm, it is now, and although the statecraft displayed by the prime minister is not exactly stellar, he does at least appear to be getting a grasp of the fundamentals. Great oaks from little acorns grow.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 2^nd,  2015.

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