Jaw-jaw not war-war

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has had a busy week in and around the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, there have been meetings aplenty and some much-needed fence-mending. He has been giving interviews as well, with the one he gave to Al Jazeera of some significance. He spoke of inheriting strained relations with both India and the USA and that the PTI government was seeking a reset with both.

The government from day one has been consistently assertive in both respects, but this is no quick fix. There is a lot of luggage to go with both transactions, and whilst the US appears to be at the vanilla platitudes end of the reaction spectrum the Indians are quite the reverse.

Pakistan made a peace offer to India on 26 July and it was dead on the ground within the week, shot down by some very bellicose statements which made mention of ‘war’. The Indians pulled out of a meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj made a fool of herself by pointedly not looking in the direction of Mr Qureshi in a meeting they both attended. Juvenile antics aside, India is passing up one of the better peace opportunities to come its way for many years. The current government is in the very early pages of its own narrative, and wants to put space between itself and its PML-N predecessors.

The US response so far has been guardedly anodyne with American pointperson Alice Wells telling BBC Urdu that PM Imran Khans’ statements were welcome as were any steps Pakistan might take in that direction. The reset with America may be taken as a work in progress whilst that with India a sad case of crash and burn. Whether the US can take a more interventionist role in bringing moderation to the Modi government is doubtful at best, particularly as the Trump administration is drawing in American horns the world over. Afghan relations are also at a crux, and Mr Qureshi is going to need to keep his wits about him