If you join the dots from Amu Daryya, the river that separates Afghanistan from Central Asia, to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, you mark out a huge swathe of Asia where more than a billion people live in the midst of immense natural resources. Between the Himalayas and the mighty Indian Ocean that carries some of the most crucial sea lanes of global economy on the other, some of the greatest civilisations of human history flourished. The nation states that claim that inheritance today take as much pride in their ancient wisdom as in the strides made by them in modern sciences and technology.
All this should make for a region of peace, prosperity and effortless cooperation. But these are exactly the attributes that their contemporary history lacks.
It is not that the eight regional states of South Asia have not tried to create a stable architecture of collaboration that geography alone would mandate. Apart from bilateral initiatives, they have been struggling for more than two decades to consolidate a regional organisation at the heart of which lies the lofty objective of a free trading area. And yet when their heads of state and government gathered in Colombo on August 2 for their 15th summit, their intra-trade was still hovering around a pathetic figure of 5 per cent compared to 23 per cent for Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) and more than 60 per cent for the European Union.
Reflecting the high quality of the regional ruling elites, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summits usually produce inspiring addresses and the latest summit was no different. They were widely expected to overcome the obstacles that have inhibited the growth of trade and investment amongst them and that were succinctly identified by past summits and numerous expert-level meetings between the summits. Ironically, it is the regional terrorists who may number only a few thousand, at the most, who succeeded in claiming a disproportionate time of the summit and in casting a sombre shadow on its deliberations.
The terrorists must have laughed all the way to their next caches of arms and dug-outs as regional statesmen laboured to stop the slide into mutual recriminations. During the run-up to the summit, the militants had committed a terrible atrocity in Kabul by bombing the Indian embassy and created mayhem in the Indian cities of Bangalore and Ahmedabad. In Pakistan, apart from the regulation bomb blasts, they had fought bloody engagements with security forces. India and Pakistan had publicly traded serious allegations against each other and by Colombo time had decided to pursue them through quiet bilateral diplomacy. But in Colombo, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan had obviously other ideas.
The Kabul attack was one of many recent incidents that had shown up glaring deficiencies in Karzai's regime's capacity to protect even heavily policed locations. There was much sympathy in Colombo for his predicament. But delivering the first of the opening addresses, he loaded his criticism of terrorism with many barbed comments implicating Pakistan in his troubles.
Fortunately for regional cooperation, the Pakistani and Indian prime ministers evaded Karzai's lead. The former did not retaliate and instead saw Karzai on the sidelines of the conference to reassure him that Pakistan would fully participate in a thorough investigation.
Biggest threat
India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a statesmanlike reference to terrorism describing it as the single biggest threat to stability and progress. The message was clear: India had misgivings but would take them up in an important bilateral meeting with the Pakistani leader. This forbearance enabled other countries to bring the deliberations back to critical issues such as the need for creating a food bank and even more importantly an energy grid that would aim at meeting the minimum needs of the relatively disadvantaged states of South Asia.
Terrorists keep exploiting the inherent fragility of peace processes in South Asia. In Pakistan there is a new realism. The tribal belt is long and porous enough to permit some cross-border movement of insurgents despite aggressive surveillance by Pakistani troops. Al Qaida component of the insurgency has international volunteers and there may well be Pakistani individuals working side by side the Central Asian and Arab militants. The state of Pakistan, however, is fighting a bitter and costly war against them along a fluid front with mixed results.
Allegations of state complicity in the exploits of militants by the United States, Nato, India and Afghanistan play into the hands of terrorists and weaken the Islamabad government domestically. In the Pakistani perception, the worst policy is to let the men of violence trump the statesmen as they nearly did in Colombo. By all accounts the Saarc summit fell short of expectations because of a disproportionate intrusion of terrorism into the agenda. What is needed is a resolute joint action to which the regional states are committed politically and by legal agreements.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan. He heads Islamabad's Institute of Strategic Studies at present.
Send us your comments
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Gulf News may edit comments for length and clarity but will not change the tone of the message. Comments will only be accepted if all fields (including name) are filled correctly and the message isn't abusive, defamatory or offensive. The Gulf News website will only print your first name along with your comment. Please state in the message if you wish to remain anonymous. All comments sent may be forwarded for use in the Gulf News newspaper.
