Five years ago, in the concluding chapter in my book, The March of Folly in Afghanistan, I advanced the thought that an internationalised non-official horizontal bipolarity of disaffection was taking shape. The Samjhauta Express attack exemplified terror, but the instant sympathy by the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, with neither indulging in the habitual blame game, confirmed that the pledge of inter-governmental cooperation in combating terror had taken roots. After 9/11, in response to the blunt question by Bush, Musharraf unhesitatingly promised jettisoning Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But he had a caveat to support “freedom fighters” in Kashmir. In 2003, the American military success was followed by unexpected political failure in Iraq, which changed Pakistan’s orientation. Rampant Islamophobia had begun earlier when the World Trade Centre was attacked, but the neo-imperialist intervention turned all the umma anti-American. As a side-effect, entrenc-hed anti-Indianism in Pakistan was jolted and a constructive review of relations with India got under way.For Thomas Friedman, outsourcing made the world flat and prosperous; Joseph Stiglitz, however, noted at Seattle meeting that the globalisation agenda was opposed surprisingly by globalised NGOs. Similar unity of protest was evident on environment in Kyoto and racism in Durban. Nepal’s Maoists have established links with the Naxalites in India; the Muslim minority protest in the Philippines and the Shining Path in Peru may well find anti-West affinities with the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda. The vertical inter-governmental bipolarity of institutions like NATO and OECD is being superseded by transnational horizontal coalitions, which defy established law and is indifferent to orderly progress. In the 19th and early 20th century, protests against imperialism could be nationally compartmentalised, but after the communication revolution, both positive gains and negative consequences are internationalised.But the transition to being contemporary poses an intellectual challenge. Politically conditioned institutional parochialism has a semi-independent momentum. The ISI, for example, will not stop fuelling anti-Indianism; our government has long regretted the IPKF misadventure, but active sympathy of the people in Tamil Nadu for the LTTE has not collapsed. Bush/Blair, imprisoned by old military overconfidence, could not foresee that non-uniformed suicidal desperation could frustrate organised firepower. After the Mumbai serial blasts, the media blamed malevolent Pakistan, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was more discerning and shook hands with Musharraf in Havana.This uneven time-warp dichotomy can also be perceived in nuclear policies. Theoretically it is long recognised that scientific and technological knowledge cannot for ever be closeted. Nuclear monopoly could no more last than apartheid. India, Pakistan and Israel were honest, but North Korea and Iran may be more surreptitious. Meanwhile, no country has been “deterred” by nuclear weapons. Even old hawks are now urging adjustment to new realities. Four eminent Americans representing bi-partisan unity (Republicans: Kissinger and Perry; Democrats: Schultz and Nunn) writing in The Wall Street Journal now plead for the immediate ratification of CTBT and graduated steps towards globally eliminating nuclear weapons. For my part, in 1967 I confidentially favoured signing the NPT and continuing our policies of total nuclear disarmament. After the Iraq fiasco, the US stands so alienated that any American initiative will carry little credibility.India is in a better position to grasp the 21st-century international imperatives. The US-India Civil Nuclear agreement is a corrective compromise. This land of Gandhi and Nehru should resume the plea for peace based on the equality of nations. It should crusade for nuclear disarmament, the spread of equitable international social justice, and abandon imitative justification for exceptionalism. We have now retrieved credibility for non-alignment by simultaneously pursuing functional cooperation with the US, Russia, Europe, China, Japan and even Iran.There is creeping rationality in India-Pakistan relations. Whether on the cricket pitch or trans-border trade, geography is dismantling the aberrations created by Partition. It is, of course, for the Pakistani people to determine their own form of government, but India has an overriding interest in the stability of Pakistan. Likewise, Pakistan must at least confidentially recognise that plurality, democracy and secularism in India serve its own identity. The threat now is not great-power conflicts or the special licence for nuclear powers; it is of institutional resources for tackling rampant poverty, the spectre of climate change and the denial of human rights. The lesson for the US from Iraq is that there is no more scope for neo-imperialist unilateralism. For India, there is no more scope for insensitive hegemonism in the region.War’s no more politics by other means. We may have our separate habitats but, as never before, we’re each other’s keepers on the planet.The writer is a former foreign secretary
