Pakistan's Homecoming | South Asia, not West Asia
In 1972, after the Bangladesh war, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto publicly vowed to turn his back on India and seek Pakistan's fortune among the Islamic
countries to the West. He convened a spectacular Islamic summit at Lahore.
He embarked on a quest for nuclear weapons, not merely to deter Indian conventional superiority but also to assert Pakistan's leadership role in the Islamic world.
He christened it the 'Islamic bomb' and collected enormous funds from the Islamic world. He concluded secret defence deals with the Shah of Iran and the Gulf states to ensure their military support in any future conflict with India.
General Zia-ul Haq continued the wooing of the Islamic world. He sent a whole division of Pakistani troops to Saudi Arabia.
Pakistani pilots flew fighter aircraft for the Gulf states. Pakistan's identification with the Islamic world became total when, under the CIA's leadership it assembled a vast international jehadi force of 80,000-100,000 Muslims from countries ranging from Morocco to Indonesia to fight the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
That, in turn gave birth to jehadism with Pakistani ideologues like Maududi (originally from India) exercising a lot of influence.
With Arab money, West European equipment obtained in black market, Chinese weapon design and technical assistance and the US looking away, Pakistan became a nuclear weapon power in the late '80s.
Yet Pakistan was not accepted as a partner by the Islamic countries of West Asia, let alone as a leader. Ayatollah Khomeini used to call Zia-ul Haq the lesser Satan, the bigger Satan being the US.
There have always been tensions between Shia Iran and Sunni-dominated Pakistan. During the first Gulf War, Pakistani army chief General Aslam Beg initially sided with Saddam Hussein's strategic defiance.
That, in turn, led to most of the Gulf states scaling down their military involvement with Pakistan under US pressure. Subsequently, Pakistan took over Afghanistan by helping the Taliban to fight the Rabbani government.
The Pakistani ISI backed the jehadi campaigns in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and Chechnya and instigated trouble in the Central Asian Republics.
Allowing Osama bin Laden refuge, supporting the Taliban and converting Pakistan into the epicentre of jehadi terrorism were all part of the Pakistani leadership's ambitious plans to play a pre-eminent role in the Islamic world.
The Pakistani leadership has a tradition of overestimating its own capability and underestimating the countervailing factors. That resulted in their being frustrated in 1947 (Kashmir), 1965 (Operation Gibraltar), 1971 (Bangladesh), 1984 (Siachen) and 1999 (Kargil).
They spoke of bleeding India through a thousand cuts but could not succeed. Similarly, their use of terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy finally recoiled on them when 9/11 happened.
The US became fully engaged in West Asia with president Bush making clear the American determination to restructure the political architecture of the region. Pakistan has been told it has no role to play to its West.
Thanks to its wrong priorities, Pakistan has lost out in terms of economic growth as well as social and political advance-ment. The Pakistani education system is completely out of sync with today's knowledge economy.
An estimate has it that the ratio of college students between Pakistan and India is 1 to 97.
General Musharraf appears finally to have realised that as a country that is part of the subcontinent and whose destiny is linked with the Indus-Gangetic area, Pakistan would never be accepted as part of West Asian Islamic states.
Long ago, a noted US analyst said that Pakistan's geostrategic importance arose out of its proximity to the three largest nations of the world - China, India and USSR - and its commanding the oil sea lanes from the Gulf.
But in a unipolar world with no active tension among these three major powers and the US, that geostrategic location has lost much of its significance. Pakistan's source of financial support, Saudi Arabia, is coming increasingly under US scrutiny.
In many ways the upcoming SAARC summit is a sort of homecoming for Pakistan: It has more in common with the rest of the subcontinent than West Asia and its future economic growth and political and social advancement depend increasingly on peaceful interaction with other SAARC nations.
Pakistan is the only country in South Asia that has been discussed internationally as a possible failed state. General Musharraf now knows that terrorism unleashed by the ISI has boomeranged on him.
The general, when faced with the US ultimatum in September 2001, made a U-turn in his Afghan policy and totally abandoned the Taliban.
Now, faced with the inexorable realities of the war on terrorism and developing international alignments, it would be logical for him to give up the policy of the last 30 years of confronting India and embark on subcontinental economic cooperation so vitally needed to prevent Pakis-tan from becoming a failed state.
In the history of SAARC this is the most crucial summit. While India, in the light of its past experience, has to be extremely cautious, it must also take into account the enormous compulsions on Pakistan to break with the past.
If Pakistan gives credible evidence of its desire to integrate with the subcontinent it should be welcomed and treated like the prodigal son of the biblical tale.
