You Gotta be Kidding, Mr. Obama!

If one human year is worth seven dog years, then one country year is worth seven human years. So over the last nine years, India and Pakistan have fought four wars, killed thousands of each others' soldiers, and accused each other of dozens of suicide bombings. Over the next nine years, India expects to become a superpower, and clearly as things stand, its much smaller neighbor lies in its flight path -- a neighbor, one might add, that India severed into two separate countries five years ago (in country years, of course). Mr. Obama considers the Taliban an “existential threat” to Pakistan. But Pakistanis may be forgiven, if they reserve that epithet for India. The Taliban are today a “clear and present” danger, but there are several reasons why they will not be around one country year from today: First, they are a lunatic fringe that has alienated almost all shades of public opinion. Second, contrary to popular perception, they are religiously unschooled and their obscurantist balderdash has been dismissed by Islamic religious scholars of all hues. Thirdly, they number in the thousands and cannot be considered a credible long term threat to the fourth largest standing Army in the world and one of the world’s premier Intelligence services, ISI. What should be of real concern to Pakistanis though are the conditions that gave rise to the Taliban: First, a legal system that is not serving justice particularly to the poor. Second, a militarized neighborhood where Muslims are receiving the short end of the stick from seven hundred thousand Indian troops in the disputed state of Kashmir and from unmanned American drones in the semi-autonomous FATA border zone of Pakistan. A few years ago, when the right wing BJP was in power in India, the Kashmir problem almost got resolved. Ironically, the overtly Hindu BJP did not have as many qualms about doing a “deal” on Kashmir compared to the secular Congress Party which believes that giving any sort of autonomy to the only Muslim-majority region in India will undermine the “secular” character of that country. The Kashmir problem must be resolved and the "existential" threat perceived by Pakistan from India must be addressed in order to remove the fountainhead of support to the Taliban and militants in the region. That is the only thing, together with a reasonably reinvigorated judicial system and economy, that can ultimately remove the militant scourge from the region. The Obama administration got it right when Kashmir was included in its initial “to do” list and to Richard Holbrooke’s mandate. The Administration made a huge mistake when those decisions were rescinded, or at least made covert, due to lobbying by a short-sighted Indian lobby. Pakistan is not only a country, it is a center of gravity -- perhaps the center of gravity of the Islamic world — which too is rising economically and militarily although not as impressively or with as much unity or with the roll of drums that accompanies China and India. Let’s resolve the Kashmir issue before it too becomes a permanent “Clash of Civilizations” and intractable like the Palestinian problem.