EDITORIAL: Surely, the United States (US) State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs didn’t just make a mistake when it referred to Occupied Kashmir as “India’s Jammu and Kashmir” in its first tweet about the disputed valley since the Biden administration took over. Nor could it have just forgotten to correct the description, which naturally “disappointed” Islamabad, even after its official spokesman made it “very clear” that “there has been no change in US policy in the region.” Each word coming out of the State Department is very carefully chosen, weighed and then rechecked before being launched; usually via Twitter first these days. It represents official US policy, after all, and even in the Trump years when the US president would shoot out impulsive tweets every now and then, the State Department never abandoned its proper approach to global diplomacy.
This ought to be warning enough for the prime minister’s office as well as the foreign ministry about the need to work more on Pakistan’s diplomatic strategy about the disputed valley. So far everybody was expecting President Biden to be more forthcoming than his predecessor about grave human rights violations in the valley. But that is not how this seems to be playing out. The State Department’s clarification came after a string of statements from senior administration officials about south and central Asia. And, clearly, the focus going forward will be on moving away from Pakistan and Afghanistan and containing China. President Biden was, of course, vice president when President Obama rolled out the Pivot to Asia policy that first made China a foreign policy priority and accepted the need to bolster India to help counter the former ‘Middle Kingdom’. So anybody still counting on the clarification about Kashmir as some sort of proof that Biden is not insensitive to Pakistan’s concerns could well be downplaying the likelihood of Washington just adopting a policy of ambiguity when it comes to Islamabad’s questions about the disputed valley.
That, if true, could put Pakistan in a bit of a fix. Prime Minister Imran Khan cannot be accused of not giving Kashmir the importance it deserves. He personally raised it at the United Nations (UN), with the US, got his foreign minister to repeatedly bring it up with Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) friends, and put the spotlight on India’s excesses there at almost every important international forum. Pakistan will have to do better than to expect old friends to side with its position, at the cost of all the advantages friendship with India can bring, simply because it is the right thing to do. It will have to do more of what it did to get strong, supportive statements out of Kuala Lumpur and Ankara. And that is to highlight all the human rights abuses in Kashmir as much as possible. Then remind the international community, as Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has done once again, that this region has become so hostile and tense that the slightest “mistake” could even trigger nuclear war.
The only solution to the problem is to get the two sides to talk. And since it is India that is ruling out both bilateral talks and foreign mediation, Pakistan’s success will lie in getting enough international pressure to bear on New Delhi to get it to the table. And for that getting President Biden to see the true face of the illegal Indian occupation of Kashmir will be extremely important. So it’s easy to understand the government’s disappointment with the State Department. But it isn’t immediately clear what it is going to do about it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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