Trade vs terror |

Pakistan was unable to manage the fallout from the "operations" of Kargil (1999) and Mumbai (2008). The governments of Islamabad fell into a bad spell and the elected leaders were punished for refusing to swallow both mishaps. Pakistan was forced to judge the brains of Mumbai attacks, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, but the trial quickly became a joke.

On November 10, 2012, the country's officials told the anti-terrorist judge holding Lakhvi that the terrorists who attacked and killed more than 160 people in Mumbai belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the group had trained in different places of Pakistan. The brain, Lakhvi, is married in prison, had a son and boasted about his prison term on the phone. Tariq Khosa, retired Inspector General of Police, wrote to Dawn on August 3, 2015: "The anti-terrorism court judge charged with trying Lakhvi has been replaced eight times since the beginning of the trial in 2009. The Federal Authority for Investigations confessed that it is difficult to prosecute a LeT commander and the learned trial judge refused to visit Adiala prison where Lakhvi was being tried – for security reasons. They received threats on cell phones. The witnesses were unsure and unwilling to testify against the accused.

Pakistan still denies that, by harboring those who have been declared terrorists by the UN, it is complicit in terrorism. But his "all-weather" friend, China, has twice joined those who accuse Pakistan of protecting terrorists – BRICS with India and FATF in Paris with Saudi Arabia. The latest rumor is that Pakistan wants peace with India. The Imran Khan government hinted that it wanted to "normalize" relations with India as its two predecessors, but their leaders have been criminalized by the country's courts.

Throughout the world, free trade is the first sign of "normalization". "Relations between countries. In 2005, at the SAARC summit in Dhaka, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke about connectivity. In the past, India has given Pakistan the status of most favored nation – a gesture that is not reciprocal. Now, after Kargil and Mumbai, and after being made to have, Pakistan apparently wants free trade.

But South Asia has moved away from the SAARC and the idea of ​​the region as a "connected" trading block. C Raja Mohan writes: "India's refusal to engage with Pakistan, unless Islamabad addresses its concerns about cross-border terrorism, has also delayed the next SAARC summit in Islamabad. The last summit of leaders of the eight SAARC countries was convened in Kathmandu at the end of 2014. The real tragedy, of course, is that nothing substantive would come out even if the summit was held tomorrow in Islamabad. "(" Farewell to South Asia ", IE, October 11)

General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistani army chief, says that his country's economic prosperity is linked to the region and peace talks with India.This, they say, is the Bajwa doctrine cutting Pakistan from the negative legacy of Kargil and Mumbai.Some information also says that China wants Pakistan to " is drawing closer to the east "to be able to pbad its Sino-Pakistani economic corridor .If anyone thought India would bite after Prime Minister Imran Khan issued his" two-step "statement on a proposed bilateral dialogue, he was quickly disillusioned.The bilateral equation has deteriorated and India is grumbling even more threateningly than ever.

Pakistan has proposed "peace talks "to discuss disputes, this has already been tried as a recipe to get out of the stalemate, but the "normalization" of relationships is something different. Maybe the world will have to wait for the next general election in India. Meanwhile, both parties score points with their people.

The 14th SAARC Summit in New Delhi in 2007 raised the issue of trade routes. India and Pakistan have agreed on the vision of a South Asian community characterized by a smooth flow of goods, services, people, technologies, knowledge, capital, culture and ideas in the region. For SAARC, which began in 1985 with quarrels over whether Kashmir could be mentioned at the summit sessions, the acceptance of trade routes was a big step forward.

In 2011, SAARC seemed to be taking off. The members were ready to follow the SAFTA agreement signed in 2004. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar arrived in New Delhi with the words: "Pakistan wants to improve its regional connectivity with energy pipelines and roads. One day, Indian trade with the countries of Central Asia could transit through Pakistan.

But in 2012, SAARC was once again a risky proposition. Pakistani diplomats, who should have led the machinery of cooperation, insulted the organization and called for "dispute settlement". Indian diplomats, for their part, asked Pakistan to talk about cross – border terrorism first. SAARC.

On the contrary, ASEAN envisions a single market like that of the European Union. More than 25 per cent of ASEAN trade is in the region, compared to 5 per cent in South Asia.

Who could want more connectivity than Prime Minister Narendra Modi? But look what happened. The year 2015 promises promising news: on February 11, Prime Minister Modi sent a message of goodwill to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But two months later, before Sharif could begin speaking, the Lahore High Court approved Lakhvi's release.

States are created by tracing borders and borders that cut them off from their neighbors. Nations are often created by cheering identities in conflict with those of their neighbors. Borders are obstacles to the movement of people and goods and constitute "national security". Trade with neighboring states is often described as contrary to "national security" because it tends to link the national advantage to the "links" it establishes with the "threatening" neighbor. This was the thesis of the founding book of Mahnaz Z Isfahani, Roads and Rivals: The Politics of Access to the Boundaries of Asia (1989). Today, such an badysis helps us understand how global trade in the WTO has changed the old ways of thinking about security.

Will Pakistan and India keep the old scheme? Will Pakistan be a state of national security, forever? Both must review their bilateral relations and move to the only standardization recipe they have developed in SAARC, which has now pbaded away. A relationship based on connectivity and free trade is the only recipe that will work in a world tired of the Indo-Pakistan conflict. Pakistan as a revisionist state damaged itself almost irreparably. But his politicians agree on the formula of "connectivity".

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