Opinion The Great Game Folio

India’s boundary dispute with China covers many parts of the state of Jammu & Kashmir including the Aksai Chin plateau. Technically,then,one might want to say India has two sets of problems in J&K — one with Pakistan and another with China — and wants to deal with each one of them separately. Bilateralism,then was about India’s preferred process and not the substance of the issue. Even that statement gets muddied by the fact that India’s contested frontiers with Pakistan and China meet in J&K. When it came to exchanging maps showing the Indian and Chinese national perceptions — not a mutually agreed delineation — of the Line of Actual Control in the Western sector that covers J&K a few years ago,Beijing had backed off because it did not want to offend Islamabad. Meanwhile,India can’t forget that Pakistan had ceded parts of the state of J&K under its control to China in 1963. China itself had stated that the final disposition of its border with Pakistan is subject to the eventual settlement of the Indo-Pak dispute over Kashmir.

Although India insisted that Kashmir was a bilateral issue with Pakistan,Delhi had to often fend off America’s ill-advised diplomatic activism in the state. It is only now that Delhi is being compelled to deal with the reality that there indeed is a third party to the Kashmir dispute — China. Washington may be the busybody,but it is Beijing that holds territory in J&K.

Wakhan corridor

As a rising China pushes its rail and road networks into the Subcontinent much to the consternation of Delhi,the next ambitious venture could be a highway through the Wakhan corridor to connect Afghanistan to Xinjiang. The Wakhan corridor was drawn across the Pamirs by the British Raj as part of the Great Game agreements with Russia. The corridor separated the Raj from Russia but also provided a small stretch of border — of about 80 km — with China.

The idea of a new road between China and Afghanistan apparently came up during the meeting between Presidents Hamid Karzai and Hu Jintao earlier this year. Although Kabul has been pressing for an early feasibility study of the project,Beijing has held back citing the huge costs and technical difficulties of building a road into Afghanistan through the difficult terrain of the great Pamirs.

Zardari’s future

Although the world’s attention is focused on the mess that the United States and the international community have made of the presidential elections in Afghanistan,it is Pakistan where some political change might be at hand. The impetus comes less from the unending terror attacks across Pakistan’s cities,but from the many legal and political challenges facing the presidency of Asif Ali Zardari.

In July,the Supreme Court had declared null and void the sweet-heart deal Benazir Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf had unveiled in October 2007. The deal, codified in the National Reconciliation Ordinance, had granted immunity to Bhutto and her husband Zardari and allowed them to return to Pakistan and take part in the elections that swept their People’s Party to power.As per the directive of the Supreme Court,Zardari needs to get Parliament approval to the NRO before the end of November. Since Zardari does not have the strength in the Parliament to steam roll the bill,he needs the support of others. With that support not forthcoming,Zardari’s party backed off on Monday from tabling the bill in Parliament. One way out is for Zardari to cut a deal with his opponents under which he will remain in office but shrink the role of the presidency to a purely ceremonial one. But Zardari will surely wonder the point of staying on in the president’s house without any power. If he does want to hold on,can he outsmart his growing band of opponents,especially the Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani? No one is betting on Zardari to win against the GHQ.

The writer is Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress,Washington DC