[sacw] SACW -> From DAWN #2 (July 5-7, 1999)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web - Dispatch #2 [Beat the Ban Service]
July 7, 1999

*********Beat the Ban Service !********
In response to the Government of India's ban on
the prestigious Pakistani newspaper DAWN's website,
this is a second lot of a regular series of dispatches being addressed to
Dawn readers in India. All recipients are requested to
share news from DAWN with others in India.
Lets beat the Ban !
:-)
*********************************************
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Excerpts from DAWN Part 2, July 6- July 7 1999
====================================
Contents:
[1.] Understanding China is vital
[2.] Questions on Kargil
[3.] Not another war
________________________

# 1.
DAWN
July 6 Tuesday
Opinion

Understanding China is vital
By Tanvir Ahmad Khan

THERE has been a peculiar polarization between comments made in Pakistan
and those made abroad on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's just concluded
visit to China. In both cases, the shadow of Kargil seems to have
affected the assessment and its media projection. In Pakistan, the visit
was largely seen as a reaffirmation of the continuing relevance of this
all-weather friendship in a period of unusual stress.
Abroad, the conclusion was more or less what the Economist implied in
the following observation: "Mr Sharif had hoped to hear a friendlier
message from Pakistan's long-standing ally, China. Apparently not.
China's statements were studiously neutral; they said nothing about an
immediate cease-fire, which would leave Pakistani forces on Indian
territory, nor did they link withdrawal to a solution of the wider
Kashmir problem". In a number of conversations during my recent visit
abroad, I was repeatedly confronted with this alleged shift in China's
strategic posture vis-a-vis South Asia.
To overstate China's considerable commitment to Pakistan's defensive
capability or, alternatively, to discover serious erosion of the
strategic understanding between the two countries is equally flawed; it
does not reflect a full grasp of the vast canvas on which China now
sketches its foreign and security policy. No less importantly, China
articulates this policy with the deliberateness and circumspection of a
major world power preoccupied with a global agenda. The transition to
major power status is an ineluctable shift away from the simplicities of
narrow and parochial regional policies to the growing complexities of
global politics. The change demands dynamic policy adjustments as well
as a radically different semantics capable of reflecting a much larger r
ange of new inter-relationships on the world stage.
During a week spent in Beijing and Shanghai in April 1999, one was
fortunate enough to engage in intensive discussions with Chinese experts
on international affairs, often in impressive institutional settings.
The most compelling aspect of the presentations made by our Chinese
friends was their clarity of purpose. The Chinese know all too well that
they will be the most important single factor in the emergence of a new
world order in the first quarter of the 21st century. They also realize
that their rise to the status of a world power would not be a simple and
linear affair; it would entail highly complex interactions with several
other centres of power. On the top of the list is their quest for a
peaceful and positive engagement with the United States, the current
hegemonic power in the Asia-Pacific region. But China will also have to
constantly define, and re-define, emerging relationships with several
other states or groups of states, including Russia, Japan, the European
Union, the ASEAN countries and India.
It is a cliche of much of western analysis that China tends to rely on
force in settling international issues. The truth is just the opposite:
China has always shown a strong preference for a peaceful settlement of
outstanding problems. During the first fifty years of the Chinese
revolution, the country has faced multiple security threats , including
those involving nuclear attack. In his book 'The World and China', John
Gittings has catalogued several instances in which the US considered a
nuclear strike against China. The fact that the USSR also actively
examined this option is again well documented.
It is highly instructive to compare and contrast the flexibility of
defence and security policies of China, a country that faced grave
dangers, to those of India, which stood, virtually, in no external
peril. The Chinese fought their way out of an obsessive preoccupation
with military security to make economic progress their central theme. If
India lags behind China today, it is partly because the Chinese
leadership was nearly always able to establish the right priorities and
proportion in adjusting inescapable demands of national defence to the
imperative of economic development. China was able to sustain very high
rates of growth largely because it was willing to limit its military
expenditure to what was assessed as minimum and sufficient force levels
while committing increasing resources to economic reconstruction.
China was able to focus sharply on economic growth partly because it
kept what could easily have become irresistible revanchism about lost
territories under check. The policy of seeking peaceful solutions has
been vindicated by China's success in resolving border issues with its
neighbours; in fact, India is now the only exception. The negotiated
orderly return of Hong Kong to the mainland has strengthened the hands
of those in China who believe that a similar peaceful settlement can be
arrived at with Taiwan.
China's determined bid to establish itself on the economic map of the
world has run a difficult course in the last few years. There is a
cluster of internal problems, some of which are the consequences of
rapid development itself. There have been periods of immense stress in
crucial areas like banking. East Asia accounted for 25 per cent of
Chinese exports. The extended crisis in the economies of East Asian
countries impinged directly on China. Some of the strains in US-China
relations can be traced to the negative reaction to an intensified
Chinese effort to increase their exports to the alternative markets in
North America and the European Union.
The die-hard anti-China analysts in the West tend to argue that, as in
the case of pre-World War Japan, economic problems will make China
belligerent and militarily adventurous. On the contrary, the Chinese
assessment of their economic difficulties deepens their commitment to
peace and stability in Asia. Avoidance of armed conflict has become a
major doctrine of Chinese security thinking.
China is currently implementing an ambitious programme of military
reforms. Modernization aims at a smaller but more sophisticated army.
China has a long way to go before it reaches the present level of
western military technology. It has, however, demonstrated that this
disparity is not an insurmountable hurdle in working out stable
political equations, especially when the essentially non-aggressive
nature of China's military power is increasingly recognized.
China is anxious to preserve a suitable environment for the attainment
of its ambitious economic objectives during the first quarter of the
next century. It will, therefore, work for a balance of power in the
Pacific. The view that it is getting ready to challenge the United
States' hegemony is an oversimplification. There is a new emphasis in
China on the upgradation of air and naval power. But the purpose remains
the defence of vital national interests in the coastal belt and in the
South China Sea. Meanwhile, multi-dimensional diplomacy seeks a regime
of peace. China has everything to gain if the regional shipping lanes,
vital to its exports and strategic imports, remain free of pressures.
Its clear preference today is to ensure that freedom through political
understanding and cooperation and not through the development of an
aggressive blue-water navy.
China is enhancing its global role by taking an active interest in the
fields of nuclear non-proliferation and arms control. The exchange of
visits between President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton and the more
recent visit to the United States of Premier Zhu Rongji focused the
spotlight on China's responsible posture on the spread of weapons of
mass destruction. China serves an important purpose by widening the
discourse to include the need for eliminating causes of tension and for
greater adherence to the principle of sovereign equality of states.
Ensconced in the global league, China cannot be expected to look at
South Asia through the prism of the 1960s. The Sino-Indian antagonism
was not of China's making anyway. The Indian propensity to use force in
settling issues with the neighbours had precipitated the 1962 conflict.
India's open strategic alignment with the Soviet Union was often aimed
more at China than the West. Notwithstanding this uneasy history, China
welcomed Rajiv Gandhi's initiative in 1987 to initiate a serious
dialogue between the two countries. It was a measure of the considerable
progress made in this dialogue that China felt so surprised by India
branding it as 'Enemy Number One' on the eve of Indian nuclear tests.
The letter written by Mr Vajpayee to President Clinton was a renewal of
the Indian offer to join in an anti-China coalition in case Washington
wanted to revert to a China containment policy. The Chinese have nor
permitted this ugly episode to derail the Sino-India rapprochement
process because their policies are firmly anchored in a long-term
perspective on China's place in the world in the coming millennium.
China is a continental power stretching from the Pacific well into
Southern Asia. The Indian bid to keep it excluded from South Asia has
always been an unrealistic enterprise. It is not even consistent with
perpetual justification by India of its nuclear weapon and missile
development programme in terms of a non-existent Chinese threat.
Fortunately, Pakistan has had little inhibition in opening its door to
China and the two countries established the salience of their strategic
cooperation fairly soon after Pakistan's independence. The
transformation of the regional situation in the post-Cold War and the
post-Soviet era might have made this cooperation a trifle less urgent
for China but the convergence of interests remains as valid as ever.
China has played an important part in enhancing Pakistan's ability to
defend itself against external aggression. This cooperation is still a
valuable asset for Pakistan.
Pakistan has a positive understanding of the changing role of China in
the regional and global affairs. But this understanding remains confined
to relatively small groups and has not trickled down even within the
state apparatus. Friendships need to be nurtured through mutually
beneficial projects.
An abiding commonality of interests is the glue that inter-state
relationships cannot dispense with. Pakistan must carry out deep
introspection to find out if it has done enough to maintain this
commonality. China's rise to the status of a major world power will, in
the long run, be immensely beneficial to small and medium
states.Pakistan has a built -in advantage if China can successfully
negotiate its course to that eminence. Meanwhile, it would have to
reconcile its expectations from China with the vastly greater burdens
that this permanent friend has to bear during its own journey to its
historic destiny.
_____________
# 2.

DAWN
07 July 1999 Wednesday
Features Section

Questions on Kargil
M. Ziauddin

HAZAR Khan Bijarani of the PPP(SB), and Aftab Shahban Mirani, Babu
Ghulam Hussain and Naveed Qamar of the PPP want to amend the
Constitution to reintroduce reserve seats for women in parliament. Begum
Abida Hussain of the PML was in full agreement with her colleagues on
the other side of the aisle. And Speaker Illahi Bux Soomro did not seem
to have the heart to shoot down the move by getting the sense of the
house which, if one had heard the parliamentary secretary for
parliamentary affairs, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, opposing the move, could not
have supported the opposition's effort to introduce a bill to that
effect.
Being a private members' day, the opposition monopolized the proceedings
on Tuesday. The speaker allowed Bijarani, Mirani, Ghulam Hussain and
Naveed Qamar to speak briefly on the need to amend the Constitution to
give reserved representation to what they called over half the
population of Pakistan. He also allowed Begum Abida, out of perhaps
special consideration as she was not one of the movers of the bill, to
speak on the issue. She proposed the setting up of a special committee
of the house having members from all the political parties represented
in the National Assembly with the mandate to draft a consensus bill for
the restoration of women's reserved seats.
Syed Zafar Ali Shah did not oppose the bill as such but requested the
opposition to give some more time to the government to come up with its
own bill. He also referred in passing to the thinking among some
sections that it would amount to giving the women double representation
if their reserved seats were restored as they also get elected directly
on the general seats. Finally, it was agreed by all to wait until the
next private members' day to sort out the matter. And the speaker
readily deferred the item to next week.
The next issue on the agenda was a Naveed Qamar resolution calling upon
the government to set up an independent board to manage the PTV. There
are perhaps no two opinions on the matter in the whole of the country
except in the government circles, no matter which government. Begum
Abida giving her support rather obliquely to the resolution put her
finger on the real issue when she said the very fact that the PTV was
owned by the government automatically undermined its credibility as
everything telecast by it is taken as government propaganda
straightaway.
The resolution was as expected opposed by the parliamentary secretary
for information, Anwarul Haq Ramay. But he later requested the speaker
to defer further discussion on the resolution to the next private
members' day as according to him some more members would like to express
their views on the issue.
Though the two issues, the bill for the restoration of women's seat and
the resolution on PTV, did seem to excite some of the members, yet most
did not seem to be paying any serious attention to the ongoing
proceedings. They were engaged in discussing perhaps something more
interesting. A heavy hum hung over the house which interfered with the
speeches. It was only when Naveed Qamar, stopping midway through his
speech on his resolution, invited the attention of the speaker towards
the hum and said the members were perhaps more interested in Kargil than
in the subject under discussion.
The questions that were being asked in the lobbies mostly concerned
Kargil and the PM's visit to Washington. What did the PM get out of the
visit? Did he have the support of the army and the Mujahideen in his
decision to agree to withdraw from Kargil heights? What did he mean when
the US president said he would take personal interest in getting the
Lahore process resumed? Has Pakistan succeeded in getting the world to
use its influence with India to agree to decisive talks with Pakistan on
Kashmir?
Those who seemed to justify everything the government did with regard to
the Kargil operation in the last six or so weeks appeared confident that
Pakistan had succeeded in achieving all its objectives for which the
operation was launched in the first place. But those who found it hard
to understand the various moves of the government in this period in the
absence of any concrete information as to the reasons for these moves,
seemed at a loss to make any intelligent assessment of the whole thing.
Most to whom I talked in the lobbies on Tuesday agreed that it was
damage control which the government needed to do and do it immediately
before things start getting out of hand domestically in the wake of the
Washington meeting. Already the so-called Jihadi forces are out in the
streets crying for blood.
__________________
# 3.
DAWN
07 July 1999 Wednesday
Letter to the Editor:

Not another war

AYAZ AMIR in his latest article rightly points out the lack of
leadership in Pakistan vis-a-vis the Kargil situation. Furthermore, I
agree with Ayaz when he points out that the people ofPakistan seem to be
somewhat disinterested in this latest Kashmir conflict. I think the
reason for this is because the official stand of the Pakistangovernment
is that the government has no control over the freedom fighters and that
they are totally indigenous and independent. therefore Nawaz Sharif
cannot do much about it.
Nevertheless, this crisis demands that our leadership takes a wise and
prudent approach to resolve this matter peacefully and not letthis spill
over into a wider conflict. God knows the last thing this nation wants
is another costly war with India which will not do a bit of good to
either us or them.
ADNAN KHAN
Boston, US
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