By IANS,
Islamabad: The use of terrorism as a “policy” should be “scrapped in its entirety” because of the harm it had caused to Pakistan and India, an editorial in a leading English daily said Saturday while commenting on the meeting of the two countries’ prime ministers in Egypt earlier this week.
Another editorial noted that the meeting had “produced two versions of what really happened”, thus giving rise to “more ambiguity, which is of the essence when managing intractable crises”.
“The use of terrorism as a policy should be scrapped in its entirety now. Its futility and the harm it has caused to both the nations should be more than obvious by now,” The News said in an editorial headlined “Good news from the peace front”.
“This is especially so in the present times where non-state actors have spread their tentacles across the globe, and can strike at any time — thereby sabotaging any initiative to build a strong relationship and embark upon joint efforts to tackle terrorism, which is a threat to both countries.
“Building a sustainable understanding, not subject upon suspicion and impulse, is in the interest of not only the people of India and Pakistan, but the entire region,” the editorial added.
In this context, it noted that the Pakistan-India agreement to delink dialogue and terrorism “is a positive development and deserves a lot of applause on both sides of the border”.
The meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh in Sharm el-Sheikh Thursday on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit “has been highly constructive, and now should serve as an impetus for both sides to mend fences and begin the journey towards peace once again.
“For both sides to commit to such an effort in writing, that too so soon after the reportedly disastrous meeting between the two sides” in Yekaterinburg in June “has also set a good example”, the editorial maintained.
Holding that it was not “realistic” to expect that “relations will always be at a high”, the editorial said this “should not mean that diplomatic dialogue should be cut off entirely, which has unfortunately been the case for over 60 years now.
“When peace is made contingent upon purely ideal situations, it is almost certain that any process of normalisation will be fragile, nervous and fickle, which cannot be said to be in the interest of anybody,” the editorial maintained.
Daily Times wrote in much the same vein, noting that the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement says that “dialogue is the only way forward”, adding that “action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed.
“This gives rise to more ambiguity, which is of the essence when managing intractable crises,” said the editorial, headlined “Interpreting the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting”.
From Pakistan’s point of view, the editorial held, “the sentence can be taken to mean two things at the same time. It can mean that Pakistan will not act against terrorists unless and until there is a resumption of India-Pakistan talks; it can also mean that India will not make talks conditional to Pakistan’s action against the terrorists”.
Noting that the joint statement doesn’t have the word Kashmir in its text, the editorial said: “There is a history of how Pakistan has gradually made Kashmir remote as the central target of its campaign to talk to India under the Simla Agreement. In the past, it was ‘separated’ from the rest of the agenda of composite talks and consigned to a special basket.”
Referring to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s statement Friday that she would not allow her country’s soil to be used for terrorism against India, the editorial said: “A lot of literature about this ‘covert’ war indicates that Pakistan is keeping the pot of insurgency boiling in India only through injection of money.
“If this is true, then India could be doing a similar tit-for-tat kind of operation in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), deniably and without non-state actors. It is to remove this kind of bilateral mischief too that India-Pakistan talks are needed,” the editorial contended.