FOR long-term peace to emerge in South Asia, India and Pakistan must collaborate, not in Kashmir initially, but in a more immediately volatile landscape Afghanistan.

It is here that India and Pakistan need to put their money where their mouths are and act responsibly by jointly suppressing the infrastructure of terrorism and helping rebuild Afghanistan so that it can take its place in the comity of nations.

India and Pakistan have been at each other's throats since 1947. From time to time, the situation comes to the brink of disaster, and then one or the other country pleads for outside help or both mouth clichés to reassure everyone that all is well. The previous three decades have seen them indulge in their own version of the Great Game in Afghanistan, originally played out between the British and the Russians.

This latest version of the game has had profoundly disastrous consequences, including 9/11 and its attendant bloody aftermath. Barack Obama's aim of departing the region triumphantly (he wants to start American troop withdrawal by July 2011) seems to have had the effect of focusing local minds in directions other than ensuring victory for Nato. Afghanistan, Pakistan and India have all reached for the nearest panic button and started planning for a post-Nato scenario.

Mindful, perhaps, of the fate that befell his hapless forerunner Najibullah, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan quickly extended an olive branch to the dreaded Mullah Omar, while pleading with the Americans to stay on in his country. Sections of Pakistan's media started questioning the rationale of fighting the erstwhile allies, the Taliban. Some called for mending fences with a force that could soon control Afghanistan.

India, which had recently urged the Americans to stay put in Afghanistan, greeted Mr Obama's announcement with no fresh insight. It would certainly be hard put to countenance a return to a time when the Taliban reigned supreme in Kabul.

With Nato's seemingly imminent exit and local actors furiously planning for contingencies, it is no longer unrealistic to imagine Kabul returning to Taliban rule. The Taliban — in their minds having kicked out a power greater than the Soviets — would become even more emboldened to govern in their own peculiar fashion. With the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns floundering, expect Afghanistan to become a fertile staging ground for future 9/11s.

Certainly the West, India and perhaps even countries such as Iran will strive to prevent this scenario from occurring. Many people in Pakistan and Afghanistan too realise the perils of this dangerous development. Yet the West wants to walk away from such a scenario.

From time to time India and Pakistan rattle sabres at one another, even dangerous ones made of protons and neutrons. Pakistan insists that peace in the region will only and naturally emerge once the Kashmir dispute is resolved. India is deeply suspicious that once Kashmir is settled, Pakistan will create further problems for it. Relations are so fractious that every evening Indian and Pakistani border guards perform a glowering, goose-stepping ritual in which thousands on each side take jingoistic delight.

Pakistan appears to be tottering today and were Kashmir to be discussed, hawks in a resurgent India would want to claim their pound of flesh. Many strategists in Pakistan want, therefore, to wait out the 18 months before American forces start leaving, while beefing up 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan to put pressure on India vis-à-vis Kashmir.

Afghanistan today presents a unique opportunity for India and Pakistan to set aside their historical differences and help the war-torn country emerge not as a crucible of regressive thinking but as a functioning nation that if not an asset to the world, is at least not an ever-ticking time bomb.

In fact India and Pakistan have no other option but to collaborate in Afghanistan to ensure that they and the wider world are not further engulfed in terrorism and its tragic after-effects. The time that Mr Obama has set aside to “finish the job” is unlikely to prove sufficient. What has, after all, not worked for eight years will not bear fruit in much less. Even if a lucky strike decapitates Al Qaeda or the Taliban, both organisations have exhibited an enormous capacity to regenerate themselves.

Over the preceding decades, in trying to outfox each other in Afghanistan both India and Pakistan have developed strong constituencies of support therein. Their militaries are familiar with the country's rugged terrain. The international community must consider installing, under UN mandate, a peace-keeping force in Afghanistan with substantial representation from Indian and Pakistani forces, a hitherto unimaginable possibility but one whose translation into reality is imperative given the terrible consequences of letting Afghanistan go its own way.

Nowhere does the Rubicon of hatred and demonisation run deeper in India and Pakistan than between their respective militaries. Almost none of the current officer cadre, self-professed proud descendants of a common institution, the British Indian Army, has ever interacted with its estranged ilk in any setting, war or peace. In the early 1950s, President Ayub Khan's proposal of a joint defence pact with India was contemptuously repudiated by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru when he said “Joint defence against whom?”

Sixty years later, the common existentialist threat has well and truly arrived in the form of the Taliban & co. The real Gordian knot to cut in South Asia today is not Kashmir but the historical distrust and endless manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring between India and Pakistan. The international community has 18 months to cut this knot. It will unravel in Kashmir soon thereafter.

Both India and Pakistan contribute their well-disciplined forces to UN peace-keeping missions in far-flung places. Why not let this charity begin at home? Obama's deadline — which has rattled so many — would instead be better served as a harbinger of peace by planning for an Indo-Pak military contingent in Afghanistan.