The Baglihar deadlock

After negotiations with India over the Baglihar dam ended in a deadlock in New Delhi last week, Pakistan has decided to call in neutral experts to determine the fate of the project.

Pakistan's objections to the project date back to 1992 when India commissioned the dam and a hydroelectric power plant over the Chenab river in held Kashmir. This, Islamabad says, is in violation of the World Bank-brokered Indus Basin Treaty of 1960.

The treaty gave Pakistan control over the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum rivers while the Beas, Ravi and Sutlej were left for India's exclusive use. The treaty also allowed India the right to use the run-of-the-river for any development projects without obstructing the flow of water into Pakistan.

In the latest round of secretary-level talks, Pakistan submitted six technical objections to India, which formed the basis of its opposition to the project in its present form.

Islamabad took exception to the design of the project rather than the project itself, demanding that alterations be made to it so as not to affect the flow of water into Pakistan.

The Indians, however, stuck to their original position, saying the flow of the river would not be affected. Hence the need to call in neutral experts to examine the project from an objective standpoint.

Pakistan is within its right to call for neutral experts, as provided for in Article IX of the Indus Basin Treaty. Meanwhile, India has continued to push ahead with the construction of the dam which, on completion in 2007, would be higher than Pakistan's Tarbela dam - one of the largest earth-filled dams in the world.

The Baglihar hydroelectric power plant is set to go into production by the end of this year. This itself was a matter of contention between the two countries, because it was being built in disputed territory and because India had continued to work on it despite objections raised by Pakistan as early as 1992. But the submission to India of six technical objections regarding the design of the project by Pakistan in last week's talks was hailed by Indian observers as a softening of Islamabad's original position on the project. That the talks still failed to make a breakthrough is disheartening.

This takes one back to what has been eating away at the core of the India-Pakistan equation, and that is their mutual distrust. The composite dialogue now underway, of which the Baglihar project is one of the outstanding issues that need to be discussed and settled, has shown little substantive progress because of the hardened positions of both on the Kashmir issue. But as far as Baglihar is concerned, the two sides have a third-party guarantor in the World Bank, which helped them conclude the treaty of 1960 in spite of the Kashmir dispute.

Both India and Pakistan would do well to refer the matter back to the World Bank without fostering any hard feelings about each other, and without this issue being allowed to cast a shadow on other areas of the composite dialogue.

They could derive some satisfaction from the fact that both sides at least tried to bridge the gap in their respective views on Baglihar, and that neither side doubted the other's intention of reaching a compromise this time round.

Exit strategy at last?

The attacks by Iraqi insurgents on US coalition forces seem to be getting bolder and more audacious with the passage of time. Friday's attack, which killed seven American soldiers in Baghdad, showed just that because it successfully targeted a Bradley vehicle, one of the US military's most heavily armoured fighting vehicles.

Following the attack, the Pentagon announced that a retired general, a former commander of its forces on the Korean peninsula, would travel to Iraq to "review overall military operations" with special emphasis on the development of Iraqi security forces that the US is helping train.

Since the long-term plan is that the Iraqis will eventually take over the job of security themselves once coalition forces leave, the US general's mission would seem to imply that the Pentagon is considering all its options vis-a-vis an exit strategy.

While American forces should have left Iraq a long time ago, it is still not too late to consider an early departure of US troops from Iraq. The fierce resistance experienced by coalition forces, the ever-rising death toll of Iraqi civilians and US soldiers, and the almost daily bombings and suicide attacks in many parts of Iraq should have made the Americans see the writing on the wall: that the occupation was not going to be a cake-walk, and hence better to cut losses and leave as soon as possible.

As long as the occupation forces are in Iraq, the Iraqi insurgents will have a focal point around which to harness their increasingly strengthening resistance. Besides, the curtailment of Iraqis' rights and the Abu Ghraib torture abuse scandal that have come with the occupation make the Bush administration's pleas for dialogue and friendship with Muslim nations and communities sound like empty rhetoric and reinforce the widely-held view that America employs double standards when it comes to Muslims, and indeed the Middle East.

The best course of action, to prove in practice the Bush administration's oft-repeated claim that it invaded Iraq to bring democracy to it, would be for the Americans to get out as quickly as possible and leave the running of the country to the Iraqis.

Curse of honour killing

The prime minister's advisor on Women Development has said that in 2004 as many as 1,250 women were killed in the name of honour all over Pakistan. In 2003, the number of killings on this score was put at 930.

Despite claims to the contrary, honour killing continues to take place all over Pakistan under one guise or another. The indifference of the government to the arrest and punishment of those responsible only strengthens the medieval practice and does little to discourage it.

There are very few among us who have actually taken up the cause of challenging this practice and coming to the aid of the victims instead of only grandstanding on the issue.

In comparison to other years, 2004 ended well with the president signing into law a bill on karo-kari. Critics, however, have warned of the loopholes that still exist in the law, and under whose cover the guilty can walk away with honour killing.

This shows that merely framing new laws will not make the horrifying practice go away. The government must come down hard on perpetrators of this reprehensible crime. It must convey a clear message that people taking the law into their own hands on the basis of some misplaced notion of honour will not be spared.

Arrest and punishment of the guilty should be made certain and swift. At the same time, awareness has to be created among the people that this practice is ignoble and unforgivable in the eyes of law as it is in Islamic jurisprudence.

In this, help can be sought from both intellectuals and religious scholars so that attitudes, particularly in the rural areas, to this practice also change. Unless a two-pronged approach is adopted, efforts to stamp out honour killing will be in vain and the practice will continue despite the laws that are being put in place to curb it.