OPENING IN SOUTH ASIA

India and Pakistan's vision of prosperity is desperately needed in the Middle East.

  Artículo de Fareed Zakaria en “The Washington Post” del 13.01.2004

 Hostility between India and Pakistan has become one of those facts of geopolitical life one simply accepts, like the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Except in South Asia there has been neither genuine peace nor even a peace process. But things may be changing. India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf met last week and, in Musharraf's words, made history. Yes, it's the beginning of a long road; much could go wrong and both sides remain inflexible on Kashmir. But suspend disbelief for a moment. In substance and style, the two countries have moved farther in the past 10 days than in the preceding 10 years. This is big news, and understanding why it happened yields big lessons.

First, give the leaders their due. Vajpayee and Musharraf have pushed for a rapprochement over the opposition of their bureaucracies. Vajpayee's important peace overture, a speech in Srinagar last April 18, was read in advance only by his three closest advisers. Musharraf is similarly driving policy with a few aides and over the groans of much of the Pakistani establishment.

Both leaders have evolved. As a general, Musharraf was a provocateur, planning the infamous military operation at Kargil in 1999. But the general is becoming a leader. Despite his many stops and starts, Musharraf has done more to battle extremism and promote reform than any Pakistani leader in the past quarter-century. The recent attempts on his life demonstrate that at the very least the extremists think he's fighting hard against them.

For his part, Vajpayee has consolidated his position, decisively winning a power struggle against his hard-line deputy prime minister, L.K. Adavani. As the prime minister approaches his last election and last term (he is 79), he wants to leave a legacy. For Vajpayee, a decent man with honorable instincts, what better accomplishment than a resolution of the 50-year-old tensions between India and Pakistan?

But the focus on personalities does not tell the whole story. The backdrop to last week's events involves not just two people but two major shifts in the global landscape: the rising costs of terrorism and the benefits of globalization.

For 15 years now Pakistan has found a cheap and effective way to fight over Kashmir -- by helping Kashmiri militants in their terrorist tactics. Sept. 11 changed that game. It stigmatized terrorism and gave India a crucial ally on this issue: the United States. Suddenly Pakistan found that supporting terror had become costly indeed.

But something equally important has happened in South Asia over the past 15 years. India has been transformed by a market revolution. Globalization has come to every part of the country, whether in the form of a call-center job, a Chinese-made toy or American-inspired television shows. Suddenly Indians want to compete. And they are. Last year India's economy was the second fastest-growing in the world, at 7.4 percent. Its business leaders speak confidently of becoming global players in their fields. In this Indian future, a continuing cold war with Pakistan is a drag.

During the same period, however, Pakistan went down a different path, one of radical Islam and domestic dysfunction. The results? In 1985 its per capita gross domestic product was 6.5 percent higher than India's; today it's 23 percent lower. Its birthrate is soaring at a frightening 2.8 percent, while India's is 1.7 percent and dropping. Thirty percent of Pakistan's economy is consumed by its military.

Musharraf has broken Pakistan's fall. And he realizes now that to modernize Pakistan he needs peace with India. But the country is proving hard to turn around; the rot has set in deep. And yet, as Shekhar Gupta, one of India's smartest pundits, has noted, peace will be a success only when Pakistan is a success.

Here is the lesson: To stop a country from encouraging conflict, place high costs on such behavior. But to truly change, that country must also see a positive future. This is what is lacking in the Middle East. Arab countries that fund and foment terrorism should know that the costs of doing so have risen. But they must also see a vision of prosperity -- and grasp it as India has. So far, too few Arabs believe they can master this globalized world.

Last week, however, we had one small, encouraging counterexample. It turns out that Libya's decision to renounce its nuclear program was crucially pushed by Moammar Gaddafi's son -- trained at the London School of Economics -- who urged his father to help Libya rejoin the world and the world economy. The father could see only the stick. The son also saw the carrot.