The mediator

In his second trip to the United States after assuming power Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif once again sought US mediation on the Kashmir dispute during his meeting with US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Senator Bob Corker along with other senior members of the committee.
Earlier, on two previous occasions, during his first official visits in 2013 to the US and later on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit last year in Hague, the prime minister had made a similar request to US Secretary of State John Kerry, which was responded to by the traditional US stand on Kashmir that it is ready to mediate if the two stakeholders in the dispute ask for it.
Pakistan’s earnest interest for mediation is not a new phenomenon; it can be traced back to Bill Clinton’s administration (1993-2000) when on April 11, 1995 the then Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto during her meeting with the President Clinton called for US mediation on Kashmir and was told of US willingness to mediate if both countries gave consent. Since then there has been silence on the subject until recently.
The fresh desire for engaging the US for mediation on Kashmir is not primarily proposed or moved by the incumbent Nawaz government. Former president Asif Ali Zardari had also made a similar request in his article published in The New York Times on December 9, 2009: ‘How to Mend Fences with Pakistan’.
The renewed interest shown by Pakistan’s political figures vis-à-vis US mediation seems to have been triggered when Kashmir was figured out for the first time during Obama’s presidential election campaign of 2008 in which he said that “working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way” would be a critical task of his administration if he was elected.
Since then numerous other statements have been made by senior civil and military US officials. On June 11, 2009 William Burns, US under-secretary of state remarked during

his visit to New Delhi: “the US favours resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan and wants the Kashmir problem to be resolved keeping in view the aspirations of the Kashmiri people.”
Likewise, on December 9, 2009 Admiral Mike Mullen, the then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff observed: “I really do believe that ‘removal of tense situation’ at (Kashmir) border is absolutely critical to the long term stability in that region.” Moreover, Kashmir was supposed to be included in the official brief of Richard Holbrook when he was appointed the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan but that did not happen.
Perhaps this seemingly promising backdrop causes Pakistan’s leadership to make repeated requests for US mediation on the Kashmir issue in the recent past. But it needs to understand that Washington’s stakes in the issue have undergone tremendous change and it sees South Asia not primarily through the Afghan-Pakistan paradigm but through the Asia-Pivot prism – and India is the linchpin in this policy calculus.
Recent events in the South China Sea conflict have brought India closer to US as evident by recent naval manoeuvres by the US, Japan, and Indian navies which shows that the US wishes to give the role of regional gendarme to India in conflict with China, a close ally of Pakistan.
The de-hyphenated US policy for India and Pakistan was started by the Bush administration and culminated with the Obama administration operationalising the Indo-US civil nuclear deal along with signing a 10-year defence cooperation pact. This context featuring US strategic alignment with India suggests that US interests lies more in the conflict prevention, conflict management and the modus vivendi on Kashmir rather than conflict resolution, and that too on Pakistan’s terms.
So Pakistan needs to have a very calculated and cautious approach when asking the United States for mediation, because a mediator is supposed to suggest the proposals and – given Washington’s strategic alignment with New Delhi’s position on Kashmir – it may be hard for Pakistan to accept US proposals on Kashmir; for making the Line of Control an international border and giving Kashmiris greater autonomy under the Indian constitution will be a zero-sum game for Pakistan.
However, in view of the American clout on the global political landscape, Pakistan may keep on sensitising the US vis-a-vis the unresolved Kashmir issue, and continue highlighting India’s intransigence on the status-quo.
Pakistan should also ask the US to facilitate the United Nations to exercise its mandate provided by the UN Security Council, of which the US is a veto-wielding permanent member, and has been the principal sponsor of a number of UN resolutions on Kashmir including the one which calls for holding a plebiscite under UN supervision. Pakistan also needs to persistently assert that neither do international agreements become irrelevant over time nor do bilateral treaties supersede international agreements.
While endeavours for bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan ended in smoke, the need for UN-supervised mediation has now become indispensable for the final settlement of the Kashmir issue.
And India’s hue and cry over mediation as an option is a self-contradictory assertion, because it did accept de jure the mediatory role of the United Nations in the UNCIP unanimously adopted resolutions, and virtually acknowledged the mediatory role of the US in diffusing the Kargil crisis in 1999.
The writer is an academic based in Islamabad.
Email: mawaisbinwasi@gmail.com