Sada-e-Watan Sydney ™
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The President Down Under

THE President’s six-day visit to Australia and New Zealand was basically designed to promote bilateral economic and commercial relations and reach understanding over issues in which each side would benefit. The volume of the two-way trade between Pakistan and Australia that stood at $660 million in 2004 could certainly be enhanced if the two countries’ business communities were to establish regular contacts to know each other’s needs of goods and services they could meet. Similar logic will hold good for links between Islamabad and Auckland, which have a miniscule two-way trade volume of $70 million. For instance, both the Antipodeans countries have highly developed agriculture and livestock industries, two inter-related areas that are vital to our economy but which are being run on primitive lines. Although an agricultural country and the world’s fifth largest milk producer, Pakistan has periodically to fall back on imports for basic foodstuffs, and the consumer by and large is condemned to get sub-standard, adulterated milk and milk products. If we were to draw on the experience and expertise of these two countries and marshal our vast resources, it could bring about a revolutionary change in the two fields that should directly benefit the farmer and the general population. In Canberra, three memoranda of understanding relating to agriculture, commerce and counter-terrorism were signed between the two countries. On both legs of his tour, the President called upon local entrepreneurs to take advantage of the ‘investment friendly’ and ‘incentive oriented’ atmosphere of Pakistan.
His discourses before various gatherings there hardly contained anything new for the Pakistani public. There can be no denying the need that India and Pakistan should move from ‘conflict management’ to ‘conflict resolution’ on the Kashmir dispute, but how New Delhi’s persistent evasion of substantive talks on this score could inspire confidence that it could be solved in “two weeks” is not very clear. So far, only one of the two tracks (CBM and conflict resolution) he mentioned seem to be operating, and that is so far also a one-way track. The US is so obsessed with its military might that his reiteration of the need to address the root causes of terrorism–Palestine and Kashmir–in a just manner is likely to fall on deaf ears, as before. He may argue that these disputes breed “powerlessness, helplessness, extremism and terrorism, which endanger world peace” but Washington’s policymakers have demonstrated that they read the situation quite differently. Similarly, the contention that there was no ‘clash of civilisations’ would not find favour with them. Rather, the Bush administration’s policies seem a reflection of Huntington’s thesis of the clash.
Reportedly, the President lost two opportunities to explain our policies when his interviews with Radio New Zealand and TVOne were cancelled. His admission that he prevented Mukhtaran Mai from travelling to the US would have provoked embarrassing questions; for such treatment of the victim of a heinous crime is unheard of in a democratic polity, which he claims to have introduced.