| ‘One can choose one’s friends, but one cannot choose one’s neighbours,’ the Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee commented recently. It was a sage observation by the leader of a country that since 1947 has dominated the most fractious neighbourhood in the world. Like the other countries in the subcontinent, Pakistan had no say in the selection of its neighbours, but even in such situations where it could have determined its own decisions, it has deliberately elected, rather than cultivating the right friends, to make the wrong enemies instead. |
| Pakistan’s stormy relationship with two of its immediate neighbours – India on the one side and Afghanistan on the other – are the most obvious demonstrations of this porcupine style of diplomacy, on how to lose friends and to antagonize people. A third country that is not a physical neighbour but ranks with the other two as a recurring obsession in Pakistan’s psyche is the sibling state of Israel. [EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 7 Aug. 2003, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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