Shannon Kindornay,
The North-South Institute, Ottawa, Canada

Multilateralism is in trouble. Global governance is in trouble. And if you don’t think that’s the case, you haven’t been paying attention. We have a world plagued by multiple crises and challenges and an ever changing landscape of geopolitical realities – take any introduction to G20 or UN communiques from the last five years and you will see what I mean. It reads something like this: the world is facing ongoing financial and food crises, a scarcity of resources – particularly in the land and water sectors – inequality is growing and economic growth and jobs creation is uneven, all in a context where climate change remains the elephant in the room.

Global power is shifting. New and (re)emerging actors, such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the private sector, are altering the international landscape, giving rise to new challenges and opportunities for addressing these issues. And civil society and citizen’s movements, for example, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, are demanding their rights and accountability from governments (as well as corporations) who themselves are increasingly ill-equipped for our highly networked and technologically interconnected world.

Now consider global governance, and the multilateral institutions, through which it occurs. Traditionally, the multilateral institutions, like the UN, World Bank and International Monetary Fund – institutions that promote and facilitate global governance and cooperation among countries – oversaw and delivered concerted responses to global challenges. Yet, as the world faces new and old challenges, and governments continue to be unable or unwilling to cooperate to address global public goods challenges, such as climate change, the continued relevance and impact of these multilateral institutions has been significantly raised.

A new edited volume by Hany Besada and Shannon Kindornay, Multilateral Development Cooperation in a Changing Global Order, lays out these issues clearly. The presence of old donors, emerging economies, civil society and the private sector is being felt by all development actors, leading to greater fragmentation of the multilateral system and more competition for institutions and financial resources. It has also meant greater competition in terms of the ideas that shape development thinking.
These trends have exacerbated old challenges related to the need for reforms to improve the legitimacy of governance and decision making processes in multilateral institutions, to better account for developing country priorities and reflect emerging geopolitical realities.

The inability of multilateral agencies, particularly financial institutions, to address concerns around representation, has led emerging economies to establish other national and multilateral mechanisms to achieve their goals, such national development banks, bilateral South-South Cooperation and regional trade blocks and groupings such as the BRICS and IBSA (a forum for dialogue between India, Brazil and South Africa).

At the same time, though financial contributions for development in the form of aid and philanthropic giving (charities) has increased significantly in the past decades, multilateral institutions, which have proliferated at an alarming rate, are seeing a decline in their funding because of donor fatigue. In terms of development ideas and knowledge, the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing aftermath, as well as the success of BRICS countries, has also led to mainstream questioning of dominant (western) understandings of how successful development ought to be achieved, including the agendas and ideas promoted by key multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, that have tended to privilege neoliberal and technocratic solutions to the inherently political problems of development.

And now, in this context, the global community has turned its attention to the post-2015 agenda, which will replace the Millennium Development Goals. This process is being informed by an UN-led consultation process, as well as intergovernmental discussions on the creation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (whose establishment was agreed to atthe Rio+20 Summit in June of 2012). Yet, despite the great deal of attention the post-2015 agenda has received to date, the future is still uncertain. The establishment of the post-2015 agenda serves as a manifestation of the key themes and challenges discussed in the edited volume. It is characterized by competing perspectives and ideas, and fragmented multilateral processes, some of which have faced questions regarding their legitimacy. In some respects, post-2015 serves as the next litmus test for the world’s ability to make multilateralism work.

In relation to ideas, no less than seventeen comprehensive and 60 sectoral and thematic proposals recommending concrete post-2015 goals, targets and indicators have been proposed by think tanks, governments and UN organizations to decision makers. At the institutional level, numerous fora have been established within the UN system/context to address post-2015, each with varying degrees of representation. These include a High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 Development Agenda which involves over 50 UN entities and international organizations, the intergovernmental Open Working Group on the SDGs which resulted from Rio+20, and the related Expert Group on Financing for Development.

For its part, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, which was established following the 2011 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness and brings together government, civil society and private sector actors concerned with effective development cooperation, is also looking at how it can engage on these agendas. Where groupings such as the G20 fit into this global context is unclear. While everyone agrees that the post-2015 and SDG processes should come together, there is no denying that a myriad of multilateral actors and processes are at play, all striving to influence the future global agenda, which will ultimately be negotiated by governments that have, in the past few years, demonstrated an inability to find strong agreement on key global challenges and issues relating to development such as climate change, trade and development, and aid effectiveness. At this point, it is unclear how this plethora of multilateral fora will work together.

It is not all doom and gloom however. As the edited volume makes clear, multilateral institutions and the policy frameworks that underpin them still matter and will continue to matter – they represent the system we have and in many instances, global challenges require global solutions. As the post-2015 process makes clear, the establishment of new development agendas and forums provides a context for future cooperation. Acknowledging the past and present challenges facing efforts towards coordination will necessarily mark a starting point for the way forward. The current development paradigm is in a state of flux. It is through this transition that there is opportunity to revamp and reform the multilateral system to ensure its relevance to future global agendas. The challenges and road ahead will be defined by the ability of the international community to learn from past lessons, adopt meaningful reforms, and advance coordinated efforts towards effective peace building and sustainable development.

Profile:
Shannon Kindornay, leads The North-South Institute’s work on development cooperation for its Governance for Equitable Growth program. Her research focuses on development cooperation, governance of the international aid architecture, aid effectiveness, and aid and the private sector. She is the co-editor of a recently released edited volume, Multilateral Development Cooperation in a Changing Global Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Prior to joining NSI, she worked on human rights, governance, and trade and development. She holds a MA from Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and a BA in global studies and political science from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Shannon Kindornay op-ed Post-2015 as the litmus test for global governance

Prof. Shamsun Nahar Khan, Ph.D.
Dhaka, Bangladesh

MOSAICQUE October 2013 edition, honors the first ever TWAS Chemistry award instituted in the honour of Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, a leading scientist & scholar from Pakistan, ushered onto Young Women Scientist Dr. Shamsun Nahar Khan from Bangladesh.

Atta-ur-Rahman, from Pakistan, is a leading scientist and scholar in the field of organic chemistry, especially renowned for his research in areas relating to natural product chemistry. With over 850 publications, he is also credited with reviving higher education and research practices in Pakistan. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) in 2006 thereby becoming one of the only 4 scientists in the Muslim world to ever have earned this honor. He is Vice-President (Central & South Asia) of the TWAS Council, President of the Network of Academies of Sciences of Islamic Countries (NASIC) and Foreign Fellow of the Korean Academy of Sciences. Atta-ur-Rahman was the President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences from 2003 to 2006, and was again elected President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences in 2011.

Introduction:
In this October edition of MOSAICQUE Magazine, we are featuring an outstanding & blessed Young Women Scientist from Bangladesh – Dr. Shamsun Nahar Khan, the eldest daughter of Begum Hasmat Ara M.D. and Sahfique Khan. Her father is a well known activist from Bangladesh, profoundly involved with the development of the country by serving himself as an Executive Director and Senior Advisor of Gonoshahthaya Kendra (Peoples’ Health Center; Coordinator Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury, is the winner of Alternative Nobel Prize”), and has played a prominent role in nation building, as a health care provider to a vast majority of population in Bangladesh particular with respect to global health care issues.

Dr. Shamsun Khan’s, Mother Dr. Hasmat Ara started her career as a medical doctor (Dhaka Medical College) and later on engaged herself as an academician to teach Pharmacology at the Bangladesh Medical College – one of the most renowned medical institute of the country. Dr. Khan has been brought up by her parents in an intellectually enlightened environment.

Shamsun, has spent indeed a great deal of her childhood time with her maternal grandparents Mohammad Harun Mallick and Mrs. Raisa Harun, – who served the Bengal Civil Service Cadre. Mrs. Raisa Harun has made an extensive contribution in the development of education system and economical status of woman in Bangladesh and has also been decorated with the prestigious Presidential award for her elaborate contributions to the social welfare to the woman deprived from social benefits in the country. Dr. Shamsun Khan has been influenced, groomed, embraced and encouraged by her grandmother from childhood towards nation building.

Regarding the research:
Dr. Khan’s started her drug discovery research during her undergraduate training in Dhaka, by conducting clinical trials studying various important indigenous medicinal plants and their bioactivity on chronic skin diseases. These diseases, according to Dr. Khan did not show any sensitivity or activity using conventional steroids, but observed fascinating bio-activity by using these medicinal plants. So she went ahead and isolated multi drug resistant clinical bacterium specimen from different clinical disease conditions and discovered that many of the plants extracts of these medicinal plants are highly bioactive on these bacterium specimens.

This led to Dr. Shamsun’s keen interest in the drug discovery and development, that started earlier in her research career. Till date, she has discovered more than 20 classes of new alpha-glucosidase inhibitors from both natural and synthetic sources. These are of interest, due to their therapeutic potential in the treatment of variety of disorders, such as diabetes, HIV infection, cancer, and lysosomal storage diseases. Results of this research are reflected in her thirty research publications, in peer-reviewed and reputed journals.

Due to the important clinical and industrial applications of her research, she has been awarded a total of 7 US patents and publications. She has also expanded her work to the enzyme stabilizers by characterizing Pulicarside-1; which helps to increase efficiency of the alpha-glucosidase by reducing the production cost of monosaccharide from disaccharides. She has elaborated her work to the method development of clinical / synthetic fungal transformation.

Dr. Khan has shown an extraordinary enthusiasm for both chemistry and biology since her doctorate studies, and carried out a variety of interdisciplinary investigations, including: anticancer studies; enzyme kinetics using chromatographic techniques; homology modelling; and pesticide & medicinal plant analysis etc. She eventually focused her efforts on the identification of enzymes associated with different clinical conditions and a kinetic study of enzyme inhibition.

One of Dr. Khan’s projects involved the identification of a complex structure of 7sk small nuclear RNA and HIV-1 (human immunodeficiency virus) Tat peptide through NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). She has currently completed this project successfully with excellent findings. One of the findings includes introducing innovative research idea in the country specially to work in the interface of chemistry and biology. She is currently working in the field of pharmacology and enzymology along with phytochemical investigation of medicinal plants in Bangladesh.

Dr. Khan’s project was also involved in the identification of a complex structure of 7sk small nuclear RNA and HIV-1 (human immunodeficiency virus) Tat peptide through NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance). She has completed the project successfully with an excellent finding. She is introducing this innovative research idea in the country specially to work in the interface of chemistry and biology. She is working in the field of pharmacology and enzymology along with phytochemical investigation of medicinal plants in Bangladesh.

Dr. Khan is now working on developing novel alpha glucosidase inhibitors – alpha glucosidases are known to be the enzymes involved in carbohydrate metabolism. Their inhibitors interfere with the absorption of glucose in the gut, and could help to control the blood sugar level in type-2 diabetes. Dr. Khan has identified some major inhibitors within different families of natural compounds, such as terpenoids, flavonoids and iridoids, as well as within synthetic compounds such as biscoumarins, isocoumarins and chalcone derivatives.

Awards & Accolades:
Khan began her academic career in 1999 as a lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy and Clinical Pharmacology, at Gono Bishwabidyalaya (People’s University), in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2002, she was awarded a postgraduate fellowship to undertake research on a PhD by the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), which is hosted by TWAS at its headquarters in Trieste. Khan completed her thesis at the H.E.J. Research Institute of Chemistry, International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences, at the University of Karachi, Pakistan, in 2008.
Shamsun Nahar Khan is the holder of 7 patents, and the recipient of several
awards, including the award of Merit Scholarship Programme for High Technology from the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia. She supervised some 20 students between 2008 and 2010, and has authored more than 30 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. For these contributions to her field, Khan was awarded the Atta-ur-Rahman Prize for chemistry.

Shamsun has had been invited for many international conferences and university for her talk including, most prestigious 42nd congress of IUPAC (International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry) held in Glasgow, UK and University of Bath, UK in 2009.

She has had been awarded “TWOWS Postgraduate Fellowship” to start her Ph.D. due to her keen research interest. For her excellent performance as an academician, East West University awarded her “Excellence in Research and Teaching” award.

Publications:
One of her important contribution is as an author of a chapter of a book entitled “Bioassay Models for Antidiabetic Activity of Natural Products” published by United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Trieste, Italy. This chapter is very often used as guidelines for the alpha-glucosidase inhibition and in-vivo pharmacological studies for diabetic and related research work by the researchers.

She actively participates to extending her contribution to the different international and national organization among them “RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) UK, “Organization for Women in science for Developing World (OWSD)”, Italy and “Asian Network Research on Antidiabetic Plants” are noticeable.

Profile:
Dr. Shamsun Nahar Khan, Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1974, Shamsun Nahar Khan received the first Atta-ur-Rahman Prize in chemistry in 2012, she has been also awarded TWAS-Bangladesh Young Scientist Award in 2011.

Dr. Khan has Bachelor and Master’s in Pharmacy, being a Professional she has chosen to develop her carrier as an academician and continued her research in academia. Dr. Khan has been recently completed her postdoctoral training program from the department of Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Shamsun is exceptionally resourceful; she has established well-equipped laboratories with HPLC (High pressure Liquid Chromatography, IR (Infrared Spectroscopy), GC (Gas Chromatography) to facilitate research work at her university.

During pursuing her Ph.D she showed her courage and volunteer as a coordinator of her research group at her host research institute for a significantly longer period of time. She was actively involved in organizing more than a dozen’s of international conferences and workshops. At this moment she is serving as an Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacy, East West University Currently Shamsun is guiding more than 10 research students at Masters and graduate levels. Shamsun is looking forward to have contemporary science education in Bangladesh.

Currently Shamsun is guiding more than 10 research students at Masters and graduate levels. Shamsun is looking forward to have contemporary science education in Bangladesh.

Prof. Shamsun Nahar Khan article on Drug Discovery and Development in Bangladesh

A historical review – an oped by Prof. Kanti Bajpai on India – Pakistan bilateral relations:

Can India and Pakistan ever be friends? Or are they doomed to dislike, fear, and violence? It would be easy enough to predict that their future will be more or less like, or even worse, than their past.

And yet…

…a different interpretation of the past should give us hope. Did you know that between 1947 and 1964, when Jawaharlal Nehru died, India and Pakistan had solved every bilateral problem, except Kashmir, through negotiation and cooperation? They came to agree on the division of the Indus rivers, arguably one of the most important river water accords in existence anywhere in the world, in 1960. Before this, they had agreed on the division of assets between the two countries in the wake of Partition. After Mahatma Gandhi reproached the Indian government, India also released the hard currency it owed Pakistan. In April 1950, the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was signed to allow refugees to return to dispose of their property, to let abducted women to go back to their homes, to restore looted property, to negate forced religious conversions, and to institute minority rights in both states.

Even on Kashmir, India and Pakistan came close to a negotiated settlement. From 1948, when the first war over Kashmir ended and the UN stepped in to help the two warring sides to settle the dispute, to the late 1950s, the two countries tried through the good offices of the world organization to find a solution. Early mediation efforts by Admiral Chester Nimitz of the US and A.G.L. McNaughton of Canada failed, but in March 1950 the two governments agreed to demilitarize Kashmir, hold a plebiscite, and further mediation. Sir Owen Dixon of Australia led the mediation effort. In February 1951, after Dixon’s report, India began arrangements for a plebiscite. This did not work out for a variety of reasons, and so a new mediator, Dr. Frank Graham, an American, was appointed. On August 20, 1953, after the visit of Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Ali, Nehru announced his willingness to hold a plebiscite under a plebiscite administrator. Again, for a number of reasons relating to the modalities of a plebiscite and the conditions under which it could be held, the offer never went forward. When Nehru died in October 1964, Sheikh Abdullah, the leader of Jammu and Kashmir, was in Pakistan, at the Indian Prime Minister’s request to reopen talks on a final settlement of the quarrel.

Since then, India and Pakistan have repeatedly shown that they can cooperate. Cooperative agreements include the Tashkent agreement after the 1965 war, the Simla agreement after the 1971 war, the return of 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, the Salal Dam agreement in 1978, a number of military confidence building measures in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Lahore agreement of 1999. In 1993, they were close to signing agreements on the Siachen, Sir Creek, and Tulbul/Wular disputes as well. After the 1965 war, they agreed to arbitration in the case of the Rann of Kutch dispute, and in 1967 their differences were resolved on the basis of the Rann award handed down by the arbitration tribunal. So also, in accordance with the provisions of the Indus Rivers Treaty, they have turned to arbitration. India got a decision substantially in its favour on Baglihar in 2007 and will probably also get a relatively favourable decision on Kishenganga in 2013.

Of course there is no denying strife. India and Pakistan have been to war with each other in 1948, 1965 (twice), 1971, and 1999. They have blundered into crisis, under the shadow of nuclear weapons, in 1986-87, 1990, and 2001-2. And they are only the second pair of states to fight a war when they were in possession of nuclear weapons (the other pair is China and the Soviet Union in 1969). In 2008, after the terrorist attack on Mumbai, they could have confronted each other again, but the Indian government wisely held back from threatening to go to war.

The presence of nuclear weapons has made cooperation and long-term peace between the two countries an imperative. Nuclear weapons have emboldened those in Pakistan who want to bleed India through terrorism. They are counting on Indian patience and the protection of nuclear weapons. But India’s patience is not unlimited and in the event of a future attack Indian leaders will face monumental pressures to retaliate. If India retaliates, the pressure on Pakistani leaders to counter the Indian attack will be hard to ignore. And so on, in an escalatory spiral that could end in nuclear war which could kill millions on both sides of the border.

This is the greatest reason that India and Pakistan must cooperate and build a permanent peace. There are at least three other reasons that they must resolve conflict and agree never again to use force against each other.

First of all, South Asia, including India and Pakistan, is perhaps the most horribly poor region in the world. On various developmental indicators, our region is worse than sub-Saharan Africa which has always been counted as the greatest developmental challenge on earth. India and Pakistan do worse than some of their neighbours including Bangladesh – for instance, on child mortality, maternal mortality, and women’s literacy. One reason we do so badly is that we are spending huge amounts of money on defence, money that could be used for development and for productive investments. In 1947, India and Pakistan had about the same standard of living as Southeast Asia and East Asia. Today, even the poorest Southeast Asian countries, Burma, Cambodia and Laos, do not feature the kind of grinding, merciless poverty and deprivation that one sees in India and Pakistan. The irony is that in terms of the infrastructure we inherited from colonial rule and in terms of fertile, arable land, India and Pakistan rank very high. India, for instance, has more than twice the arable land of China even though China is two and a half times India’s size in overall land area. China though produces far more food than India because it has invested in productive agriculture.

Secondly, India and Pakistan must cooperate and make peace is that the challenges of the future are so immense that our present situation, terrible as it is, will seem a happy one. Climate change, environmental change more broadly, as well as rapidly declining potable water could lead to total economic, political, and social collapse. The day of reckoning may be much nearer than we think.

Thirdly, the conflict is taking a cultural and moral toll on both our societies. Perpetual conflict inevitably debases one’s values and practices. There is no doubt that political and social life in India and Pakistan has been degraded by the sense of anger, fear, and frustration arising out their differences. With each war, crisis, and terrorist attack, we add another layer of bitterness to our already substantial layers. The rise of religious fundamentalism and internal strife in both countries and the tolerance we have developed for human rights violations in the name of national unity are symptomatic of the degradation of our values and practices. We are both democracies, but it would be hard to say that today there is much to admire in either one of our political systems and the general social intercourse that prevails. The position of religious minorities and of disadvantaged groups – caste, tribal, women, and the poor – are appalling. Compassion, gentleness, and the sense of restraint and refinement have gone out of our lives, and this is related to the India-Pakistan quarrel that has so ruined our collective existence. We may pretend that the gradual corrosion of our values and practices are unrelated to our international relations; but in fact they are deeply related.

Can India and Pakistan make peace? Yes, though it won’t be easy. India and Pakistan have been negotiating almost continuously since 1991 when Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister. The agenda is a rich and integrated one, featuring two key issues – Kashmir and security and six secondary though also very important issues (rivers, Siachen, Sir Creek, trade, people to people, and so on). There is no doubt that Kashmir is the biggest problem for both countries. We in India may find it hard to accept this, but given the number of people who have died, been injured, or have disappeared in Indian Kashmir and given that the quarrel over Kashmir feeds extremism and terrorism in Pakistan, there is little doubt that this is the primary cause of our present and future differences.

Is there a solution to Kashmir? And will a solution to Kashmir lead to a permanent peace? I suggest that there is a solution to Kashmir and that though a Kashmir solution by itself will not deliver long-term peace, it will provide the essential ingredient for what International Relations scholars call a “security community” in which states no longer expect to use force to settle their differences (e.g. Canada-US, the European Union).
What are the key elements of a Kashmir settlement? First, all parties – the Indian and Pakistani governments as well as Kashmiri separatists – should agree that the Line of Control will be left as it is for a period of 20 years. If there is one thing that everyone agrees on, it is that the Line of Control (LOC) is not a final boundary. Certainly the Pakistani government and separatists do not agree to the division of Kashmir. In addition, the Indian government formally lays claim to all of Kashmir including territories on the Pakistani side of the LOC.
Second, all sides should agree to a demilitarization of Kashmir. This means a significant reduction in the presence of troops and heavily armed paramilitaries to the point where Kashmir has only lightly-armed forces at the LOC and police personnel who should be from the state. The militant separatists should give up their arms, and they should be rehabilitated. They should be given loans to start small business ventures (including retail shops), government employment, and absorbed where possible into the police force. Those militant separatists who do not agree to give up their arms will of course have to be disarmed by both India and Pakistan and Kashmir police.
Third, India and Pakistan should move towards a similar constitutional relationship with their respective Kashmiri governments. In the case of Pakistan, this means centrally the holding of elections. At the core of the new constitutional status of the Kashmiris should be as much autonomy as is commensurate with good governance. Another key aspect of constitutional convergence would be guarantees of minority rights on both sides of the LOC.
Fourth, the two parts of Kashmir should allow citizens of the two halves to move freely to the other side via a system of identity permits rather than requiring them to carry passports and apply for visas.
Fifth, the two Kashmir governments should begin to deal with each directly and collaboratively on issues such as trade, environment, tourism, and other municipal functions (perhaps power, water).
Sixth, and more challengingly, the three parties should consider some kind of reconciliation process with regard to those who were killed or injured during the militancy.
Seventh, at the end of 20 years, there should be further consideration of the status of Kashmir including the possibility of shared sovereignty.
What are the advantages to India, Pakistan, and the separatists of such a compact? To the extent that Kashmir stays within the Indian Union, New Delhi can claim that it has not lost Kashmir and has a say in its affairs, especially its defence. For Pakistan, the advantage is that it too has a say in Kashmir affairs and can argue that it helped demilitarize Kashmir and thus end the violence there. And for the separatists, they get the substance of a united Kashmir, a chance to live a normal civilian life again, and to enter democratic politics and share power by participating in elections and administration if they so choose. It is no one’s best solution; but it is no one’s worst solution either. It is vital to be clear about the advantages and about what each side is giving up or forsaking if the agreement is to be sold to Indian, Pakistani, and Kashmiri publics.
With Kashmir settled in this way for at least two decades, a lot of the bitterness, fear, and suspicion that has dogged India-Pakistan relations will abate. The situation will then be ripe for further cooperation – on other aspects of security, river water use, the lowering of trade barriers, enhanced movement of people and cultural and social contact, and so on. Common challenges for the future including dealing with the effects of climate change and other environmental problems, the flow of narcotics into the region, cooperation for disaster management, and so on will cement ties further. At last, India and Pakistan, like Canada and the US, may usher in a security community in which the use of force against each other becomes unthinkable. The benefit to common Indians and Pakistanis will be enormous; indeed the whole of South Asia will be psychologically, socially, politically, and economically transformed.
India and Pakistan can resolve their differences – as they have shown in the past. A solution to the most pressing and costly conflict, namely, Kashmir, is within sight. Interestingly, India and Pakistan have recognized that something like the solution proposed in this essay is the way forward. Both sides have endorsed the idea of softer if not soft borders. Soft borders are the essence of a putative Kashmir agreement outlined here. It will take courage and shrewdness for the two governments to move ahead and to defend such a course of action to their own publics and to the people of Kashmir. Both have shown that they do have the courage to take bold decisions. It is not beyond them to do so again in light of the many other daunting challenges that will confront them in the decades ahead. If they do not set aside their differences, they risk chaos and collapse in the long term, as they are overwhelmed by natural, economic, political, and social problems. They must begin to make the case for a Kashmir settlement and an India-Pakistan security community, and the sooner the better.

The author is Professor and Vice Dean Research, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.