(IPS) feature

A joke popular in the Indian capital and understandably not as funny in Islamabad is that the Kashmir problem is all about India having Kashmir and Pakistan the problem.

With the war in Afghanistan drawing to a close and a dispensation highly favourable to New Delhi ready to be installed in Kabul, a feeling is gaining ground that Pakistan has now shot all its bolts and that the joke is now going to be a permanent reality.

Through the war, analysts in Islamabad and New Delhi have been watching each other with a wary eye, waiting for any sign of favour or displeasure that may come from Washington.

After the badly botched attempt on Dec 13 by armed 'fedayeen' (Islamist suicide squads) to storm the Indian Parliament, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced confidently - and to many, convincingly - that India's 12-year-old war against terrorism was now on its last legs.

Recently, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh blamed Pakistan-based militant groups for the attack on ''the symbol and seat of Indian democracy''and officially demanded that Islambad arrest the leaders of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of God) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of God) groups.

Earlier, Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani warned that India would retaliate against the conspirators behind the attack on the Parliament building ''whoever they are and wherever they are''.

Advani was of course echoing the new currency of international diplomacy in which countries which are seen as being too close to elements that support ' jihad ' (holy war) are the new outcasts of the world.

Reflecting the new mood of belligerence, members of Advani's right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanded in the reconvened Parliament later that India now strike across the border at militant groups based in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir.

So upbeat is the mood that India is now drawing up plans to hold provincial assembly elections in Kashmir as scheduled early next year. ''Let the people of Kashmir decide their own future through the elections,'' Vajpayee said when he announced the polls recently.

At least a part of Vajpayee's confidence stems from Islamabad's discomfiture in having had to help in the strangling of the Taliban, which it so assiduously created in the hope of building ''strategic Islamic depth'' in Afghanistan against India.

Disastrous failure

Salman Haidar, India's former foreign secretary says that Pakistan's Afghan policy has been shown up as a disastrous failure. ''Under compulsion, it has betrayed its carefully acquired Taliban clients in a manner that will not be forgotten easily.''

General Pervez Musharraf's warning to India to ''lay off'' from Afghanistan in a televised address even before the war against terror, in which he has become a reluctant partner, got underway is instructive.

With the Pashtuns betrayed, it cannot be long before they revive the demand for a redrawing of the Durand line drawn up as the border by the British through Afghan territory which till 1893 extended eastwards up to the Indus river.

Afghanistan refused to recognise the newly created Pakistan from British India in 1947 and tried to block its entry into the United Nations. No government in Kabul since, including the Taliban, has accepted the validity of the Durand line.

Indeed all regimes in Kabul have been unanimous that the territory of Afghanistan extends from the Oxus river in the west to the Indus river in the east and the demand now threatens to transcend the ' ummah '' or universal, borderless Islam that Pakistan has tried to peddle.

According to Daulat Singh, a former Indian career diplomat and expert on Afghanistan, ''Pashtun irredentism could now rear its head again and this time more enduringly and more menacingly.''

In other words, Pakistan is now faced with a border problem along the Durand line straddled by ungovernable Pashtun tribes on its west, that is far worse than the problem it has on the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir to its east.

And Islamabad cannot but be unhappy at the pilgrimage that top-ranking members of the Afghanistan Interim Authority created in Bonn such as Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and Interior Minister Younis Qanooni have been making to Delhi.

Abdullah, who arrived in New Delhi last week to the din of gunfire and grenade explosions around Parliament, has said the incident was obviously the ''handiwork of an international organisation'' though he refrained from naming any country.

Qanooni, who made New Delhi his first stop after Bonn, declared more forthrightly that it was time Pakistan stopped interfering in Afghanistan.

Wise investment

India, it turns out, has made a wise long-term investment in backing the Northern Alliance (or United Front as it is now called) through its trials and is now clearly hoping to cash in with peace in Kashmir.

It is a matter of satisfaction to observers here that Musharraf's demand that the Northern Alliance be denied entry into Kabul and that moderate Taliban elements be given a place in the new dispensation have been ignored by the United States.

Not only did Kabul fall to the Northern Alliance but all major urban centres are now capitulating to it with intense US aerial support unstinting through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, despite Musharraf's pleadings.

And all of this was not unheeded by the All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC), a coalition of separatist political groups in Kashmir which have till Sept 11 been looking to Islamabad for leadership and support.

Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the APHC in October sued for a ''comprehensive ceasefire'' which is yet to be accepted by the Indian army partly because the group's chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat has rejected the ''so-called elections'' being planned in Kashmir.

The militant wing of the APHC or Hizbul Mujahideen has also split down the middle with one faction refusing to acknowledge the leadership of its Pakistan-based ''supreme commander'' Syed Salahuddin.

Rebellion within the Hizbul Mujahideen has been simmering for some time and the local faction of the group - the only one which can claim to have purely Kashmir cadres, rather than Pakistani and Afghan fighters - declared a surprise unilateral ceasefire in July 2000.

Salahuddin, who initially went along with the ceasefire then appeared to be pressurised by Islamabad to call it off and also to reject a reciprocal Indian ceasefire announced by Vajpayee in the Ramadan month of that year.

The reason then given for rejecting New Delhi's ceasefire was that Islamabad had not been invited to the dialogue.

With the back of the Taliban broken, most foreign fighters eliminated or captured in Afghanistan, and Pakistan having new woes to its west, Vajpayee's renewed optimism for peace in Kashmir in the new year is well justified.