The visit by President Obama's envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, was illustrative of a number of truths. The visit was primarily meant to assure the Pakistanis he met that they had made the right choice in the War On Terror, the American. The Pakistanis also tried their hardest to convince him that they were the USA's best bet in conducting the War. Whether or not there was any success on either side, there was a Pakistani group set-up to provide input into the policy review that the Obama administration has ordered into official American policies for the region. Since Holbrooke has occupied a job which did not exist before, and since it is not entirely clear what his reporting line is to be, and whether it includes the State Department, he will give it the shape and substance it does not yet have. Though Holbrooke is supposed to be under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he is supposed to report to her, but he will also report to President Barack Obama. He has been a presidential envoy before, having served with President Bill Clinton in the Balkans, where he was involved in the Kosovo crisis and was the chief American negotiator in the Daytona Accords. What Pakistan needs is for him to become convinced that the solution to the Indo-Pak relationship lies in Kashmir. However, even though one of the reasons Musharraf gave for entering the War On Terror on America's side was that this would help solve the Kashmir issue, it did nothing of the sort. In fact, it helped throw the Kashmir issue further into the background. The main issue was that Pakistan tried unsuccessfully to point out that the Kashmiri struggle was one of self-determination, while the world bought into the Indian story that this struggle was Pakistan-sponsored. That is why it is so important to India to prove that the Mumbai attacks were Pakistan-sponsored. However, India should not have worried. The same reasoning that let India get away with Kashmir, would have let it get away with Mumbai: the biggest-market story that has led to India becoming flavour-of-the-month in the West. Another link with Holbrooke was that Pakistan had a meeting of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet the same day as he arrived. The DCC was not only the highest forum to consider the issue in Pakistan, it was also held as an alternative to a meeting of the National Security Council, which the military has been backing since at least 1985. Then it formed part of the constitution that Ziaul Haq gave to the nation in the shape of the Revival of Constitution Order, but when Muhammad Khan Junejo passed the Eighth Amendment, the NSC was omitted. Yet the military wanted an institutional method of the COAS complaining to the government. The DCC, the highest forum where the chiefs, including the COAS, attended (though only on invitation), was apparently not enough. Below the DCC, chaired by the PM, was the Defence Council, chaired by the defence minister, and the only forum at which the chiefs were supposed to attend as a matter of right rather than by special invitation, as was the case at the DCC meeting which decided to go ahead with the nuclear explosions, back in May 1998. It was after those meetings that the then COAS, General Jehangir Karamat, revived the NSC idea, but he was forced to resign for going public with the call. He was succeeded by Pervez Musharraf, and the rest is history. When Musharraf, through the 17th amendment, got his opportunity of tailoring the constitution to suit himself, he re-introduced the dissolution power (Article 58-2(b)) and the presidential power to appoint the service chiefs, but not the NSC. That was legislated as an Act of Parliament, and the Parliament was included through its presiding officers, as well as the opposition leaders. The main difference between the NSC and the DCC was that the NSC was chaired by the president, not the PM. In fact, this was the only body the PM did not chair even though he was a member. There was a National Security advisor, who was also the secretary of the Council, and his office was in the presidency. As was self-evident, the NSC was meant to provide another forum in which the president could run down the PM. It took Zafarullah Jamali, a veteran of the Junejo years who remembered the NSC debate well, long enough to pass the requisite Act for that to be made one of the reasons for forcing him to resign. As was to be expected, the NSC did not meet much, because Musharraf was both president and COAS, but the NSC did allow him to make his friend and confidant Tariq Aziz NSC secretary, thus finding him a sinecure of appropriately high rank within the presidency. It was not very propitious that the DCC was meeting to consider the Mumbai issue, because the DCC is supposed to convert into a War Cabinet in times of war. There had been no mission statement for the NSC converting it into a component of any wartime Higher Defence Organisation. Therefore, DCC meetings are a signal by the government that it considers that there is a threat of war. Though the Indian threat seems to have receded, the holding of the meeting was a signal by the government that it was not yet ruling out the possibility of an Indian attack. That leaves the question, unanswered, of what was to be the function of the NSC in times of war. Apparently, none. After all, it was meant as a forum, with a secretariat separated from the Defence Ministry and under the president, where the COAS would lay a chargesheet against the government of the day, the other chiefs would give their opinion, and the president would proceed to exercise his powers under Aricle 58-2(b) - and dismiss the government by dissolving the National Assembly. It was assumed that the COAS, protected from the civilian government by being appointed by the president, would use all this as pressure to make the civilian government do what he wanted. However, the major defect of this scheme, assuming that the military must be given a special voice in government, is that it does not give the chief any extra share in the panoply of power that accrues to the president ex-officio. However, the DCC meeting probably did not just consider the national response over Mumbai, but also the national defence situation. Holbrooke, who expected only to have to sell the message that the Obama administration was as determined about the War On Terror as the Bush, found he still has some fire-fighting to do.