Once again tensions between Pakistan and India have risen to dangerous levels and the war hysteria has been whipped up in both the countries. Once again there is the serious risk of a miscalculation in the handling of the grave crisis confronting them because of the dastardly terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Since both Pakistan and India are nuclear powers, the consequences of a miscalculation can be catastrophic for both of them. One would, therefore, hope that rationality would prevail and the leadership of the two countries would succeed in defusing tensions, arresting and punishing the culprits responsible for the Mumbai attacks, taking steps to prevent the recurrence of the terrorist attacks which are hurting them both, and putting the peace process back on track. These objectives can be achieved only if Islamabad and New Delhi keep their lines of communication open and choose the path of cooperation rather than confrontation in overcoming the current crisis. India must avoid hurling threats at Pakistan which will merely aggravate the situation by playing into the hands of the hawks on both sides of the border. The last thing that India and Pakistan need is the mobilisation of troops which will feed the war hysteria and increase the risk of a miscalculation by either side. If India is convinced that elements from Pakistan were responsible for the Mumbai attacks, it must provide credible evidence to the Pakistan government to enable the latter to take the requisite action against them. Obviously such action cannot be taken on the basis of mere conjecture and speculation or baseless allegations. The responsibilities of the Pakistan government in combating terrorism are self-evident in the light of the numerous regional and international agreements on the subject. It should not need prodding by India or by the international community to take stern action against the terrorist elements operating on or from its soil. The fact that Pakistan itself has been a victim of the menace of terrorism makes it even more incumbent on the government to leave no stone unturned in eliminating this scourge. The frequency of the terrorist attacks in Pakistan shows that the performance of our security establishment, especially the intelligence agencies, in combating terrorism leaves a lot to be desired. Needless to add that India itself is also under the obligation to desist from terrorist activities in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia. One must practice what one preaches. The challenge of the crafting of our India policy is, however, much bigger than the task of overcoming the current crisis in Pakistan-India relations. Since the very birth of Pakistan, its relations with India have been generally tense and occasionally hostile as reflected by the several wars and military confrontations between them. There have been two primary reasons for the discord between India and Pakistan: the Kashmir dispute and India's quest for hegemony in South Asia which was met with Pakistan's opposition. Another underlying factor for the tension-ridden relationship between the two countries has been the grudging reluctance with which India accepted the creation of Pakistan and its continued hope that sooner or later the partition would be nullified and Pakistan would rejoin India as part of a federation or a confederation. The fact of the matter is that Pakistan belongs to the Islamic civilisation whereas the vast majority of the Indians represent the Hindu civilisation. As stressed by the Quaid-i-Azam at Lahore in March 1940 and later in his famous correspondence with Gandhi in 1944, the Muslims and the Hindus belong to different civilisations and cultures, have a distinctive outlook on life and of life, and, therefore, constitute two different nations. However, whereas the two-nation theory justifies the continued existence of Pakistan as a separate state, it does not and should not prevent good neighbourly relations between Pakistan and India. Our leaders and policy makers have been guilty of a number of fundamental flaws in managing our relations with India. They pursued policies which our resources could not sustain leading to the classic mistake of a strategic overstretch. They defined the concept of security almost exclusively in military terms with politics and economics taking the back seat. They also ignored the lesson of history that in modern times the nations that have prospered in the world accorded higher priority to building economic strength than to military strength at the initial stages of their development. Sustainable military power can be built up only on the foundation of political stability and economic strength. Unfortunately, we have put the cart before the horse by building up military power at the expense of political stability and economic development. Since the 1990's, we have added to these policy flaws the blunder of policy formulation in a vacuum ignoring the dictates of the global and regional strategic environment and a tendency to swing like a pendulum from one extreme position to another. The disintegration of the Soviet Union drove home the primacy of economic strength in any long-term contest between nations. The Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War not because of the lack of advanced weaponry. Its fundamental mistake was to build a heavy military super-structure on weak economic foundations resulting in its inevitable collapse. As for the global strategic environment, two developments relevant to Pakistan-India relations stand out prominently. One is the rejection by the international community of terrorism and resort to violence by non-state actors, which has immediate implications for the current tense situation between Pakistan and India. The second is the gradual emergence of India as a major power on the international political scene. Finally, a word about the flip-flops of our India policy as exemplified by the journey from the Lahore Declaration through to Kargil, the Agra Summit, the Pakistan-India Joint Statement of January 6, 2004 and, more recently, the statements by some of our leaders for an economic union and a visa-free regime with India which would negate the very existence of Pakistan as a separate and sovereign state. Such pendulum-like swings in our India policy betray the absence of steadiness of purpose and a carefully worked out long-term strategy based on national consensus, and instead a preoccupation with short-term and arbitrary approaches. What are Pakistan's options in an admittedly difficult strategic environment? The most urgent requirement right now is to overcome the current crisis in Pakistan-India relations by taking internally the steps required to meet our international obligations against terrorism and activating our diplomatic effort to convey our point of view effectively to India and the rest of the international community. We should welcome the diplomatic interventions by major powers and friendly countries to defuse the situation. Our long-term strategy must recognise that peace is a strategic imperative for both India and Pakistan now that they both possess nuclear weapons. This strategy should avoid the extremes of a confrontational approach, which we can ill afford, and loose talk of an economic union with India, which would strike at the very roots of Pakistan. Instead our long-term objective should be to build up our internal strength politically and economically, pursue a low-risk and non-adventurous foreign policy, curb our military expenditure to increase the focus on economic development, and take well-calculated steps externally through adroit diplomacy to turn the strategic situation in our favour. The process of composite dialogue, which has been put on hold by India, must be resumed as soon as possible to defuse tensions in our relations with India, avoid the risk of the outbreak of an armed conflict, develop mutually beneficial cooperation in economic and commercial fields, and resolve the outstanding disputes in due course as the relations between the two countries are normalised and a climate of mutual trust is established. The writer is a retired ambassador E-mail: javid.husain@gmail.com