Sydney, Nov.6 : A professor of political science at the University of Waterloo in Canada has opined that the only sensible solution to the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan is to convert the Line of Control into an international border.

In an article for The Australian, Professor Ramesh Thakur, says that this conversion would recognise a reality that has barely changed in the past 60 years and is unlikely to change much in the next 60.

“It would drain the oxygen from the army's political role and allow the infrastructure of terrorist training to be dismantled across Pakistan. The army belongs in the barracks. Putting it back there would mark the beginning of the end for Pakistan's long nightmare. Keeping it there would constitute a solution,” the paper quotes him, as saying.

Thakur further goes on to say that Allah, the army and America have always triangulated Pakistan.

Pakistan, he says, is an artificial creation carved out of British India with mass bloodshed. Civilian governments have alternated with military ones, competing with each other in a race to the highest levels of incompetence and corruption.

Enmity with India has given the military an excuse for establishing ascendancy over all civilian competitors and for spreading its tentacles into almost every aspect of national affairs.

Pakistan has always thought of itself as India's equal in every respect. At the heart of this emotional parity lies the ability to match India militarily.

Thakur says that domestically, civilian and military governments in Pakistan have competed with each other as to which of them could rob the national treasury more rapidly.

He says that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawa Sharif have warned against the perils of backing a duplicitous and unreliable Musharraf, and he adds that Pakistan has one of the staunchest anti-US images in the world.

“If he fails to show any tangible progress, he would be toppled. So he has brilliantly played both ends against the middle. But that has meant the policy contradictions have ripened and threatened to burst,” he warns.

As far the declaration of emergency is concerned, Thakur says that Musharraf has been true to his commando instincts. He has struck with the plea that he is saving the nation from its many enemies.

“Such last-gasp efforts may delay the inevitable but are rarely successful. Pakistan has slowly but surely descended into the failed state syndrome during the past few years, amid the Koran and Kalashnikov culture,” he says, and concludes by saying that “a strong and sustained international pressure and effort - stick, followed by carrots - will be needed” to rein in the country and its managers.

An unstable, volatile, radicalised and nuclear-armed Pakistan is in no one's interest. Musharraf is not the solution but part of the problem, with a track record to prove it. He has to go, Thakur says. (ANI)