Refashion confrontational foreign policy: Pak media tells govt

The desire for peace has to come from within as made clear by President Obama's remarks in India, the newspapers said in editorial and front page opinion pieces on his visit. As US has made it clear that it cannot impose solutions to long standing issues like Kashmir, the papers said that Pakistan will have to look hard at the American President's remarks.

Pakistan must develop a "more differentiated and supple approach to the world outside" instead of being habituated to a confrontational foreign policy that had developed "because of the subordination of our Foreign Office to the military point of view," said The Express Tribune.

In an editorial titled 'Reading Obama right', the daily said if Pakistan remains reluctant in refashioning its foreign policy, then it ran the risk of being seen as "an inward-looking state that no longer cares how isolated it is in the world".

The editorial said: "The ease the world feels with India is owed to India's soft image which our ideology and our weak state situation do not allow us. The truth is that our hard ideological environment repels global capital as investors feel jittery visiting Pakistan." "In today's world, defeat can be described in one way only: international isolation... Be it Kashmir or any other issue, principles don't help if they cause isolation, pointing to martyrdom as justification for national honour," it noted.

"Cheers – US President endorses India's bid for permanent UNSC seat," said the headline alongside a picture of Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raising a toast in The Express Tribune.

Obama's endorsement for India's bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council too was covered prominently on the front pages of other dailies. Several newspaper editorials highlighted Obama's remark about India having a vital stake in stable and peaceful Pakistan.

"What should impel both India and Pakistan to cooperate with each other is the common threat of terrorism. The history of sour mutual relations and rivalry in Afghanistan are militating against this kind of cooperation," the Daily Times said in its editorial titled 'Give peace a chance'.

The newspaper added: "The will for peace, however, has to come from within the two South Asian neighbours. Given the accumulated layers of grievances over time, this will be an uphill task. Nevertheless, it is necessary." It said terrorism is a common problem for both countries as terrorists respect no borders and "are running a pan-Islamist movement".

If Pakistan is not stable and prosperous, "India cannot rest sanguine" as the elements which were instruments of Pakistan's foreign policy in Afghanistan and India "are now challenging the writ of the Pakistani state", the Daily Times said.

The News daily, in its editorial titled 'Obama balls aloft', said the US President "was careful to be seen to give equal weight (though equally careful not to give equal status) to India and Pakistan in terms of a satisfactory resolution to the Afghan conundrum, but offered no hostages to fortune leaving both balls safely in the air".

The newspaper noted that Pakistan has "very little that America wants and a lot that it does not want in the form of actual as well as latent instability". The key statement on the future relationship between the US and India came at a joint news conference by Obama and Manmohan Singh, where the US President spoke of the bilateral ties as "one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century", the daily said.

Obama also completed the "circle by saying that he now recognised India as a world power" and this, The News claimed, was an indication that the US and India "may be drawing the preparatory sketches for a new form of empire" that could lead to an "Amer-asian hegemony". The influential Dawn newspaper, in its front page report on Obama's address to Indian parliament, contended that the US President's backing for India's bid to gain permanent membership of the UN Security Council was linked to New Delhi delivering on Washington's "punitive prescriptions against Iran and Myanmar".