As the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) reached another milestone in its steady evolution into a grouping of considerable economic and strategic potential, it also began to evoke mixed reactions.
In its age of innocence when it was identified mostly by the spirit of Shanghai without a rock-hard platform, it was globally praised for having settled complex border issues between China and the neighbouring successor states of the Soviet Union and for its resolve to counter religious extremism and separatism.
On the fifth anniversary as SCO, an organisation comprising Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as full members and Mongolia, Iran, Pakistan and India as observers, there was less harmony in the notes struck in different parts of the world.
Western concerns that it may develop into a rival of Nato, a veritable Warsaw Pact of the Orient, surfaced explicitly. It was also described as a club of dictators averse to the project for the democratisation of the region.
On their part, Russia and China responded to these fears with studied ambivalence: SCO would never be a military pact and yet it was to be an open organisation likely to expand in the fullness of time.
This year's joint communiqué and joint declaration a remarkable sequence of documents recording a gradual change of identity and objectives made it implicitly clear that its values, preferences, policies and principles would be a forceful alternative to externally ordained intervention, unilateralism, economic models and dominance.
A discordant note was struck on the theme of expansion. As and when the present observers are granted full membership, SCO would account for nearly half of the world population inhabiting a large area dotted with huge energy resources.
Analysts with a visionary foresight dream of an Asian energy network including the states of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). On the eve of the 5th summit, US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld cast the first stone by harshly objecting to Iran's presence in the summit.
Then, in a marked contrast to the past, the two sub-continental powers, India and Pakistan, seemed to be out of sync. Pakistan, an ally both of the United States and China underscored the special relationship with China and the importance of SCO by the personal presence of President Pervez Musharraf and by a proactive and urgent pursuit of full membership.
India, with a long tradition of close relations with Russia and one of the keenest actors on the regional energy stage, tampered its earlier enthusiasm by sending only the petroleum minister, and not even either of its two ministers of state for foreign affairs, to a summit where every other participating member or observer was a head of state.
Washington's attack on Iran's presence and the level of Indian participation would have inevitably precluded any serious progress on the enlargement of membership.
Plausible explanation
A facile but plausible explanation of the low-key Indian participation is that New Delhi is taking an active interest in energy security issues while distancing itself from the emerging strategic orientation of the grouping. The summit took place when the greatest recent triumph of Indian diplomacy, the nuclear energy deal with the United States, is still under congressional scrutiny.
Pakistan was precipitately committed to the war on terrorism without any prior debate in any elective institution, civil society forum and even the media. This peculiar circumstance has led to much controversy. Since Bush's last visit to the region, there has been a rising pressure in Pakistan to replace a linear US-centred foreign policy with a more broad-based policy that attaches higher priority to China, Iran and the Arab-Islamic world.
Many Pakistani analysts see in the SCO's multilateral framework an opportunity for improving relations with India, Afghanistan and Iran. President Vladimir Putin's public support for Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline is a significant event. Gazprom's participation would significantly add to the feasibility of the project.
When I worked as ambassador to the Russian Federation, reactions to Nato's possible expansion into the Baltic states and Ukraine were invariably combative. Two years after Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia signed on, Russia has muted its criticism.
However, Ukraine is still hotly contested even as some Ukrainian politicians point to 2008 as the moment of truth for Russia. The western caveats to SCO's expansion naturally compelled the SCO leaders to deviate from their restrained prose in the joint statements and speak of "double standards".
SCO need not acquire the trappings of a military alliance but it certainly adds to the autonomy of decision-making in energy-rich states.
In case both India and Pakistan become full members, four out of the known eight nuclear weapon power states would be sitting at its high table. SCO will increasingly become a factor of multipolarity.
The fifth summit avoided a drum roll of confrontation and prudently left enough space for individual states to find their own balance in political and economic cooperation. It could change if the other side brought unjustified pressures to bear on this large experiment in regionalism.
Painting it in an unfavourable light in its present formative phase may simply become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For reasons which may not be identical, India, Pakistan and the states of the GCC will follow the trajectory of SCO's development with much interest.
The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.
