Of the six rivers of the Indus, three start in India, three in Kashmir. David Lilienthal and Eugene Black of the World Bank have tried to work out formulas that would satisfy India and reassure Pakistan. The Indians in 1948 forced an agreement by partly shutting off the water. But Pakistan, from its portion of Azad ("free") Kashmir, is able to float down logs cheaply from its profitable lumber industry, while the Indians must truck them expensively.

Now buffer state?

All the troubles that beset Pakistan seem to be in the western part. One grief is the persistent effort of Afghanistan—a true Muslim state complete with veils—to disengage a portion of the Indus Valley. This plan is called "Pushtoonistan."

The Afghans, warmly encouraged by India, wish to form a new halfmoon-shaped state, running in a curve from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, and roughly paralleling the Indian border. This plan would reduce the crescent of West Pakistan to a thin fingernail. At the friction point of this crescent, around the Khyber Pass and Peshawar, there is more ill feeling than anywhere else between two Muslim nations. Afghanistan, to tap the rich Indian market for her fruits, must ship them across Pakistan. They do not always move rapidly and sometimes rot. The gasoline trucks that bring fuel into Afghanistan from Peshawar have a way of being held up by Pakistani delays, according to the claims of the Afghans.

The aging protagonist of the Pushtoonistan movement is the nearly forgotten Fakir of Ipi, who dwells in a border village of "independent Pushtoonistan," largely ignored by the Pakistanis. Once they bombed him a little. Now they snub him.

Rifles into plows

For the mettlesome Pathans, in their barren hills of the Northwest Frontier, the Pakistanis have adopted the same solution sanctified by the British: the pay-off. Through the chiefs, regular stipends are handed out to keep the jirgas or meetings of the Pathans from turning into frontier raids.

At Warsak, the gorge probably traversed by Alexander's army when he reached the Indus, a dam is slowly rising. It will flood thousands of acres and give homesteads to the uneasy tribesmen. This is the most enduring pay-off possible, far better than cash. The Pathans soon will be able to begin beating their homemade rifles into plows. When they do so, perhaps the government will no longer fear to release its curbs on the Red Shirts, the pro-Indian group of Muslims who almost stole the Northwest Province from Jinnah.

Not being a theocracy—though Indians often call it such—Pakistan needed a poet as well as statesmen. He appeared in Sir Mahomed Iqbal, a Thomas Paine who died before his state was born. He puta message of progress into the mosque. Fiery in his view of the future, he was gentle in the means of reaching it. He wrote: "I am absolutely sure that territorial conquest was no part of the program of Islam. I consider it a great loss that the progress, of Islam as a conquering faith stultified growth of those germs of an economic and democratic society that I find scattered up and down the pages of the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet."

Pakistan's land reform

It may have been Iqbal who spurred Pakistan to undertake early her program of land reform, of doing away as far as possible with the big landowner or zamindar and dispersing his lands—after compensation—to the landless peasant. Iqbal had written that the Koran is "the patron of the propertyless slave" and for the capitalist "a message of death.”