The current angst about India conceding ground by agreeing to incorporate a reference to Balochistan in the recent joint statement out of Egypt is misplaced. If India is in fact aiding and abetting rebels in Balochistan, then it is not automatically the moral equivalent of Pakistan's involvement in Jammu & Kashmir. Without getting into lengthy legalistic tangles about how the two might or might not be equivalent, the issue is as simple as right versus wrong.

Not all liberation movements are the same in a moral sense, and it follows that not all interference in a foreign liberation struggle is morally equivalent. The fight in Balochistan is about unfair exploitation of Balochi resources by Pakistan's dominant Punjabis, and about the disrespecting of Balochi language and culture. The fight in Kashmir is about the adoption, by a segment of the Muslim population there, of Pakistan's underlying supremacist ideology, usually known as the "two nation theory"...