Talk in Tashkent

Mayors everywhere are expected to be boosters, and Tashkent's Hunuddin Asamov is no exception. Last week he was busy extolling the tourist virtues of his ancient city in Soviet Central Asia to a pair of wary travelers: Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan and India's Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri. "We have planted parks and gardens, over 2,000,000 trees, 1,500,000 shrubs and 80 million flowers," wrote Asamov in an open letter. "Moreover, we Uzbeks have a saying: If two neighbors have an argument, go to the third, and you will always achieve peace."

As Ayub and Shastri meet in Tashkent this week under the sponsoring eye of Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, that old Uzbek saying sounds overoptimistic. Kosygin invited the pair to Tashkent during the height of last summer's Indo-Pakistani border war. Since then, an uneasy, U.N.-imposed "ceasefire" has been torn almost daily by vicious, small-scale clashes, and both sides have counted more than 3,596 "violations."

In Ayub's winter-bound capital of Rawalpindi, war fever still runs high. Sandbags are piled around government buildings, air-raid trenches kept clear and ready. In the brunt of the summer's fighting, war readiness has become a way of life. In Lahore, scene of much of last summer's fighting, hardy Pakistanis last week nibbled sweets and kept their horse-driven tongas ready to carry rice and curry to frontline soldiers. "Sons of Islam are meant to fight," said one, "not to allow their guns to rust."

In New Delhi, the Indians charge that Pakistan has received a $67 million loan from Peking to rebuild its shattered armed forces, claim that a daily air shuttle from Sinkiang into Pakistan is carrying Red Chinese small arms to outfit three new Pakistani divisions. "There is an almost poisonous atmosphere between the two countries," said a top Shastri aide last week. "To expect any dramatic results [in Tashkent] seems to be rather impractical." Since the heart of the Indo-Pakistani dispute remains Kashmir, a problem which neither the U.N. nor the big powers have been able to arbitrate successfully for 18 years, that pessimism is well warranted. Still, the days of talk in Tashkent may allow both sides' tempers to cool.

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