The daily ceremony at the India-Pakistan border crossing where turbaned border guards go through an extravagantly choreographed flag-lowering ritual has now come to symbolise the vacuity and swagger of the relations between these two countries.

What they think is a patriotic pageant at Atari actually resembles a cock-fight. While people on both sides cheer, the rest of the world is laughing. Separated at birth, the governments of these twin nations are so consumed by their envious loathing for each other they are holding their own people and the rest of South Asia hostage. Come on, guys, grow up.

The latest brinkmanship came in the run-up to the 11th SAARC Summit. Just look at the inane chest-thumping. Calling these two governments infantile would be an insult to children. With the Afghan war drawing to a close, the conflict is now threatening to creep eastwards. New Delhi, which felt peeved and left out as Washington wooed Islamabad for support in the anti-Taleban campaign is now trying to get back the world's attention. "We're here," they seem to say when they mass troops along the Pakistan border, or cancel the overfly rights of Pakistani airliners. In trying to imitate America's "war on terror", the Indians are making the same mistake: not addressing the roots of extremism. And in India's case it has (for the past 50 years) always been the struggle for autonomy in Kashmir.

Resolve Kashmir and everything else will probably fall into place. Let Kashmir fester and this corrosive extremism will consume us all. It is difficult to see why it isn't easier to find a solution to this.

As long as India and Pakistan were just destabilising each other, the rest of South Asia didn't really care. But now they are playing with nukes. And the rest of us are quickly trying to figure out prevailing winds so we won't be downwind when the firecrackers go off.

Leave Kashmir aside for a moment. Isn't a moderate Pakistan in everyone's interest? It's in General Musharraf's interest, and it's in Prime Minister Vajpayee's interest. Escalating the current tension only benefits extremists in both India and Pakistan. By its short-sighted sabre-rattling New Delhi is not giving Gen Musharraf political space, and playing right into the hands of those who want to Talebanise Pakistan. Gen Musharraf needs to reign in the Taleban's mentors within his own intelligence community, but threatening to go to war is not going to make that job easier for him.

The leaders of India and Pakistan need to once and for all redefine their perspective on security. It is no longer about outdated military concepts like "strategic depth" or "doomsday deterrence", it is no longer about adolescent posturing with nuclear erections. It is about human security and development. The enemy is within, not in the other's territory. Poverty, inequality, decades of mal-governance and corruption have rotted the innards of both countries. More than half the populations in both countries live in poverty, the parameters for infant mortality, literacy and safe drinking water are shameful even by sub-Saharan standards.

Having nuclear weapons does not mean zilch. Remember the Soviet Union? It had enough warheads to destroy the world ten times over (once would have been quite enough, but that's just how mad they were during the Cold War). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics imploded under the weight of its own inability to address economic and governance crises. International stature comes from the strength of your economic and social indicators, not the size of your arsenal. The enmity between India and Pakistan, besides threatening us all with radioactive contamination, is dragging down the economy of the rest of the region.

From our vantage point in the Himalaya, we see the bilateral bickering between New Delhi and Islamabad for what it is: a dangerous game that is diverting precious resources away from a more urgent task that they (and we) need to address-South Asia's development challenge.

But Indian and Pakistani hawks need each other's hatred to perpetuate their holds on power. Saner leaders must now call the shots and take bilateral relations to the fundamental need to give all Indians and Pakistanis a chance for more decent lives. On that they both need to be fundamentalists.