Kashmir's very short fuse
UNITED NATIONS Ñ One million well equipped troops facing off on a long-disputed frontier. Two wars fought over the region. Nuclear weapons on both sides. This is not a test, but the one place on earth with the possible exception of the divided Korean peninsula where a nuclear showdown is not only possible, but I hesitatingly say, probable.
The dangerous standoff in Kashmir, South Asia's mountainous region controlled and hotly disputed between both India and Pakistan has continued since 1948. But now the long simmering dispute has again gone back to boil as nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan allow what The Times of India calls "Competitive Jingoism" to set the political tone. Pakistan's test firing of three missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads brings the matter into frightening focus. In the meantime, artillery exchanges across Kashmir's "line of control" kill and maim civilians on both sides in what could be a countdown to a wider war.
At the time of Indian independence and the sub-continent's partition, Kashmir opted to join India. Pakistan viewed the Hindu Maharaja's move as illegitimate as the Muslim majority province would have normally joined the Muslim state of Pakistan. Now more than 50 years later, Kashmir has yet again dominated intense diplomatic efforts aimed at averting wider conflict.
While Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf remains an important American ally in the War on Terror, sadly, factions in his own government have played a deceitful game by supporting Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic militants against India and as a way to indirectly weaken Musharraf himself and perhaps pull the US and Russia into the South Asian quagmire. Pakistan's ISI military intelligence oft described as a "state within a state' not only set up and supported Taliban but likewise played a similar game backing Islamic mujadeheen in Kashmir. Though Gen. Musharraf has cracked down on these militants, Islamic factions promote a hidden agenda which may work against him as well as inept Indian rule in Kashmir. Earlier this year, India and Pakistan almost came to blows after Islamic terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi.
But as the Economist of London warns editorially, "It would, however be wrong to heap all the blame at Pakistan's door. The encouragement of the Pakistani security apparatus is only one of the things that make the jihadi's such an intractable problem. Another is the way in which mainly Hindu India has treated mainly Muslim Kashmir since independence. The record of abuses committed by the hundreds of thousands of Indian troops stationed there is a blot on the reputation of the world's largest democracy...In Pakistan's eyes, arming the jihadi is the only available response to an India which refuses to compromise. Land for peace has never featured in the Indian lexicon."
Why is this important for the USA? Consider the regional geography. Afghanistan is nearby. Washington often says that Pakistan's military faceoff with India diverts troops from its own missions against Al Qaida terrorists on the Afghan frontier. While Pakistan has worked with the US in the war on terror and nominally controls the "Wild West" border regions with Afghanistan, the primary reason goes well beyond policing. Any India/Pakistan conflict would likely involve a nuclear exchange. Use of nuclear weapons, besides breaking the long held psychological taboo, would spill fallout from South Asia to the Far East and beyond across the Pacific to North America. Intelligence agencies claim even a "limited" nuclear conflict as causing twelve million dead in the immediate region.
Could this be the Al Qaida's atomic bomb? In other words, can Al Qaida operatives entrenched in the Pakistani military deliberately trigger a nuclear exchange in Kashmir in the wild jihadist hope that probable escalation will in itself have obvious consequences of nuclear fallout going to the US?
Given India's conventional military superiority--almost one to four in New Delhi's favor--Pakistan views its nuclear option as the ultimate "ace in the hole." While India developed (with Soviet assistance) nuclear weapons in the early 1970's, Pakistan joined the "nuclear club" in 1998 with technical "assistance" from both the People's Republic of China and later North Korea. By the late 1990's, both countries had nuclear warheads and the capability to deliver them to each other's cities.
Stemming from its military disadvantage, Pakistan has refused to give up its "first strike option " for nuclear weapons use; India promises "no first use."
American diplomacy should along with Britain, India's former colonial power, and Russia, the former political patron of India, press for a comprehensive political soultion to the long running Kashmir standoff by returning to the basics. The UN Security Council should re-visit the issue. In 1949 the Security Council passed resolution #47 authorizing an internationally sponsored plebiscite through which the people of Kashmir could decide their own future. The vote was never held; the choice is yet to be made.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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