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The new year opened with Britain’s PM Tony Blair stumbling his way through the Indo-Pak subcontinent to try to tamp down the possibility of war. There was some hope as he departed that things were cooling. But Blair hadn’t much to do with it.
Like Sec. Powell tirelessly ringing up Indian and Pakistani officials, foreign persuasion has limited value. The feud between these Siamese twins turns around the issue of Kashmir. But its 10-million people or even its strategic position wedged between India, Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan is less the issue. For to quote that old Irish-American machine politician Tip O’Neal, all politics are local; no less so in the Subcontinent.
The fragile Indian administration of PM Vajpayee is facing midterm elections in Uttar Pradesh, a 100-million mishmash of ethnic groups. Vajpayee, a gentle failed poet, fronts for the hardline Hindu revivalist BJP party as their votegetter. Old and ill, were he to go, it’s not clear the hodgepodge Indian coalition could survive.
His counterpart in Pakistan, Pres.-Gen. Musharraf [whose pre-Partition roots are in the UP] is walking a very thin line; neither a Punjabi, a Sindhi, a Pathan, Pakistan’s distinctive political entities. He appears the last gasp of the old British Indian army ethos which once dominated the Pakistani and Indian armies and could, on occasion, rise above the Subcontinent’s bitter ethnic, racial and religious furies. [Former Pres.-Gen. Ayub Khan used to say that were the Indo-Pak feud not solved in his generation which grew up in united India, it never would be, a prophecy one can only hope was wrong.]
The only light is that both these men are not representative of their political constituencies, that is, that they are willing to make the kinds of compromise most of their followers are not.
How to do that?
Blair, apparently, had hoped to pick up on Powell’s suggestion of a special emissary, probably American. But India sees that as the first step toward international mediation. For India, the issue has always been that despite Kashmir’s overwhelmingly Moslem population it belongs in India if for no other reason than to prove that India is a secular state [despite special law for its population of Moslems larger than Pakistan’s population].
For Pakistan, created by those who argued the Subcontinent was really “two nations”, that only a state identified as Moslem — even though those leaders wanted it secular — could protect the minority. The predominantly Moslem areas on the east [later to break away as Bangla Desh] and the west constituted the new entity. Part and parcel of such a state should be contiguous Moslem Kashmir. But a detested Maharaja, who hamhandedly attempted independence, Abdullah, a charismatic Moslem Kashmiri politician who favored secular India, and Indian Prime Minister Nehru whose family roots traced to Kashmir, brought about “accession” to India. The Pakistanis’ answer was to send in Moslem tribals, shooting, looting, and raping until blocked by Indian troops.
Over half a century the plot thickened with attempted UN intervention, UN calls for plebiscite, shifts to and fro in both Indian and Pakistani policy, three wars in part over Kashmir. Just as the Pakistan-sponsored Talliban became the host for the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, once passively prone Kashmiri sentiment against India — despite half a million Indian occupation forces — has become prisoner of religious fanatics including some non-Pakistani guerrillas.
The culmination came Dec. 13 when terrorists came very close to assassinating the Indian cabinet. It seems likely that Musharraf’s enemies in Pakistan — perhaps the Al Qaeda network itself — was behind this attempted atrocity. Had it succeeded, India would immediately have gone to war.
Despite a deployment of Indian forces, and cries particularly within Vajpayee’s party for action, New Delhi had not moved by January 7th. Low-level exchanges continued. India is pressing Musharaff to deliver up 20 terrorists whom New Delhi charges were behind the plot. Musharaff, who under Washington pressure has imprisoned Kashmiri insurgent leadership, will find it difficult to move further against the terrorists and face down his own opposition without major concessions from India on the larger issue of Kashmir.
The implications — beyond the danger of all-out war, the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange [given India’s perceived superiority in conventional forces and Pakistan’s refusal to take a no first strike nuclear pledge] — are enormous for Washington. The Paks have already moved forces away from the Afghan-Pakistan border where the U.S. hoped for help in mopping up the Al Qaeda, if not in capturing Osama Ben Ladin himself. India must consider the danger of troop withdrawals from its troubled northeastern border areas facing China with whom it has border issues since the 1962 Himalayan war.
The curse of Kashmir has now become a major international problem challenging the deftness of Anglo-American diplomacy as never before.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@directvinternet.com ),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.