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A SENSE OF ASIA

Kashmir, the ticking time bomb in a devastating earthquake's rubble


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

November 24, 2005

The ghost of East Pakistan stalks the Himalayan hinterland.

In 1970, a supercyclone hit the Bay of Bengal, taking 300,000 lives in the then “east wing” of the then largest Moslem state. The inability and lethargy of the government’s response, dominated by West Pakistanis, aggravated longstanding friction between the two “wings”. Indian intervention and Bengali nationalism in a short war brought forth Bangladesh, an independent nation. Henry Kissinger – the U.S. had opposed it – called the new state “a basket case” Today its 150 million people live in a poor, overpopulated, and ill-governed nation threatening to become a sanctuary for Islamist terrorists and armed insurrections in India which surrounds it.

Could something similar be happening in Kashmir and northwest Pakistan? If so, the repercussions not only for the Subcontinent but for the rest of the world would be threatening.

An Oct. 2 record-breaking earthquake in the region could not have come at a worse moment. Kashmir is a tinderbox, the focus of two wars between now nuclear-clad India and Pakistan. Weekly terrorist attacks take place despite more than a half million Indian security forces on the ground. Pakistan-held Kashmir, too, has become increasingly restless The adjacent Pakistan tribal areas, the quake’s epicenter, are intimately tied to the issue; tribal guerrillas descended into the Kashmir Valley to thwart New Delhi’s incorporation of the predominantly Moslem area in the bloody mess Louis Lord Montbatten left behind with Britain’s “divide and quit” in 1947.

President Musharraf has complained bitterly at the slowness of international response to Pakistan’s call for aid. More than 80,000 people died with three million hit by the quake With virtually all housing destroyed, the winter is bearing down on tens of thousands of wounded. The U.S. – largely ignored by the Western media – rushed in with 1500 soldiers, two mobile hospitals, and helicopters and an aircraft carrier carrying food and other supplies as well as immediate cash aid. And in a catch-up donors’ conference Nov. 19 international aid agencies over fulfilled pledges for more than $5.86 billion.

But difficulties abound in one of the most isolated and difficult terrains in the world. Oncoming winter at high altitudes threatens enormous suffering. There is no shortage of troublemakers. While the international agencies have rightly called for “transparency” in the delivery of aid from a Pakistan bureaucracy noted for its corruption, there are already stories of local petty thievery and conflict in makeshift refugee camps.

Local Islamic fundamentalist organizations allied with the terrorists – sympathizers of Osama Bin Laden always rumored to be in the area – have apparently been the most effective first responders, showing up the clumsy efforts of the Pakistani military. They are following the pattern of Mideast groups using social welfare to build a support base. Their ties to the Kashmir issue go back to Pakistan using tribals in an effort to head off incorporation into India of the Moslem-majority in the then princely state, in the bloody, confused division of British India in 1947. They were repulsed by the Indian army, splitting the area’s tribes, families, and natural geographic access.

In an effort to break the Indian hold, past Pakistan governments supported terrorist infiltrators. Now Musharraf’s efforts to reach a peaceful settlement with India and at least his partial suppression of the infiltrators, has turned the terrorists against him. At least two near successful attempts on his life have come from these elements, backed above ground by religious parties in Pakistan’s local regional governments and the national legislature.

The disruptions and rehabilitation efforts are going to fan old and ignite new conflicts. Some local leadership has already objected to aid by U.S. military, adding new accusations to their charge Musharraf has sold out to the Americans. Musharraf, trying to gain the initiative, suddenly flung out a challenge to India at the donors’ meeting for a dramatic effort to solve the Kashmir question. He and Indian Prime Minister Singh have been moving slowly, at the Indians’ insistence, with “confidence building measures”, opening old trade routes, exchanging prisoners, and permitting family reunions.

But now Musharraf — and a growing Kashmiri insistence for direct participation in the negotiations from both sides of the Line of Control — are suggesting a radical new approach to arguments endlessly chewed over for almost 50 years. One proposal calls for demilitarization and a federation of Kashmir’s regions [there are Hindu and Buddhists as well as the Moslem majority] as a United States of Kashmir.

Musharraf, with hopes dimmed of economic revival of a near bankrupt economy, no end to the terrorist threat yet in sight, and always smoldering anti-Indian nationalism, needs a dramatic breakthrough. But even were Pakistan to give up its long-held claim for a UN plebiscite, an independent or autonomous Kashmiri state with powerful Islamicists and their underground terrorist organizations in that strategic corner of the world abutting India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China’s Tibet could well become an even more threatening time bomb.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), 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.

November 24, 2005


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