While the world’s attention was fixed on the soccer world cup in east Asia in the early summer of 2002, a more deadly drama was unfolding in south Asia, where India and Pakistan once again confronted each other in their long-standing conflict over the disputed province of Kashmir. Since 1947 these ‘distant neighbours’ have fought three wars over Kashmir, and more recently an eleven-week border conflict in 1999 that cost over 1200 lives.
What made this summer’s episode so ominous was the mobilisation of over a million troops, the open threats to use nuclear weapons, and deep misgivings among the wider global community about the ability of political leaders in both countries to rein in the hawks. With ambiguous nuclear doctrines, and poor command and control of nuclear weapons, the military situation was intensely dangerous.
The path to the nuclear precipice
The immediate causes of the confrontation were acts of terrorism in India and Indian-controlled Kashmir by militants operating from the Pakistan-administered area of Kashmir. Since 1989, Pakistan’s strategy in Indian Kashmir has been to sponsor armed Islamist militant groups who have displaced the traditional Kashmir opposition to Indian rule. India has responded in kind, with heavy-handed counter-insurgency resulting in over 40,000 fatalities (independent observers put the figure much higher).
When, on 13 December 2001, the Indian parliament in New Delhi was attacked, leaving 14 dead, the country’s government – led by the ageing Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s right-wing National Democratic Alliance – decided on coercive diplomacy. Borrowing liberally from the rhetoric of ‘war against terror’, India launched a full-scale mobilisation of its land, air and sea forces.
The pressure on General Pervez Musharraf’s military regime in Pakistan was palpable. Yet Musharraf, despite professions to the contrary, was unable or unwilling to control the Islamist militants. And when in May the militants struck at an Indian army camp in Kashmir – killing children and women as well as army personnel – Vajpayee made a sabre-rattling tour of the province and urged the field troops to prepare for ‘decisive battle’.
India’s war rhetoric gained momentum, with widespread suggestions of a ‘clinical strike’ against the militants’ camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Musharraf responded to these threats by testing missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons deep into Indian territory. The general also reaffirmed that, in the event of an Indian attack, he would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons for defence. By the end of May, it appeared that India and Pakistan were sleepwalking into a nuclear exchange that threatened to wipe out most of the north-west of the Indian subcontinent with minimum casualties estimated at 20 million.
The US as peace broker
In the event, India and Pakistan were brought back from the precipice by strong-arm tactics employed by the US. The campaign in eastern Afghanistan against al-Qaida, the need to keep the Pakistan regime on board in the war against terrorism and to assuage Indian feelings in the face of a growing realisation that India is likely to emerge as the region’s policeman – all led to intense US and international diplomatic pressure on Musharraf to relent in his support of the Kashmiri militants operating from Pakistan.
It now appears that an informal understanding was reached among India, Pakistan and the US. Musharraf agreed to control the infiltration of militants across the "line of control" (LoC) that divides Indian and Pakistani Kashmir in return for a promise that the US would lead a diplomatic initiative on Kashmir. India in turn agreed to de-escalate the military build-up once US assurances were secured about limiting the violations across the LoC.
One notable feature of the crisis was the impact of indirect external diplomacy. Warnings to western citizens to leave India and Pakistan had a profound psychological impact on informed public opinion in both countries, leading to calls, from businessmen in particular, to reflect seriously on the implications of the war rhetoric.
Since early June there has been some de-escalation in mobilisation by both sides. Nevertheless, tensions remain with isolated acts of terror by Islamist militants operating in Indian Kashmir. So what has the crisis achieved?
Three states, three perspectives
From India’s perspective, ‘coercive diplomacy’ has brought two possible rewards: it has exacted an understanding from the US – Pakistan’s chief patron – that Pakistan must abandon the ‘proxy war’ in Indian-controlled Kashmir, and it has tarred Pakistan with the tag of international terror. To what extent these outcomes endure will be determined by Pakistan’s commitment to the agreement and the ability of New Delhi to establish a legitimate government in the valley after the scheduled September-October elections for the provincial assembly.
The signs are not promising. Over a half century of mismanagement of regional autonomy suggests that a radical breakthrough is unlikely, even if India is able to control cross-border militants. In the absence of a comprehensive response from New Delhi to the outstanding demands of Kashmiris, Indian governments are likely to continue to govern through malleable local clients. In short, ‘coercive diplomacy’ will be a poor substitute for legitimacy if the October elections are again rigged, reinforcing deep disaffection among the Kashmiri electorate.
From Pakistan’s perspective, the crisis marks an end to the strategy of ‘proxy war’ that was launched simultaneously with the Talibanisation of Afghanistan. General Musharraf’s efforts to restructure Pakistani politics after 11 September by curtailing the influence of Islamic fundamentalists will now have to extend to Kashmiri groups.
But unlike Afghanistan, Kashmir is a regime-threatening issue in Pakistan politics and no leader can survive any dilution of Pakistan’s claim on the territory. Although diplomacy rather than violence is likely to come to the forefront, some of Musharraf’s recent pronouncements suggest that militancy might be rekindled if the grievances of the Kashmir people are allowed to fester. On Kashmir, Pakistan has made clear the limits of its patron–client relationship with the US. While it acquiesced in the war against terror, in the long term it cannot afford to concede any advantage that may arise from reigniting militancy. Much, however, depends on Musharraf’s ability to successfully navigate the national elections due in October.
From the US perspective, the crisis has demonstrated the need for more effective engagement in a region that US policymakers have traditionally viewed in terms of high cost and low gain. Apart from US involvement in Afghanistan, there is clearly an opportunity to frame a longer-term security architecture for the region.
However these efforts remain largely rhetorical. The recent statement that the US sees the Shimla accord of 1972 (imposed on Pakistan by India after the 1971 war) as the basis of a bilateral understanding between India and Pakistan has caused deep resentment among the latter. Pakistan had called for the Indian state to fulfil its original commitment – given in 1948 to the United Nations – to hold a plebiscite on Kashmir’s future. Earlier efforts by US administrations to force a dialogue between India and Pakistan (the Lahore agreement of 1999 and the Agra summit of 2001) have ended farcically. The paradox of current US influence in south Asia is that it may be able to prevent a war but it is unable to ensure a permanent peace.
From the regional to the global
In a much broader perspective, the Afghan war and the Kashmir crisis also highlight a much more general problem: the failure of governance in a region that contains the highest concentration of poverty and some of the most corrupt nations in the world. The root causes of these symptoms lie in the adversarial relationship between India and Pakistan, which has distorted development by giving birth to a regional cold war.
Since 1947, relations between India and Pakistan have been characterised by deep mutual mistrust, suspicion and opposing state ideologies that contest the very nature of each other’s nationhood. These sharp differences have fostered highly centralised polities over essentially regional and plural societies where the politics of control has triumphed over participation.
Pakistan’s second phase of democratisation (1988–99) ended with the return of the generals. In India, the post-Nehruvian state is beset by a deep crisis of governability that has seen eight governments in the last decade, the mainstream acceptance of the Hindu right, and immense pressures towards regionalisation unleashed by economic liberalisation. Ironically, secular trends in both countries cry out for a political subcontinent of the regions; but the dominant and official state ideologies in India and Pakistan continually reinforce each other, as well as undermining the prospects of this development. Kashmir’s tragedy is that it is the victim of these processes.
The recent crisis has proven that Pakistan cannot sustain a ‘proxy war’, that India is incapable of unilaterally dismantling Pakistan, and that the US has sufficient clout to stop war breaking out. This new realism is, in a sense, a solidification of the processes ongoing since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the end of the second cold war and the arrival of India and Pakistan as nuclear states in 1998. Whether India likes it or not, the Kashmir dispute, as Colin Powell has stated, is “firmly on the global agenda”. It is incumbent on politicians and generals in India and Pakistan to rise to the challenge of resolving a conflict that is now a global as well as a local and regional concern.
