Nervous Pakistanis Watch ‘The Wall’ and Indian Troops : Asia: The 375-mile fence was built by New Delhi to cut arms and drug smuggling. Now it stands at a potential flash point as a symbol of tensions.

As Col. Mohammad Ali Khan strode Thursday night through the border wheat fields that soon may be an international killing ground, he said little about the brewing war between Pakistan and India but talked instead of “The Wall”--the hundreds of miles of barbed wire, searchlights, electrified fencing and machine-gun nests.

“We call it the new Berlin Wall,” the Pakistani soldier told the handful of Western reporters who were permitted for the first time to see key sections of the extraordinary 375-mile-long fence that India has spent two years and millions of dollars building along its western border. “The Berlin Wall has gone. But here, the new Berlin Wall has come to take its place. I suppose one can say that it is a powerful sign of our very troubled times.”

Indeed, the barrier is a stark and enduring symbol of the deepening rift between these two South Asian neighbors.

Earlier, at the headquarters of the 4th Corps in Lahore, 50 miles to the north, Khan’s superior officer, Lt. Gen. Alam Jan Mahsud, explained Pakistan’s assertion that India is preparing for war.

Pointing to a 12-foot operations map marking 21 forward Indian positions with large red dots, the general said that more than 25,000 Indian troops, including a full armored brigade, have moved threateningly toward Pakistan from their peacetime positions in recent days. In addition, he said, India’s southern strike corps, which includes 50,000 more infantrymen, heavy artillery and at least 300 tanks, remains poised 30 miles from Pakistan’s border.

Asked whether the troop movements indicate that India is preparing an attack, Mahsud said, “I may not go to that extent. But, taken in the context of the statements of their leaders, these moves certainly are provoking moves. It concerns me.”

Mahsud commands the most sensitive sector of the Indo-Pakistani border, a 100-mile stretch dividing the Punjab region. It was here that the fiercest fighting in all three previous Indo-Pakistani wars took place.

The Punjab, divided between India and Pakistan when the subcontinent was politically partitioned in 1947, is well south of the heart of the conflict between the two countries, an escalating war of rhetoric that last week led Indian Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh to appeal publicly for his nation of 850 million people to prepare “psychologically” for war.

The flash point is India’s predominantly Muslim northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, where armed insurgents have won wide popular support for their campaign to secede from Hindu-dominated India.

New Delhi has cracked down on the movement, sending the Indian army into the Kashmir Valley and clamping a 24-hour curfew on the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar.

It has repeatedly accused Pakistan of fueling the conflict by sending large quantities of arms to its Muslim brothers across the border, and by training Kashmiri militants in Pakistani territory.

Singh also has charged that recent Pakistani military movements indicate that Pakistan is preparing to attack India, a strategy that Islamabad did use during a far smaller Kashmiri rebellion that touched off the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war.

It is in the Punjab region that most military analysts say any war would be fought hardest, and on Thursday, India bolstered its charge of Pakistan’s aggressive intent by citing major troop movements within Gen. Mahsud’s 4th Corps area.

So far, the fighting remains largely rhetorical, a war in which Mahsud’s briefing and his press tour of India’s formidable border fence were well-timed salvos.

“You see for yourself that there are no unusual troop movements on our side,” the general declared in his underground briefing room. “No troops have been moved forward in response to the Indian buildup.”

The general insisted that neither Pakistani political leaders nor army commanders want another war with their more powerful neighbor.

“I hope sense will prevail,” he said. “It’s going to be disastrous for both of us. I don’t think either side is in a position to be able to flatten the other side. It’s more a question of which black eye is bigger, who loses more teeth and whose jaw is more badly broken.”

Mahsud agreed that the heightened tension between the two nations is something of an embarrassment at a time when peace is breaking out in most of the world.

“We are living at a time when, from Hungary to Azerbaijan, fences are coming down, but here they are coming up, complete with searchlights, barbed wire, guns and what not.”

Nonetheless, the general and his staff were using “The Wall” on Thursday to cast India as the aggressor. Col. Khan, assigned to escort the visitors to the border fence, took an almost perverse pride in showing off the extent of India’s handiwork, which originally was designed to cut off the flow of Pakistani arms, heroin and gold to Sikh secessionists in India’s Punjab state.

“You see how the lights blind us from this side,” the colonel complained as, after sunset, searchlights every 75 yards exploded into life, like a series of campfires from horizon to horizon, high above the wheat fields and the double-layered, 12-foot-high fence.