Special Report: Seeking a New World : 4. ‘Unconventional and Indiscriminate’: The Changing Face of War : The planet may be less safe because insurgents are getting newer, more sophisticated arms

On a midsummer’s day, while the rest of India scorches, pine-scented breezes cool the valley. Reflections of the snow-tipped Himalayas shimmer across Lake Dal. Quaint houseboats dot its shoreline, a legacy of British colonial days.

Once the summer home of Mogul emperors and later a tourist haven, the Vale of Kashmir for centuries has been extolled in song and verse as paradise on Earth.

But over the past year, paradise has turned into hell.

Beautiful Kashmir, India’s only state with a Muslim majority, is now gripped by civil war. Since January, its long smoldering separatist movement--once limited to an extremist fringe--has broadened into a full-scale revolution.

Tourists have fled Lake Dal; its resort hotels now quarter Indian troops. Rebels have fired rocket-propelled grenades into the hotels’ upper floors from the filigreed verandas of houseboats.

Srinagar’s graceful wooden mosque is draped with black flags, mourning for the more than 2,000 killed this year. The bazaar, once filled with curios from far destinations on the ancient Silk Road linking Europe to China, is shuttered. Its labyrinthine alleys are guarded by soldiers peering from behind five-foot sandbag berms.

The crisis in Kashmir is more than just another remote insurrection in a permanently unstable corner of the Third World. The brutal fighting on the streets of Srinagar is testimony to the increasing ability of insurgents all around the globe to get their hands on ever more powerful weapons. And behind the immediate conflict is an even more sobering reality: The two countries on each side of the vale, India and Pakistan, could come to war over the issue--and both might be tempted to use nuclear weapons.

Thus the crisis in Kashmir offers a bitter taste of what warfare may be like in the decades ahead. For the end of the Cold War and the sweeping changes in global technology, economics and politics are reshaping the realities of armed conflict just as they are altering so much else.

The threat of an apocalyptic confrontation between East and West has receded, but the new era may be no less violent than the preceding decades. Indeed, conflicts may become more varied in their flash points, tactics and goals--and more destabilizing in their impact on the world as a whole.

Among the trends:

* Unlike the Cold War period, when weapons of mass destruction were largely confined to a handful of nations and subject to the discipline of the East and West blocs, the post-Cold War era is already marked by an anarchic proliferation of such armaments: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, along with the ballistic missiles that are “democratizing” the potential for catastrophic conflict.

Larger powers will find such conflicts more difficult to contain or quarantine.

* The developing nations are becoming less dependent on outside arms suppliers, which reduces the major powers’ leverage on their actions. Although most Third World countries still need at least some outside help obtaining the most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, some are making rapid strides in producing their own armaments--from rifles and chemical weapons to nuclear warheads. And especially for conventional weapons, many new producers seek to defray their own costs by selling to others.

* Traditionally fought between nations over ideology, territory and trade, warfare is increasingly centered within societies. “Lebanonization”--the process by which nations are torn apart in conflicts over such issues as religion, national identity and competition for resources--is already evident in countries as disparate as the Soviet Union and South Africa.

* Terrorism and guerrilla wars are likely to rise, and wars will be played out more frequently in crowded cities than in the sparsely populated countryside.

“Conflict toward the end of the 20th Century has become increasingly unconventional, increasingly indiscriminate. It’s not the established militaries of established countries clashing on demarcated battlefields, but a succession of dirty power struggles, bloody clashes and endemic conflict throughout the Third World,” said Bruce Hoffman, a military analyst at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica.

And, warns Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser: “There is a real possibility that conflicts will be more local (but) perhaps more dangerous, because there has been a spread of military technology, especially the possibility of horrible things like chemical warfare and biological warfare, not to mention nuclear.”

The most immediate flash point, of course, is the Middle East.

The confrontation with Iraq over Kuwait reflects the dangers posed by the proliferation of missiles and chemical weapons, as well as possible nuclear devices, and the potential for regional conflicts to threaten the vital interests of distant nations. Unlike most conflicts expected in the years ahead, it may end in a traditional clash between massive military machines over territory and natural resources. But the gulf crisis is also overlaid with the kind of ethnic, cultural and religious concerns that will be a hallmark of the future.

The Arab-Israeli conflict embodies almost all the characteristics that are expected to distinguish warfare in coming decades. While the possibility remains for full-scale war, for almost 20 years both Israel and its Arab foes have opted instead for more limited forms of conflict.

In Kashmir, meanwhile, tension over the disputed border, which dates back to the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan, has erupted into full-scale war three times--in 1947, 1965 and 1971. Between wars, border skirmishes have been almost commonplace.

But the potential today is qualitatively different. Kashmiri secessionists have increased the pace and scale of their insurgency this year to a steady stream of hit-and-run attacks against Indian troops, a pattern deliberately modeled on the Afghan Mujahadeen’s strikes on Soviet troops and the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.

“I have attacked Indian soldiers many times,” boasted a 22-year-old medical student turned militant who goes by the nom de guerre Nasruddin ul-Islam. “My greatest achievement was when we saw Indian policemen bathing in the river and we surprised them.

“We killed about 100,” he said with cold satisfaction during a clandestine interview in a rebel safehouse in Srinagar. His identity was concealed by a kerchief tied bandit-style across his face and sunglasses.

Ul-Islam is a member of Hezb-e-Mujahedeen, one of at least a dozen different groups ranging from secular nationalists to Islamic zealots that have proliferated throughout the valley as India’s ham-handed crackdowns have increasingly alienated the Kashmiri middle class and driven it to support the young guerrillas.

“Parents are sending their children for training (with the guerrillas) with enthusiasm and desire,” said Dr. H. U. Kant, a local epidemiologist. “In the villages, the matchmakers are complaining because all the good young men have run off and joined the movement.”

The rebels’ growing sophistication is reflected in both arms and training. Until two or three years ago, they had only odd lots of pistols and single-shot rifles.

Now, ul - Islam said, “We have the most modern equipment--rocket launchers, hand grenades, Kalashnikovs.” Among the rebels’ arms are American weapons intended for the Afghan resistance. The insurgents are also now being trained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

As insurgents obtain more weapons and better training, the stubborn little war in Kashmir becomes ever more difficult to stop--a trend that will characterize many future wars.

But the Kashmir rebellion also reflects another change in warfare: the new potential within the Third World for the kind of cataclysmic conflicts once limited to the East-West confrontation.

Since the last war between India and Pakistan almost a generation ago, both countries have acquired three of the world’s deadliest weapons: ballistic missiles and, despite official denials, poison and nerve gases and the technology for making nuclear bombs.

And late last spring, for the first time, these two nations openly debated the circumstances under which they might use atomic weapons against each other.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY PERIL

The arming of developing nations with high-tech weapons--either through purchase or independent development--is the single most ominous trend in warfare for the 1990s and beyond.

“What kind of century will it be if a lot of countries now have the potential for having their own nuclear weapons?” asked George Mirski, a leading analyst at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. “What will be the consequences, for instance, if a lot of situations arise around the Third World in which countries possessing terrible weapons will be in confrontation?

“Will the United States and the Soviet Union have leverage enough to influence them? It is very doubtful. The most dangerous situation in the world now is the proliferation of weapons.”

In the developing world, 10 countries have or are working on nuclear capability, according to Leonard S. Spector, a proliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

While a spate of new arms accords have reduced the military confrontation between the superpowers, few Third World nations are likely soon to surrender the sophisticated weapons they see as equalizers in the new line of confrontation--the widening gap between North and South.

Last month, in a rare hopeful sign, the presidents of Brazil and Argentina jointly renounced manufacture of nuclear arms.

But how dependable are the pledges? Both countries have peaceful nuclear programs that can always become the basis for weapons development. And both nations, beset by chronic economic problems that undermine fledgling democratic rule, could see the no-nuclear arms pledges abrogated by new governments--by the kind of bellicose military juntas, say, that have ruled both countries in the past.

While the United States has focused most of its efforts on curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, it is the proliferation of ballistic missiles that most alarms many experts.

“By the year 2000, at least 15 developing countries will be producing their own ballistic missiles,” CIA Director William H. Webster predicted earlier this year. Up to 25 Third World nations--from Argentina to Yemen--are currently working on ballistic missile programs, according to a 1990 survey by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“The 1980s witnessed the transformation of ballistic missile proliferation from a relatively minor international question to an issue at the top of the international agenda,” the report concluded.

In effect, the Third World is forming its own consortiums to develop missiles.

North Korea, reportedly with Egyptian assistance, has replicated a Soviet-designed ballistic missile and expanded its range, for example, and Pyongyang is a major arms exporter throughout the Third World.

Similarly, Argentine and Egyptian experts assisted Iraq in developing the Condor missile system. Brazilian specialists worked with both Iraq and Iran on ballistic missile projects.

During the final stages of its eight-year war with Iran, Baghdad unleashed its new weapons in the so-called War of the Cities. Missiles rained down on civilian areas far from the front lines, including Tehran, leading millions to flee the Iranian capital. It was an ominous demonstration of what the proliferation of missiles could mean.

“These developments portend greater destruction and loss of civilian lives in future regional conflicts as adversaries become more likely to fire missiles, possibly armed with chemical or even nuclear warheads, into the cities of their opponents,” a Congressional Research Service study warned.

For developing nations, ballistic missiles provide an ideal weapon of surprise attack because most nations have no defense against them. Indeed, they can serve as an effective alternative to an air force for countries without the financial or human resources to purchase, man and maintain sophisticated warplanes.

“Soon, a few of these countries may have missiles capable of striking the United States,” a 1989 CRS report said.

“In the past, regional powers have not been able to threaten the major powers. But at the end of the 1980s, you began to see new possibilities emerging,” said Spector.

What makes the spread of ballistic missiles so ominous--in a new war over Kashmir or in any other part of the world--is the ease with which conventional warheads can be replaced with chemical, biological or nuclear devices.

The so-called “doomsday” scenario may already have been realized in Iraq, which Arab and U.S. specialists claim last year test-fired a ballistic missile loaded with chemical agents. Syria may also have chemical warheads, CRS reported.

Chemical weapons--from primitive mustard gas used in World War I that blisters the skin and burns the lungs to complex nerve agents like sarin and Tabun that destroy the nervous system--are simpler and cheaper to develop than nuclear weapons or missiles. And some can be delivered by conventional artillery.

Their production is also the most difficult to track or limit. At least 22 countries, most in the Third World, have or are trying to develop chemical weapons, according to the CIA. Most are the same nations working on ballistic missiles.

Banned by the 1925 Geneva Protocols, poison gases until recently had been reported used only in isolated cases: Egypt in Yemen in the 1960s, and Italy in Ethiopia and Japan against China in the 1930s.

But a threshold was crossed in the 1980s when Iraq made repeated and widespread use of mustard gas and, for the first time anywhere, nerve agents against both Iran and its own Kurdish population. In a 1988 attack that lasted only a few hours, up to 5,000 Kurdish women, children and old men died in the village of Halabjah as they ate or slept in their homes, as they walked on the streets and as they worked.

The threat is now so real in the Middle East that within days of Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, businesses in Saudi Arabia were faxing instructions to colleagues across the country on steps to take in the event of a chemical attack.

Controlling proliferation is more difficult for chemical weapons than for other arms because many of the chemicals and much of the technology are also basic to everything from medicine to fertilizer.

The 40-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which has been struggling over a new chemical weapons treaty since 1980 to prohibit manufacture, stockpiling and use, faces Third World resistance.

“We don’t have chemical weapons and we don’t want them,” said Roberto Garcia Moritan, Argentina’s ambassador to the Geneva talks. But, he added: “The proposed treaty’s discrimination and restrictions are prohibitive. What we see is that it’s going to restrict the effect of all chemical industries in Latin America.

“A good number of Third World countries will not adhere” because they want chemical industries for development, he said.

For weapons of mass destruction--ballistic missiles and chemical and nuclear arms--most Third World nations are still dependent on major powers for some parts, technology or expertise. But over the past decade, developing nations have vastly increased their capacity to produce their own tanks, artillery, aircraft and other conventional armaments. A significant number are also moving toward independence on missile production.

And, with the exception thus far of chemical weapons, more Third World arms makers are becoming arms sellers.

Explained Gehad Auda, a military analyst at Cairo’s Al Ahram Strategic Studies Center: “During the 1950s, you used to produce weapons as an indicator of pure national strength. In the 1980s and 1990s particularly, we produce these things to enhance our trade capacity.”

The proliferation of such weapons may be intensified by the end of the Cold War if countries feel more vulnerable as they lose a superpower ally or shield and therefore feel compelled to establish a regional position of strength.

“The looming disappearance of the bipolar, superpower-dominated security system will foster an increasingly unruly international regime in which Third World players may be prone to try to throw around their weight,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a senior research fellow at the International Peace Academy.

THE IMPLOSION OF VIOLENCE

Tiny brick homes gutted. Dirt roads strewn with broken glass, rocks and, often, still-drying blood stains. Youth gangs roaming impoverished communities or waiting in the surrounding hills to stalk political prey.

In Edendale, South Africa, the debris and death from the last battle have yet to be cleared away before the next one erupts in the black townships abutting the Zulu tribal homeland.

“You can usually tell when there’s going to be trouble,” said a local guide. “They start forming in the hills just before dawn. Then they come down in formation, a long line marching side by side, carrying sjamboks (whips with steel tips) and pangas (machetes). There’s little most people here can do but run.”

The black political violence that has ripped through South Africa this year will probably kill 4,000 people--more than 10 a day--according to the South African Institute of Race Relations. The area around Edendale has been hit so hard that survivors call it Death Valley.

On the surface, the flash point is a power struggle, originally among Zulus, between followers of two different groups: Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement.

But the stakes are much broader and reflect one of the new realities of warfare: While the Persian Gulf crisis has monopolized the world’s immediate attention, future wars will arise less often because of disputes over territory or ideology than because of rising domestic tensions. The enemy is no longer external; it is internal.

The end of the Cold War has been one factor in the change:

“Until today, the conflict of interest of each country was suppressed by the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is likely that these small conflicts will surface in the future,” reflected Gen. Hiroomi Kurisu, former chairman of Japan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Now that the ideological Cold War is over and now that national liberation movement countries have attained their goals, now each society is getting back to the delayed items of the agenda: how to divide power or to distribute power, to distribute wealth, to distribute prestige,” added Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist.

Changes in the dynamics of global politics have been another factor:

As revolutions or internal pressures have forced a host of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America to address demands for empowerment, internal battles resembling the breakdown in Beirut have begun to boil over. Trouble comes in countries where established governments are not responding and in nations that lack a consensus on the shape of a new order, or how power should be divided within it.

The absence of consensus on the new order is the problem in South Africa. Mandela’s ANC offers a new black identity that would break ancient ethnic ties and unite the nine distinct tribes as equals in a non-apartheid system. Buthelezi’s campaign is ultimately based on preserving the powerful Zulu tradition as a separate identity in the new order.

“We’re going to see a lot of conflicts in the Third World because the societies there are in a state of flux. You see all these issues of creating nations where a single nation doesn’t exist,” said Soviet political analyst Mirski.

Elsewhere in Africa, new waves of internal strife result from failure to address demands for change.

In Zambia, bloody rioting and street protests, triggered by stiff food price hikes, left 23 dead and triggered a short-lived coup in June. It was the most serious threat to the 26-year rule of President Kenneth D. Kaunda; he was forced to accede to a national referendum on converting his single-party rule to a multiparty state--although it has yet to be held.

Such crises are not just more of the coups and countercoups that have been a hallmark of African politics since the wave of independence began three decades ago.

“Those coups were mainly revolving-door changes of elites, which did not really change the basic structure of the political system. It was musical chairs at the top,” said Pauline Baker, an African specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“What’s occurring now in Africa is that there are demands from people from the bottom to open up the political system entirely. It comes from a number of sources, including the economic distress the entire continent has suffered since independence, and it’s aimed at the state.”

Rather than being an exception, Lebanon’s 15 years of civil strife was instead “a harbinger,” said the International Peace Academy’s Norton, who served in Lebanon as a U.N. observer.

“What has happened in the late 20th Century--as education has improved, as media and communications have reached down into even the most isolated villages--is that people have become much more aware of themselves as members of political societies and have begun to make increasing demands,” he explained.

“For decades, even centuries, weak, fragile, inefficient, corrupt, inept governments could stumble along as long as they only had to satisfy a few elites and a small percentage of the population. But now with much broader demands for government action or services, most of these governments are incapable of accommodating the citizens. The necessary result is turmoil, chaos and, all too often, conflict.”

Such conflicts are not limited to developing nations. In November, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev publicly warned of the dangers of the Lebanonization of his own country under the pressure of ethnic and national divisions.

Reflecting the depth of the internal instability, the 173,000 exotic but little-known Gagauz who live in the Soviet Republic of Moldavia on the border with Romania are revolting against the ethnic Romanians and the Russians. And resource-rich districts of Siberia, part of the Russian republic, are demanding control over the wealth within their borders--independent even of fellow Russians.

“Freedom brings a lot of problems. It’s taken us 200 years to get to the point where we are today,” said Adm. William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “All these emerging countries, they don’t want to take 200 years. They want it in three years. (But) these enmities don’t disappear in three years. That’s just a fact of life. What’s the outcome? Trauma . . . probably killing.

“Transitional periods are horrible,” he said.

The one encouraging note is that Lebanon is making yet another stab at ending a generation of war that has left more than 120,000 dead. Although the cease-fire remained fragile, the last of the nine major militias pulled out of Beirut in November.

“If Lebanon’s problems can be solved, then there’s hope for the resolution of virtually any contemporary conflict,” said a leading former envoy to Beirut. “The problem is the cost along the way.”

A TOOL CALLED TERRORISM

Since terrorism emerged in contemporary form in 1968--when radical Palestinians hijacked an El Al Israel Airlines plane and held it for 40 days, until Israel released 16 Arab prisoners--it has become one of the most potent instruments of modern warfare.

“Terrorism is here to stay,” said Anat Kurz, a terrorism specialist at the University of Tel Aviv’s Jaffee Center. “It proved itself as a feasible weapon for diverse political and religious, ethnic (and) social streams.”

Indeed, the 1980s were the most violent period of terrorism in history--a total of almost 4,000 incidents worldwide, or a 33% increase from the 1970s, according to Karen Gardela, director of the terrorism data base at the RAND Corp.

The number of deaths doubled in the 1980s. And incidents killing 10 or more people increased by 135%.

Annual figures are as erratic and unpredictable as the groups involved, but analysts expect an increase over the next decade.

The end of superpower tension may contribute to the increase. In the absence of outside support and arms, local groups may revert to isolated attacks as substitutes for full-fledged campaigns they can no longer wage, Kurz said.

” . . . The conflicts are there and people do not need very sophisticated weapons to resort to terrorism,” she said.

Even the terrorists themselves are changing, in turn altering the targets.

In 1968, the 13 identifiable terrorist groups were predominantly ideological, like West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. In 1990, of the 74 known groups, 58 are ethnic separatists or nationalist, and 12 have a strong religious identification, according to Bruce Hoffman, a military analyst at RAND. Only 15 are ideologically motivated.

In South Africa, white right-wing groups with blood-curdling names such as the Order of Death, the White Liberation Army and the White Wolves have launched a series of attacks this year to protest government pledges to end apartheid and introduce majority rule.

In the Soviet Union, Armenian vigilante militias have already raided military arsenals. Ethnic groups--Uzbek pitted against Kirghiz and Christian Armenians against Muslim Azerbaijanis--have engaged in clashes that could disintegrate rapidly into terrorism, Soviet analysts fear.

While racial and ethnic conflicts like these will be fertile breeding grounds for terrorism, economic crises will also provide flash points for such violence. That in turn will make economic targets more important.

In the Soviet Union, about 100 Aeroflot planes were hijacked to the West by disgruntled job-seekers before Moscow lifted travel restrictions.

Colombia’s National Liberation Army has sabotaged the country’s largest oil pipeline 21 times this year in what is now known as “petro-terrorism.”

But terrorism specialists worldwide identify two trends of still greater concern in the 1990s: hostage seizures and the “terrorism spectaculars,” which premiered in the late 1980s with the midair bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland and UTA Flight 722 over the West African nation of Niger.

Such terrorism has gone high-tech.

“Although a new generation of thermal neutron analysis devices (the multimillion-dollar explosives detection machines in airports) is coming on line and will make it more difficult to hijack or bomb an aircraft, terrorists are not going to give up trying. The next danger is from the shoulder-fired missile,” said RAND’s Hoffman.

“All they have to do is sit on the edge of the airport Tarmac and fire at the tailpipe. And there’s almost no protection against them.”

The nightmarish possibility of terrorists taking up chemical or biological warfare has received widespread publicity, but Hoffman and others contend that other high-tech weaponry is more of a threat.

And the most cost-efficient terrorism tactic of all remains hostage abductions, which also increased dramatically in the 1980s and then soared to an unprecedented high in 1990 with a single incident: Iraq’s “detention” of more than 2,000 foreigners.

The magnitude of hostage seizures and their impact has grown with each decade, and the 1990s have started off on an ominous note, not only in the Middle East. The Peace Corps pulled its volunteers from the Philippines and Liberia this year because of the kidnaping threat.

And the dangers are no longer limited to terrorist groups or insurgents. In Colombia, the Medellin drug cartel kidnaped eight local and foreign journalists, including the daughter of a former Colombian president, this year in a campaign to get amnesty for the so-called “Extraditables.”

The prospect that the decades ahead may see even more conflict, bloodshed and terrorism than those just past represents a somber irony as the Cold War ends.

“One can see the paradox of the world becoming both a less and more dangerous place,” said Iqbal Akhund, who served as national security adviser to then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

“The greatest powers today have learned that no profit is to be gained from war and that war is no longer a usable instrument of policy.” Yet “the world may be faced by an increase in wars,” he added.

Border Disputes: The dispute over Kashmir dates back to the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan. At that time, the Hindu ruler of Kashmir acceded to India, despite the fact that 75% of the region’s population was Muslim. Source: An Atlas of Territorial and Border Disputes, Map History of the Modern World. Arms Trade: Top Sellers, Buyers The Leading Exporters of Major Weapons, 1985-89* Soviet Union: $66,209 United States: $52,862 France: $15,802 Britain: $7,711 China: $6,862 West Germany: $5,019 Czechoslovakia: $2,658 Italy: $2,077 Sweden: $1,877 Nehterlands: $1,756 Brazil: $1,385 Israel: $1,183 The Leading Importers of Major Weapons, 1985-89* India: $17,345 Iraq: $11,989 Japan: $10,554 Saudi Arabia: $8,764 Syria: $5,876 Egypt: $5,795 Czechoslovakia: $5,280 North Korea: $5,275 Spain: $5,152 Turkey: $4,751 Poland: $4,649 Afghanistan: $4,610 * In millions of 1985 U.S. dollars. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute