Pakistani Official Warns of Nuclear War Over Kashmir

Pakistan’s foreign minister warned Saturday of the danger of nuclear war in South Asia if India and Pakistan fail to resolve their longstanding dispute over Kashmir.

The dire but ambiguous remark by Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali, on a weeklong tour of former Soviet republics in Central Asia, came just days after a stalemate in negotiations over Kashmir in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Ali’s strong statement appears to be largely an attempt to regionalize the Kashmir issue by pulling Uzbekistan and the other Muslim republics of Central Asia into a negotiating process that India insists should be strictly bilateral.

But talk of war is likely to create more disquiet in the region rocked by fighting in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and other hot spots.

Ali told reporters here that “the core problem of South Asia is the Kashmir dispute.” Unless this dispute “is solved on the basis of international law and the U.N. resolutions,” he said, “there cannot be lasting peace in South Asia.”

Pakistan and India have gone to war three times since their independence in 1947. Kashmir, predominantly Muslim but mostly under the control of predominantly Hindu India, was the prime cause of two of those wars.

The threat of another Indo-Pakistani war is heightened by the fact that both countries are believed either to possess nuclear weapons or to have the components to assemble them.

“The concern of the world, the concern of South Asia countries,” Ali said, “is that if a war takes place in South Asia, it might become a nuclear war.

“We all want to see that this does not happen,” he said, “and the best way to do that is to resolve the Kashmir dispute.”