Fighting Season in Kashmir

Here in the Himalayas, the nuclear crisis is giving way to springtime, and the blooming flowers and melting snows signal the annual start of the Indo-Pakistani dirty war.

“The season for fighting has just begun,” Pakistani Brig. Haider Khan said as he watched an Indian bunker a rifle shot away.

As India and Pakistan take their first pause after a monthlong atomic standoff, the low-grade fighting that has marked their relationship for 50 years is picking up again.

This time, the reasons for keeping it under control loom larger than ever.

Now that both India and Pakistan have tested atomic weapons, their border duels and shadow fights present a greater danger: that they could escalate to a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

On both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border, the battle-tested officers say they can keep the conflict from exploding into a wider war. The two sides, the military officers say, have developed a virtual language between them that allows extraordinary levels of violence and killing to continue with little chance that either India or Pakistan will plunge into an all-out attack.

“There are rules in this conflict,” said Maj. Gen. A. S. Sihota, an Indian commander stationed here in the disputed region of Kashmir. “Otherwise we would not have been able to keep the peace for so long.”

The sanguine assurances of the Indian and Pakistani commanders are not convincing to everyone. Western diplomats and experts, particularly, worry that the border fights--and especially Pakistan’s continuing support for an insurgency in the Indian-held portion of Kashmir--have suddenly become the most likely spurs for the world’s first nuclear exchange.

“The most worrisome scenario is if a conventional war starts and Pakistan starts to lose,” said Richard Haass, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Then the question becomes, ‘What will they do?’ ”

Haass’ worry is that the Pakistanis, faced with military disaster, could reach for nuclear weapons.

Gohar Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s foreign minister, left little doubt in an interview last week what his country would do.

“One hopes it never goes nuclear,” Khan said in his office. “But Pakistan will not lose a war. And we will not give ground.”

Longtime Adversaries

The bitter relations between India and Pakistan, long confined to academic seminars in the West, captured the world’s attention when India and then Pakistan tested nuclear devices last month.

The two countries have fought three wars since 1948 and have gone to the edge twice. At the center of their quarrel is Kashmir, occupied by India and Pakistan and claimed in its entirety by both.

Here and abroad, the fear is not so much that either Pakistan or India would launch a surprise nuclear attack on the other but that a smaller conflict--a border skirmish, an artillery duel, even a military exercise--could race out of control and prompt one side to launch atomic weapons.

Within days of their nuclear tests, the shadow war between India and Pakistan began again. On Tuesday, Indian soldiers gunned down four men believed to have crossed the border into Kashmir from Pakistan, whose government the Indians accuse of harboring separatist guerrillas. Last Sunday, a bomb on a Pakistani train killed more than 20 people--an act that the Pakistani government blamed on Indian spies.

“Preposterous,” a spokesman for the Indian government said.

Along the 450-mile Line of Control that cuts through Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, military leaders say they are careful not to let their skirmishes get out of hand.

Of the dozens of artillery duels fought each year, few get much bloodier than tit-for-tat exchanges that kill or wound a handful of soldiers or civilians.

Both sides insist that they never fire first. In some places along the border, the two camps are separated by only a few dozen yards, and firefights have been known to start after a soldier on one side insults the mother of another.

“If you pop your head out, they will shoot it off,” said Khan, the Pakistani brigadier.

While generals on each side say their ground commanders have authority to fire small arms, the heavier responses--by artillery or mortars--are strictly controlled.

Pointing into the hills in front of his bunker, Khan said he knows where most of the Indian artillery batteries are dug in. As long as the Indian attacks are fairly predictable, he said, then he too is careful to exercise restraint.

“We do not escalate,” Khan said.

Lt. Gen. Krishan Pal, who commands about 100,000 troops in Indian-held Kashmir, said he tells his lower-echelon officers to ignore most of the Pakistani firing. His troops fire, he said, only when they suffer serious damage or casualties, or when civilians are hit.

“It’s unnecessary to respond to every strike--it’s futile,” Pal said at his headquarters in Srinagar. “Somebody has to break the chain somewhere.”

Pal said he must first give the order before any Indian officer can unleash artillery or mortar fire across the Line of Control.

Commanders’ Hotline

Generals in both armies say they are careful not to provoke their adversaries. Except during war, neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis have deployed missiles or combat aircraft in Kashmir. Neither side sends troops across the border. Even during the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971, neither bombed the Indus River dams, which help irrigate much of the farmland in each country.

“It works like hostage theory,” said B. G. Verghese, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “If I bomb your dams, then you bomb mine, and we both starve.”

Every week, Pakistani and Indian commanders confer over a hotline set up between their headquarters in Rawalpindi and New Delhi. The two nations’ prime ministers have their own hotline as well, which they have used half a dozen times in the last year when shelling along the border grew particularly intense. Even the commanders along the Line of Control talk occasionally on their own special telephone.

“ ‘For God’s sake, stop firing,’ ” was how Maj. Gen. Sihota described the gist of one hotline conversation.

India and Pakistan will be more careful now that they have tested nuclear weapons, some observers say.

“These ding-dong battles will continue,” said Giri Deshingkar, a New Delhi defense analyst.

For all the confidence of the commanders, events have very nearly run off the edge several times in recent years. The Kashmir dispute, combined with the poor communications and intelligence-gathering of the two countries, makes war more likely.

Many experts say the closest India and Pakistan have come to all-out war in recent years was in 1987, when the Indian army staged a massive military exercise--250,000 troops with live ammunition--near the border with Pakistan.

Pakistani leaders, caught off guard, rushed 50,000 troops to confront the Indians. The two sides backed down after Western leaders intervened.

What military analysts find so troubling about the crisis is that leaders on both sides stopped using their hotlines as events escalated.

“The two generals just stopped talking to each other,” said P. R. Chari, an Indian author who has co-written a book about the crisis. “They thought the hotlines were being used to spread misinformation.”

Moreover, analysts say, the command and control networks of each country did not work very well. At the height of the crisis, according to several analysts, the Indian army had no idea where the Pakistani troops were.

“The Indians didn’t detect the movement of 50,000 Pakistani troops until two weeks after it happened,” said George Perkovich, author of a book about India’s nuclear program.

Now that both India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons, the consequences of such a miscalculation could be catastrophic: The flight times of the Indian and Pakistani missiles believed capable of carrying nuclear warheads are less than seven minutes.

The more immediate threat to peace comes from inside Kashmir, where Muslim insurgents are fighting to bring Indian-held territory under Pakistani rule.

Indian leaders accuse Pakistan of harboring the insurgents in camps across the border--a charge that Pakistan denies.

Indian leaders have also hinted that they might send the army into Pakistan to hit the guerrillas.

“If somebody hit you and hit you and hit you, would you sit back?” Indian Maj. Gen. Sihota asked.

Conflict’s Toll Grows

The fighting in Indian-held Kashmir has quieted somewhat in recent years. But the cause remains popular in Pakistan, where politicians often promise that Indian Kashmir will become part of Pakistan.

“A government that withdrew support for the struggle would be tossed out immediately,” said Amir Qazi Hussain Ahmad, chairman of Jamaat-i-Islami, a political party that supports the separatists.

As the commanders debate the finer points of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the enormous human toll continues to mount. So far, 20,000 people have died in the fighting, and thousands of refugees have poured into Pakistan.

Naseema, a 30-year-old Muslim woman, has lived in a refugee camp near Muzaffarabad since she was in her early 20s. She fled her home in Indian-held Kashmir, she says, after being raped by Indian soldiers.

“I’ve never known peace in my life,” she said. “I would like to go home.”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.