Despite U.S. Deal, Battles in Kashmir Rage On

A deal struck in Washington to end the border war on the Indian subcontinent failed to take hold Monday, as fighting raged in the Himalayas and the Pakistani military vowed to keep its ground.

A day after Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, meeting with President Clinton in Washington, agreed to rein in troops who sparked a bloody and dangerous skirmish with India, few signs emerged that the deal was falling into place.

Indian leaders said they saw no evidence that the Pakistani-backed forces had begun to pull back from Indian territory in the disputed Kashmir region. And Indian soldiers stepped up assaults along the frontier and claimed the capture of another key mountain peak, the second in two days.

Sharif, for his part, sent word from the United States that he would be out of the country until later in the week, and no one in his government called on the fighters to pull back. Leaders of Islamic political parties denounced the prime minister and called for his overthrow. Comrades of the guerrillas fighting inside India vowed to hold their ground--no matter what the politicians in the capital said. Pakistan’s powerful military--which has ruled the country for most of the 52 years since it attained independence from Britain--seemed to balk at Sharif’s orders to retreat.

“There will be no withdrawal,” Pakistani Brig. Rashid Qureshi said Monday. “Our forces are not on the Indian side.”

Fears seemed to mount inside Pakistan that the peace deal could embolden extremists in the military and religious parties and threaten the country’s tenuous democracy. Some Pakistanis said Sharif faces a difficult task in quieting the forces that were encouraged to fight against India.

Despite the developments, Western diplomats said Monday that they were still hopeful Pakistani generals would--and could--begin withdrawing their forces from Indian territory. They predicted that Sharif’s opponents would ultimately accept the agreement.

“There is a firm decision to quickly withdraw the Pakistani troops,” said a Western diplomat in Islamabad, the capital.

Monday’s tumult came on the heels of a joint statement released Sunday by Sharif and Clinton, who spent the Fourth of July trying to ease the military standoff in South Asia. After their nearly three-hour talk, Sharif pledged to restore the long-standing border between his nation and India. Privately, Clinton’s aides said that Sharif had promised to pull back the force of about 600 fighters who crossed the border in May and seized a series of strategic mountain peaks inside Indian territory.

The incursion sparked the worst fighting between India and Pakistan in 31 years. The two countries’ recently acquired status as nuclear-armed states has raised fears that the border fight could end in catastrophe. India has deployed more than 40,000 troops to repel the invaders, hundreds of soldiers have died on both sides, and unprecedented artillery firing has left dozens of civilians dead and maimed.

India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir since 1947, when the two countries split the region while gaining independence from the British. Both countries claim all of it, and they have gone to war twice over it.

India and Pakistan share a 450-mile disputed border. Pakistan supports an insurgency inside India that has killed more than 25,000 people since 1990.

Sharif’s pledge Sunday to pull back his forces represented a diplomatic triumph for Clinton--but posed hurdles for Sharif himself. Pakistani leaders have not publicly acknowledged that their troops are inside India. Since the current fighting began, Pakistani leaders have insisted that the troops fighting in India are indigenous guerrillas battling Indian rule. They say Pakistani soldiers are defending themselves against Indian attacks.

Western diplomats maintain that the Pakistani army planned and directed the incursion into India and that Pakistani soldiers joined pro-Kashmir guerrillas in undertaking it. Many diplomats and observers on the subcontinent speculate that the Pakistani army mounted the operation without consulting the prime minister.

As word trickled out Monday that Sharif had agreed to pull back, people across Pakistan reacted with anger and dismay. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who Western diplomats say played a key role in planning the operation, kept out of sight Monday. Sharif and his top aides flew from Washington to New York and said they would not be returning to Pakistan until later in the week.

Military sources said Pakistani officers were seething at Sharif’s decision. Some predicted that the army--which has become increasingly Islamist in recent years--would refuse to carry out Sharif’s order.

A senior Pakistani military officer seemed to cast doubt on the ability of Sharif and his aides to force the fighters in Kashmir to withdraw from their positions around the Indian town of Kargil.

“I don’t see how they can change the ground realities in Kargil,” he said.

Retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani military intelligence, predicted that the agreement would collapse because the moujahedeen--”holy warriors”--fighting with Pakistani troops in India would not retreat.

“The moujahedeen will never accept it,” he said.

Gul also predicted that the Washington deal will bring about Sharif’s downfall.

“I doubt very much that Sharif can survive,” he said. “He will have to defy Clinton or face the wrath of the nation.”

Organizations representing the guerrillas fighting alongside Pakistani troops inside India said Monday that they would keep fighting. The hard-line religious parties that are seeking to impose strict Islamic rule on Pakistan called for protests against Sharif.

“Pakistan may withdraw, but the holy warriors will not,” said Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, chief of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group fighting inside India.

But for all the anger Monday, many people here predicted that Sharif will implement the pullout and muddle through the present crisis. According to some Western diplomats in the city, the Pakistani army chiefs decided to pull their troops out of India before Sharif went to Washington. Pakistan’s military leaders were persuaded by diplomatic pressure from the West and military force from India, these diplomats said.

“The generals made a very sober assessment of what they could achieve and at what cost,” one diplomat said. “There was a meeting of minds.”

The most common lament in Pakistan on Monday seemed to be that Sharif had put himself in a difficult situation largely of his own making: The prime minister encouraged extremists in the military and the religious parties to join the fight against India, and now he faces the task of persuading them to quit.

Said Maleeha Lodhi, a newspaper editor and former ambassador to the United States: “Sharif unleashed the very forces he is trying to contain.”