Defuse the Kashmir Powder Keg While We Can

Escalation of military tensions this week in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan enclave nestled between India and Pakistan, is powerful evidence of how a lack of preemptive multilateral foreign policy solutions for such zones can lead to much graver consequences.

Pakistan’s shooting down of two Indian MIG fighters Thursday along the “line of control” demarcating Kashmir has increased the risk of accidentally triggering a more serious confrontation between the now nuclear-reliant Pakistani army and India’s hegemonically ambitious political and military war machinery.

Furthermore, disturbingly familiar patterns of diversion often practiced by South Asian leaders in times of domestic turmoil also appear to be behind this week’s events. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been besieged at home for his crackdown on free press institutions. Sharif’s actions have jeopardized millions in funding from donor agencies, which argue against the lack of transparency in his governance.

The potential halt in funding from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank has annoyed an army already restive in its transformation from the guardian of national security to the more mundane societal roles of electricity cop and tax collector. In Pakistan, anything that endangers military budgets is equivalent to endangering an elected civilian government.

To add to Sharif’s domestic woes, U.S. congressional legislation authorizing a five-year reprieve on economic sanctions against Pakistan for its nuclear tests last year and on military sanctions that would have permitted limited military spare parts sales, was withdrawn by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) this week. The reason: concerns over the growing limits on press freedoms in Pakistan.

Sharif may have reasoned that an escalation of low-level border skirmishes in Kashmir would divert world attention away from his despotic ploys at home and focus it instead on the need for third-party intervention to lower the risk of nuclear confrontation. Pakistan has long advocated external intervention to settle the Kashmir dispute.

Never one to shrug off Pakistani provocations in Kashmir, India’s interim prime minister and repeat candidate in the fall’s general election, Atal Behari Vajpayee, responded with air raids to bolster his party’s tarnished image as the defender of Indian sovereignty and security.

Having seen his mandate to govern evaporate in the exhaust fumes of his bus trip to Lahore earlier this year, Vajpayee may have surmised that it was possible to win back it back by taking a harder line in Kashmir. Such actions would also retake the hawkish impetus shown in recent months by his likely rival in the elections, Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party’s candidate for prime minister.

With such domestic political muck and with discredited Western policies buttressing both South Asian leaders’ political disdain for restraint and reason, the formula for lowering tensions in Kashmir and avoiding a nuclear confrontation requires the following:

* Pakistan, through its particularly meddlesome intelligence agencies, must reduce insurgency violence in Kashmir and redouble its efforts to build an economy that can support ordinary Pakistanis.

* India must withdraw many of its 600,000 troops stationed in Kashmir, a force whose magnitude alone increases the probability of violence. New Delhi must finally recognize that its inciting of Pakistan will only lead to a first strike with horrendous nuclear consequences.

*Washington must exert its considerable influence with donor agencies to modulate the flow of money into Pakistan’s bankrupt economy in a manner that reduces Islamabad’s need to resort to guerrilla warfare and increases the probability of rebuilding the shattered lives of Kashmiris and Pakistanis.

* Moscow, fresh from its intervention in Kosovo and keen to play global diplomat, must stop or at least slow the flow of $3 billion a year in Russian technology and arms to India. This would stall the widening gap in conventional armaments that fuels Pakistan’s military insecurity and now its reliance on nuclear weapons as the primary tools for conflict.

It is incomprehensible that India, the world’s most populous democracy, Pakistan, the world’s largest Islamic democracy, America, the world’s most powerful democracy and Russia, one of the world’s newest democracies, cannot together construct a policy that allows Kashmiris the right to determine their own fate in peace.

To do so would free them from a half-century of human rights violations and religious strife, relieve the region of unconscionable military preparedness burdens and, in the process, diffuse the potential for a catastrophic nuclear holocaust.