The Other Tinderbox

The U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan is going well, but between next-door Pakistan and neighboring India, combat fever has flared once again. A bloody terrorist attack last week on the symbolic heart of India’s democracy, its Parliament building, has outraged Indians, who assume that the assailants came from Pakistan. The neighbors have already fought three wars, and the stakes between them have never been higher.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited India and Pakistan only two months ago to ease tensions after an attack on the legislature in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed more than 30 people. In last week’s attack in New Delhi all five gunmen were killed by security forces before they could get into the Parliament building itself; eight Indians died.

New Delhi blamed two Pakistan-based groups that the U.S. this month designated “supporters of terrorism.” One is Lashkar-e-Taiba, the other, Jaish-e-Mohammed, which claimed responsibility for the Kashmir attack and then, finding itself condemned rather than cheered, withdrew the claim. Washington again is urging restraint by both nations.

Kashmir is the double-ended sword impaling India and Pakistan. Both occupy parts of the mountainous territory, which is mostly Muslim and has been the cause of two wars between the neighbors. For more than a decade, insurgents have tried to win independence or annexation to Pakistan for all of Kashmir; tens of thousands have died in the fighting. Pakistan says it gives only moral support to the fighters, but that’s nonsense. Pakistani security forces’ assistance to assailants trying to cross into India is well documented.

India again is threatening to strike at terrorist camps inside Pakistan. Its reasoning echoes that of Israel in attacking Palestinian territory. Washington has told Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to arrest the terrorists; Washington needs to tell Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the same.

Musharraf has proclaimed his support for Kashmiris rebelling against India. When he courageously sided with the United States in the anti-terrorism war, in the face of many Pakistanis’ support for the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, he said one key reason was the need to protect Pakistan’s interest in Kashmir. But the terrorist attacks on India threaten Musharraf just as Hamas suicide bombers in Israel threaten Arafat’s grip on power. Musharraf cannot afford to let India declare him impotent to stop the violence and therefore irrelevant as a negotiating partner, as Israel has done with Arafat.

India will have to talk eventually with Kashmiris about their grievances and with Pakistan about the many issues dividing the two nations. The terror attacks delay the day of negotiation and threaten to provoke another all-out war, this time perhaps with the nuclear weapons that both sides now possess.