Kashmir crisis has reignited
India has been redeploying troops, weapons and ammunition on its side of the 778-kilometre Line of Control that straddles its de facto border with Pakistan.
New Delhi is considering covert or overt military strikes against Pakistan.
Or so the highly nationalistic Indian media have speculated after last Sunday’s cross-border attack by the Pakistan-based Jaish-eMohammed extremist group on an Indian army base at Uri, near the Kashmir capital, Srinagar. Thirteen Indian soldiers were killed and 32 others were badly burned.
Many Indians are deeply suspicious of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, blaming it whenever such attacks occur. They believe the ISI is a “deep state” within the state that is directing a creeping coup against the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif because he and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been getting along — Modi was a guest last December at the marriage of Sharif ’s granddaughter.
Since the Uri attack, many Indian commentators have been pushing for India to go on a war footing. Similar pressures exist in Pakistan, where there has been growing outrage over the treatment of their Muslim kin in Kashmir. As has happened in similar circumstances, authorities in Islamabad closed the main highway between the capital and Lahore for two days, starting Thursday, so the Pakistani Air Force could practise landing and taking off warplanes.
The dispersal of Pakistani fighter aircraft to temporary highway bases is not just theatre. Taking out all Pakistan’s airfields would be one of New Delhi’s first priorities in a war.
This potentially deadly ballet, with soldiers and equipment moved around like pieces on a chess board, occurs every time a provocation sends tensions spiralling.
The clash at Uri was the first major attack in disputed Jammu and Kashmir since nearly 900 people were killed in the Kargil War of 1999. But there have been many bloody smaller battles and terrorist attacks before and since.
Even in relatively quiet times visiting the Line of Control (LoC) near the Sachien Glacier, which India seized total control over in 1984, is a bizarre experience.
Other than the hapless soldiers stationed there — who more often die from the cold, from the thin air or from avalanches than from fighting — no Indians or Pakistanis live here.
The prize is far below in the fertile Kashmir Valley, where the overwhelmingly Muslim Kashmiris have lived under Indian rule since Partition divided Britain’s Indian empire along sectarian lines in 1947.
In Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, communal tensions are such that Indian troops have been patrolling constantly there for decades. The governor’s residence is a heavily guarded fortress.
For all that, Indians have come to regard China, not Pakistan, as their greatest rival. For decades, New Delhi and Beijing have a similar dispute over a few mountain peaks and mountain valleys in the eastern Himalayas. The newest aspect of that dangerous rivalry is over whose navy will control the northern half of the Indian Ocean.
As India’s economic power has grown its alliances have shifted. So have those of Pakistan.
Where India once bought most of its military hardware from the Soviet Union, then Russia, it now greatly prefers to buy American. It has recently become the U.S.’s second biggest military customer after Saudi Arabia. As part of a $150-billion modernization program, it is has acquired or is acquiring fleets of C-17 heavy lift aircraft, Apache attack and Chinook transport helicopters and P-8 maritime spy planes. It has also conducted exercises in the Indian and Pacific oceans with the US, Japanese and Australian navies.
The same process is taking place in reverse in Pakistan. It has been weaning itself from its traditional U.S. military suppliers and buying much more from China and Russia. It is also establishing closer military ties with Moscow and Beijing. In fact, Russian troops are on exercise in Pakistan right now.
While India frets about China, Kashmir and Partition remain the national obsession for Pakistanis. Lethal attacks, such as the one on Sunday near the LoC, and a spectacularly brazen assault by Pakistani-based terrorists on the Taj Mahal hotel and 11 other targets in Mumbai in 2008 in which 164 people died, always trigger a wave of inflamed rhetoric and jingoism in both countries.
There is such a military and economic imbalance in South Asia that Indians often regard the threat from Pakistan as a nuisance, albeit one where proxies cause bloody mayhem from time to time. But every Indian and Pakistani knows the other side has nuclear weapons.
Whenever there is a fresh spasm of violence, people in both countries pay lose attention. With so much at stake, and with the US, China and Russia taking sides, too, everyone should pay attention to the latest flashpoint.