India and Pakistan aren’t always bickering, including over Kashmir, the dispute that has defined their relationship over more than six decades. Away from the public eye, top and trusted envoys from the two countries have at various times sat down and wrestled with the problem, going beyond stated positions in the public and even teasing out the contours of a deal. In the end of course, someone’s nerve failed, or something else happened and the deal was off.

Beginning 2004  and up until November 2007 India and Pakistan were embarked on a similar course and very nearly came to an agreement on Kashmir, says investigative journalist Steve Coll in an article for the New Yorker. Special envoys from the two countries met in secret in hotels in London, Bangkok and London to lay out a solution and after three years they were ready with the broad outline of a settlement that would have de-militarised Kashmir.

An abstract of the article  is here and the Washington Post  has a story on it.

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There is a strange dichotomy in Delhi at the moment. If you read the headlines or watch the news on television, India and Pakistan appear headed for confrontation - what form, what shape is obviously hard to tell but the rhetoric is getting more and more menacing each day.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani promised a matching response ‘within minutes” were the Indians to carry out precision strikes against camps of militants inside Pakistan, whom it blames for the Mumbai attacks.

And as if they were doing a dress rehearsal, Pakistan Air Force jets have been flying over Islamabad and Lahore for the past two days, prompting one blogger  to report that some people had called up media outlets asking if the Indian Air Force was on its way.

Indian army chief General Deepak Kapoor meanwhile went up to the freezing heights of Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield, to test operational preparedness.

And yet off the front pages, and on the street and in living rooms, it doesn’t seem like a nation preparing for war. Instead Delhi is in the full swing of the marriage season when the astrological stars are right and thousands upon thousands of young couples trailed by a veritable army of friends, families and neighbours get betrothed.

There are also the Christmas/New Year festivities where the conversation is not about the possibility of war but the economic meltdown that has spoiled everyone’s party, including India’s. To be sure, there is rage each time Mumbai is mentioned, and there are many who say “they will have to pay for this”. But war? No, that isn’t at the top of people’s minds yet.

So what’s really going on? Is the threat of a fourth India-Pakistan war real, not counting 1999 when India and Pakistan fought over the heights above Kargil on the Line of Control? Are the two countries inexorably moving toward conflict without their people realising it?

Or is this the Cold Start  doctrine  that strategists speak of, in which you don’t really mobilise troops and armour for weeks on a vast scale and then go to war like in ancient times, but instead go quickly into action from forward bases both in the air and on the ground for a short and sharp thrust ?  

Your guess is as good as mine, but in another two days it will be a month since the Mumbai attackers struck.  As far as India is concerned, that is time enough for Pakistan to have acted against the men and groups that it says are involved in attacks on India. Is there a clock ticking somewhere?

India and Pakistan will open a trade link across divided Kashmir for the first time in six decades on Tuesday, aiming to ease tensions by creating soft borders in the disputed region. The move looks to be fairly tentative; lorries will be allowed across the military ceasefire line only once a week, carrying a limited list of goods, and will be expected to unload some 10 km to 15 km beyond the Line of Control which separates the Indian and Pakistani-held parts of the region. But it has potentially more than symbolic significance, particularly if it helps to open up the isolated Kashmir Valley — at the heart of the separatist revolt – to the outside world.

The step, which would have been unthinkable before a ceasefire on the Line of Control in late 2003, is also meant to build trust between India and Pakistan. The region’s governor, N.N. Vohra, described it as an important milestone in India-Pakistan relations. But as is so often the case in India-Pakistan relations, there have been some unexpected counter-currents recently, acting as a powerful undertow against attempts to improve the two countries’ approach to Kashmir.

As I discussed in a post in June, the two countries are getting tetchy about the use of water from rivers they share in divided Kashmir. India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived long periods of intense antagonism.

But matters came to a head earlier this month when Pakistan complained that India had violated the treaty while building a dam on the Chenab river in Kashmir for a power project. Although a Pakistani team is now in India for talks on the controversial Baglihar dam, the row has raised questions about the durability of the Indus Waters Treaty at a time when both countries are desperate for water both to grow food and provide hydroelectric power. (The Times of India has just run two stories on it here and here.)

In a separate issue, Pakistan also protested last week against a trip by US Army Chief General George Casey to the Siachen glacier while he was visiting India. It complained the trip might be seen as an endorsement of the Indian position. India and Pakistan have battled since 1984 for control of Siachen, in the mountains beyond Kashmir, though they stopped actual fighting there when the 2003 ceasefire was agreed. 

On top of that, Indian plans to push ahead with state elections in Jammu and Kashmir in November and December, after the biggest protests since the separatist revolt began in 1989, and in the face of a planned boycott by Kashmiri separatists, also complicate the picture. Pakistan has traditionally opposed elections in Jammu and Kashmir, seeing them as an attempt by New Delhi to impose a purely Indian solution that excludes Islamabad.

So one step forward and three steps back? The usual eddying currents that have made the Kashmir issue so intractable for more than half a century? Or will the opening up of trade shift mindsets enough to offer the possibility of further progress?

One of the more recurrent themes in U.S. political punditry these days is the need to nudge India and Pakistan towards peace. The theory is that this would bolster the new civilian government in Islamabad by encouraging trade and economic development, reduce a rivalry that threatens regional stability, including in Afghanistan, and limit the role of the Pakistan Army, whose traditional dominance has been fuelled by a perceived threat from India.

So what are the chances of progress? (assuming the latest bombings just being reported in Delhi do not trigger a new downwards spiral)

President Asif Ali Zardari has got everyone talking by promising that there will soon be “good news” on Kashmir. An expected meeting  between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Zardari on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month would also give the two leaders the chance to repair relations soured by the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July.  

It seems unlikely however, that India and Pakistan can make any real concessions on Kashmir, at a time when the people of the Kashmir Valley at the heart of the dispute have renewed their protests against Indian rule. In Pakistan this would be seen as a betrayal of the people of Kashmir, while in India the government would be accused of caving in to the protests.

One alternative would be to try to resolve the dispute over Siachen, an idea revived this week by Zardari , as a way of building trust and creating an atmosphere to make progress on Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought for control of the mountains overlooking the Siachen glacier since 1984, although there has been a ceasefire since 2003. Apart from the troops stationed on the world’s highest battlefield, there is nothing there but snow, ice and rocks (believe me, I’ve been there), and many commanders on both sides have long accepted the region has no strategic value.  Siachen, in the Karakoram mountains, is quite geographically distinct from the Kashmir Valley — it would take you three days to drive from the Kashmiri capital Srinagar to the Indian base camp in Siachen, and then only if you were lucky — and it is a far less explosive issue to tackle.  What has been lacking is the trust and political will to agree a mutual withdrawal.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi came tantalisingly close to reaching a deal on Siachen in 1989 when they were young prime ministers seeking a fresh start for the region. With both now assassinated, it will be interesting to see whether their widowed spouses now in positions of power — Zardari in Pakistan and Sonia Gandhi in India as head of the ruling Congress party — try to complete what they started. 

Are tensions over Kashmir and Afghanistan returning to haunt relations between India and Pakistan?

At first glance, it looks unlikely. The two countries have more or less managed to hold to a ceasefire agreed at the end of 2003 on both the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir and on Siachen, and they have a slow-moving peace process which at least has India and Pakistan talking rather than fighting each other. India is far too interested in winning itself superpower status to let itself be distracted by some embarrassing fighting on its border. And Pakistan has enough problems dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban on its western  border with Afghanistan, without having to cope with trouble on its eastern border with India as well.

But there have been signs of a new strain in relations this week. The two armies exchanged fire across the LoC  in a violation of the ceasefire. That in itself might not be too troubling, were it not for the fact that long-simmering resentment in Kashmir against Indian rule has burst into the open again. A decision, subsequently reversed, by the state government to transfer land to the Hindu Amarnath Shrine Board sparked some of the biggest protests since the Kashmir separatist revolt erupted in 1989 and has now brought down the state government.

At the same time, the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul has exposed the rivalry between India and Pakistan over Afghanistan. Afghan authorities hinted that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was behind the attack — prompting Indian analysts to say that the ISI was sending India a message to get out of Afghanistan. Before the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Pakistan regarded Afghanistan as its own preserve — a place that would offer it “strategic depth” against India.  Since 2001, it has been forced to watch in frustration as India builds economic and political ties  with the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

So will Kashmir and/or Kabul become the slow burning fuse threatening relations between India and Pakistan? Or is the peace process well enough entrenched to douse the flames?

(Update: Thanks to readers for pointing out the obvious error in the original post which wrongly said that Afghanistan was on Pakistan’s eastern border and India on its western border. I have now corrected above).

The People’s Daily does not run editorials very often about Pakistan and India, so when it does, I pay attention.  It just published an op-ed about the latest talks between India and Pakistan on counter-terrorism. The talks themselves appeared to yield little in actual results. Yet according to the People’s Daily, it was an “important step towards mutual political trust”.

“The efforts for peace once again prove that dialogue is the sole path to resolving differences between countries,” it says. “India and Pakistan’s steps on this road are not big yet; but they are moving, in a positive direction.”

Is this an example of China taking on a U.S.-style role of regional policeman? Would India and Pakistan feel uncomfortable about such a role?

Maybe not. India and China decided years ago to put the bitterness of their 1962 border war behind them in order to concentrate on winning a place at the top table in the global economy. India’s nuclear deal — the centrepiece of its rapprochement with the United States — appears to be running into trouble at home – leaving it all the more in need of friendly neighbours on its own doorstep.

Pakistan has always seen China as a more reliable friend than the United States, as underlined in this Yale Global Online backgrounder. With relations between the United States and Pakistan getting tetchier by the day, you would expect Islamabad to turn to China for help.  Plus China seems to be pumping investment into Pakistan, of which this story in the Daily Times about it offering Chinese skilled labour to build a dam is just one example.

So is the United States losing its place in South Asia? And is China stepping in to fill the gap? It’s worth remembering that China, India and Pakistan all have a stake in Kashmir since all of them control parts of what was once the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.  And the Siachen war is the only conflict in the world to have been fought in a place where three nuclear-armed powers meet.  If these three countries are now trying to pull together, what kind of role does the United States have left in the region?

While living in Delhi after 9/11, and in particular after India and Pakistan nearly went to war over an attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, one of the questions that cropped up frequently was about how much the Pakistan army had been permeated by hardline Islamists. In other words, how much sympathy did the army feel for al Qaeda and Taliban militants that then General Pervez Musharraf had pledged to fight?

Several years later, while researching a book on the Siachen war, I had occasion to travel with the Pakistan army and assess the Islamist question up close.  My impression was that the Pakistan army was not driven by religious fanaticism. Yes, it exhorted its soldiers to embrace “shaheed”,  or martyrdom,  in the name of Allah.  But it was otherwise remarkably similar to the Indian army. Both relied on a blend of nationalism and loyalty to their fellow men in the same unit; both found recruits in the mountains and rural villages who could be inculcated with a spirit of “ours not to reason why”; both counted on officers to lead from the front. Men did not go into battle dreaming of death. An officer who thinks only of killing himself is of little use to a professional army, which needs men who are above all sane, who can remain focused and objective, who know the difference between suicide and getting killed.

My Pakistan army minder on my trip to the Siachen war zone was clearly religious, respected prayer times, and did his best to explain to me the teachings of the Koran. But he probably expended more energy telling me off for smoking –  particularly on the world’s highest battlefield where the air is so thin that it can be difficult to walk — much as my minder during a tour of Siachen on the Indian side had done.

So I thought I had settled the Islamist question — at least in my own mind — until August 2007, when more than 200 Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas were taken captive by Islamist militants without firing a single shot.  During a visit to Delhi shortly afterwards, I discovered that people from the Indian army were as surprised as me — accustomed as they were to seeing their rivals on the Pakistan side at least make a show of fighting. Had the Islamists so permeated the Pakistan army that its soldiers had gone soft? 

Pakistan army expert Brian Cloughley addresses this question in his book ”War, Coups and Terror”, a review of Pakistan since 1971 and due to be published next month.  His conclusions make interesting reading.

While he recognises that the Pakistan army includes “some religious extremists among its officers and soldiers”, he says the promotions system overseen by President Pervez Musharraf made sure that officers were promoted on the basis of professional competence rather than religious devotion.

The rub came in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) next to the Afghanistan border, where religious ideologues had affected the morale and efficiency of the military. ”There is evidence that some soldiers have been so influenced by religiosity as to have doubts about their being regarded as Shaheed in the event of being killed in conflict with fellow Muslims who are held (by extremist clerics) to be engaged in fighting against infidels,” he writes. “This has resulted in incidents of refusal to take part in operations in the tribal areas, which indicate a serious malaise.”

Cloughley quotes the following from a source that he is unwilling to identify, but I think is worth reproducing here:

“Statements [by terrorists captured during an army operation] and [other sources] leads to one inevitable conclusion, that deep in their hearts . . . [some of the] troops have sympathies for AQ/Taliban who, in their perception are fighting a holy war against non-Muslims now occupying  Afghanistan.  This feeling has got further impetus and strength because of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and a partisan approach towards  the Palestinian issue.  Print and electronic media, anti-US sentiments among the general public, bitter criticism by opposition leaders of our government’s policy regarding Afghanistan [and] support to the Coalition (US) forces in combating terrorism . . .  and the anti-Islam propaganda by the west, have further reinforced the perception of the common man that Muslims all over the world are being victimised.  These feelings have obviously . . . penetrated the rank and file of the Army despite our best efforts that whatever we are doing is in the overall best interests of the country.  Having identified this weakness, we now need to apply all our command and leadership skills to educate our troops on the logic and necessity of what we are doing.”

Cloughley tries to take a positive view of this by saying that at least the problem was recognised by those in command and that  action was being taken to address it. But he adds that Pashtuns — the ethnic group who live on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and who make up about a fifth of the regular army – had sometimes shown reluctance to engage militants both out of a disinclination to kill fellow tribesmen and antipathy against fighting fellow Muslims. ”Another factor is the widely-held belief that the counter-insurgency war in FATA … is not being conducted on behalf of Pakistan but is waged at the behest of the United States.”

Cloughley also says that missile attacks blamed on U.S. Predator drones targeting al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas had further angered the army, since they also killed civilians. Yet at the same time, the army had found itself caught in the middle, facing itself a steep rise in suicide attacks directed against military targets, in retaliation for its operations on the border. Though I have seen only one advance chapter of Cloughley’s book, it makes an interesting read, highlighting as it does one aspect of the phenomenally complex challenges faced by Pakistan in battling Islamist militants.