Radha Kumar is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Ethnic Conflict and Peace Processes at the Councilon Foreign Relations, New York.

Untying the Kashmir KnotRadha Kumar

The Kashmir dispute, long on the sidelinesinternationally, has moved front and centersince September 11. India has made use ofchanged opinions since the terror attacks onthe United States to pressure Pakistan,which for decades has promoted a jihadistguerrilla movement within Jammu andKashmir, the only Indian state with a Mus-lim majority. When Islamic extremistsmounted a murderous attack on the Indianparliament last December, New Delhi re-sponded with a massive troop buildup alongits border with Pakistan. The confrontationof the two nuclear-armed neighbors wastemporarily contained by U.S. and Europeandiplomacy but could flare up again at anymoment. Are there more durable means ofcontaining this 50-year dispute? Is thereeven a possible solution to the problem?This essay will attempt answers, with theimportant caveat that it is difficult to con-vey the complex and angry passions that theword “Kashmir” evokes.

For confirmation, one only has to visit a website for a Pakistani Islamic university,Markaz ad Dawa’ah Wal Irshad (Center for and Invitation to the Spread of Islam).The site featured a poll that asked whetherAmerica’s new war was against Islam or terrorists. The poll was programmed so as to elicit an “against Islam” response. Else-where, the site quoted a prominent Islamiccleric’s claim that the war in Afghanistanwas a clash of civilizations: “This battle willtake [the] shape of the religious war of Hindin which the Muslims stood victorious,” thecleric said, referring to the Mughal conquestof India.1

Markaz ad Dawa’ah is the parent organi-zation of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of thePure), a militia that the U.S. State Depart-ment added to its list of banned terrorist organizations this past January. Founded in1994, the Lashkar is based in Pakistan butactive in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir.Its religious center is the 200-acre Markazcomplex in Pakistan’s Punjab province, butits training camps are in Pakistani-heldAzad Kashmir.2 Its mujahideen (holy war-riors) are mostly Punjabi Pakistanis, and un-til recently it also drew heavily on the radi-cal fringe of Britain’s Muslim diaspora,mostly of Pakistani origin, who provided itwith funds and foot soldiers. After an attackon New Delhi’s historic Red Fort in De-cember 2000, which the Lashkar boasts ofon its website, Britain banned the group in February 2001. Since then, the supply of British Muslim foot soldiers has trailedoff, though recent reports suggest that asmuch as $3 million a year still flows fromBritain into the coffers of the Lashkar andthe Jaish-e-Mohammed (Mohammed’sTroops).3

The Jaish was founded in 2000 by an Is-lamic preacher who was released by India ina prisoner-hostage exchange after an Indianairliner was hijacked by would-be Jaish ad-herents and Harkat ul Ansar (Movement ofthe Medinite Friends of the Prophet) mili-tants in December 1999. The militia hasties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but itsbase is in Karachi, and it has been impli-cated in the kidnapping and murder of U.S.journalist Daniel Pearl. Investigations intoPearl’s kidnapping led to one of the 1999

Untying the Kashmir Knot 11

hijackers as well as to one of the prisonersfreed in 1999, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, aBritish citizen of Pakistani origin with arecord of kidnapping and murder in India.4

Sheikh subsequently confessed to havinghelped organize a series of attacks for theJaish: the bombing of Jammu and Kash-mir’s legislative assembly in October 2001,the raid on India’s parliament in December2001, and the United States InformationService shootings in Calcutta this January.5

Pakistan banned the two groups afterthe U.S. State Department put them on its list of terrorist organizations and has ar-rested some of their members, closed someof their offices, and cracked down on someof their fundraising. But the bulk of themujahideen have been allowed to lie low—the Lashkar’s website is up and runningagain after a two-week freeze—and Indiafears Pakistan will not relinquish the covertwar in Kashmir that has dominated its for-eign policy since the 1980s.

“The Unfinished Business of Partition”Kashmir has often been described as “theunfinished business of partition.” Thephrase is especially popular with Pakistanipoliticians. Indian politicians and Kashmirinationalists say, with critically different mo-tives, that there is no connection betweenthe Kashmir dispute and the partition of In-dia; strictly speaking, they are right. Theprincely states were not parties to partitionin 1947. But they were drawn into theclutch of partition-related issues at inde-pendence, when the British gave them onlythe right to choose whether to accede to In-dia or Pakistan, not of independence. Whilethe choice was relatively easy for Hindu- orMuslim-majority princely states that bor-dered India or Pakistan, it was very difficultfor states like Kashmir, which had a Muslimmajority and a border with Pakistan, butwas ruled by a Hindu maharaja. Kashmir’scase was further complicated by its demog-raphy. Its Muslim majority was concentratedin the Kashmir Valley and in the tribal

lands of the Northern Areas. The vastmountainous tract of Ladakh, which bordersTibet, was predominantly Buddhist, and theJammu region of southwestern Kashmir,which borders Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir,was mixed Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh.

Pakistan assumed that Britain wouldweigh in on its side in the Kashmir acces-sion race, as an extension of the underlyingprinciple of the 1947 partition: that con-tiguous Muslim-majority territories wouldgo to Pakistan. But Britain was looking fora speedy exit, not to take sides, and whileMaharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir dithered,his choice was preempted. Barely threemonths after the declaration of India’s parti-tion, as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs massa-cred one another in bordering Punjab, apeasant rebellion broke out in Kashmir’sJammu province in October 1947, and ac-celerated into war when Pakistani tribesmeninvaded.6 Hari Singh turned to India, whichmade military support conditional on acces-sion. At the same time, India’s prime minis-ter, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised to hold aplebiscite on accession once the state was at peace again. Before that happened, Paki-stani troops came to the support of thetribesmen in the belief that the rebellionwould spread. But Kashmiris, instead,helped the Indian troops. Their anti-monar-chist leader, Sheikh Abullah, was fired bythe Indian independence movement and hadties to the Indian Congress Party.

While the Indian and Pakistani armiesbattled one another, Nehru took the disputeto the United Nations. The United Nationsestablished a cease-fire line that divided theprincely state, leaving Pakistan in control ofa strip later named Azad (“Free”) Kashmir,the Northern Areas of Gilgit, Hunza, andBaltistan, and the Aksai Chin region ofLadakh. (China subsequently occupied theAksai Chin.) The rest of the princely state,now called Jammu and Kashmir, remainedunder India’s control. Monitored by theUnited Nations, the cease-fire line grew into a de facto partition of the state and a

12 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2002

new boundary between India and Pakistan.7

Partition divided the multiethnic provinceof Jammu, creating a separate Muslim en-tity (Azad Kashmir).8 However, it left theMuslim-majority Kashmir Valley under In-dian control.

The cease-fire line was intended to betemporary. But neither country could agreeto the U.N. proposals for a settlement. TheUnited Nations asked Pakistan to withdrawits troops from Azad Kashmir, and India tokeep only as many troops in Kashmir aswere necessary to the state’s security. To In-dia’s chagrin, the United Nations also rec-ommended a plebiscite on accession to Indiaor Pakistan. Before that thorny issue was re-solved, talks foundered on interim arrange-ments. India rejected Pakistan’s proposedinternational administration for Kashmir—which the United Nations was neither in aposition nor inclined to provide. And Paki-stan rejected India’s proposal to reuniteKashmir with Sheikh Abdullah, popularlydubbed the “Lion of Kashmir,” at the helm,fearing perhaps that his closeness to India’sleaders would prejudge the dispute. Paki-

stan did not withdraw its troops, and theplebiscite was never held.

In the years that followed, the twocountries dealt differently with the parts ofthe state they held. Pakistan treated AzadKashmir as formally separate and tempo-rarily under its protection, though over timeits population integrated with Pakistan’sthrough the labor market, and its politiciansran shop from Islamabad while a Pakistanigovernor, generally a retired colonel, man-aged the state. Candidates for electoral officehad to swear an oath of allegiance to Paki-stan, separatist politicians were regularlyjailed, and there was little freedom of speechand no civil society to speak of. Pakistantreated the Northern Areas more openly asprotectorates: they were run from the centerby a governor and had no elected govern-ment or administration.

On the Indian side of the cease-fire line,Jammu and Kashmir’s fortunes underwent aseries of twists and turns. Sheikh Abdullah’sNational Conference, founded on the sameprinciples of secular democracy as the Con-gress, swept the board in Kashmir’s first

Untying the Kashmir Knot 13

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elections; for the first time, power movedinto the hands of Muslims, and the seat ofauthority moved from Jammu to the Kash-mir Valley. In 1952, the state was grantedspecial status under Article 370 of the Indi-an Constitution, which made defense, for-eign affairs, and communications the onlyportfolios under federal control. At the sametime, the United Nations committee onKashmir, chaired by Owen Dixon of Aus-tralia, made a final recommendation: to re-partition Jammu and Kashmir in order tocreate more ethnically homogenous unitsand allocate the Muslim-majority KashmirValley to Pakistan.9 Alarmed, Indian nation-alists in the Congress Party decided Article370 was the thin edge of the wedge, and inthe following years India reneged on itscommitments to self-rule in Kashmir.Sheikh Abdullah was alternatively wooedand imprisoned, and successive corruptregimes were nudged to power.

New Delhi’s flip-flop policy dominatedthe Indian response to Kashmiri aspirationsfor autonomy until the 1980s. In any case,the hostility between India and Pakistan leftlittle respite to put Kashmir’s house in or-der. The 1960s and 1970s were decades ofwar. In 1965, after Abdullah had been im-prisoned for the third time, Pakistan in-vaded in the belief that Kashmiris were ripefor revolt. They were as sadly mistaken asthey had been in 1948. The Kashmiris didnot revolt, and India attacked Lahore, butunder international pressure both countriesagreed to return to the status quo. India andPakistan fought a third war over Kashmir in1971, when India invaded East Pakistan insupport of its secession and Pakistan openeda second front in Kashmir. India won acrushing victory in this war, taking a largechunk of Pakistani territory and 90,000prisoners of war.

The 1971 war was followed by an Indi-an-Pakistan summit in the Himalayan townof Simla in June 1972, which was notablefor two agreements. First, that from then onthe two countries would settle their disputes

through bilateral negotiations—in otherwords, the United Nations would no longermediate. That role had lapsed in the 1950s,but India wanted to prevent its future re-vival and by dint of the Simla Agreementstaved off subsequent U.N. offers of its“good offices,” in 1999, 2000, and 2001.And second, that the cease-fire line wouldbe converted into a “line of control,” whichIndia saw as a step toward turning the lineinto an international border. It also appearsthat the Indian and Pakistani prime minis-ters, Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto,agreed privately that the Line of Controlwould eventually be recognized as an inter-national border.10 But that never happened.

The early 1980s seemed to be a time ofpromise in Kashmir. Pakistan’s attention,under President Zia ul Haq, was focused onmobilizing a pan-Islamic jihad against theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Kashmirwas quiet. In 1982, Sheikh Abdullah died,and his son Farooq became chief minister.Unlike Kashmir’s previous leaders, who hadkept the fiction of Kashmir’s special statusalive by staying away from Indian politics,Farooq Abdullah made common cause withchief ministers from the west and south ofIndia who were pressing for federal devolu-tion. The campaign offered a significant op-portunity for India to integrate Kashmir bydevolving power across the country, but In-dira Gandhi saw it as a threat to her author-ity and treated Farooq’s part in it as a per-sonal betrayal. In early 1984, she appointedthe notoriously ruthless Jagmohan11 gover-nor of Kashmir. Though the role of stategovernor was largely ceremonial, governorshad the power to dissolve the state assemblyand dismiss the ruling government in crisissituations, such as a breakdown in law andorder, or mass defections. Soon after he be-came governor, Jagmohan dismissed Farooq.

Kashmiri anger, slow to mount overdecades of misrule, began to smolder. Thepatently rigged elections of 1987 proved aturning point. Opposition coalitions, suchas the Muslim United Front, which was af-

14 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2002

filiated with the Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami,a conservative Sunni Muslim religious party,were pushed out of the race by a ban on reli-gious parties. Farooq, who was acclaimed asthe “lion’s cub” in the early 1980s, was cov-ered with contumely when he returned aschief minister. A new Kashmiri movementfor democracy began in the Kashmir Valley,which became the seat of government afterthe monarchy ended. There were massdemonstrations protesting the rigged elec-tions and affirming Kashmiriyat, a syncreticcombination of elements of Sufi, Buddhist,and Hindu traditions with Sunni Islam, asthe cohesive force of a multiethnic Kashmirination that aspired to self-determination.(Religious syncretism was a longstandingpopular tradition in the Kashmir Valleyrather than in Jammu and Ladakh, thougheach was tolerant in its own way.) Kash-miriyat did not unite the different parts ofKashmir—but it was not given the time totry. Governor Jagmohan dealt with theprotests by making widespread arrests,while the Indian government sat by. Fa-rooq’s protests fell on deaf ears as the valleyentered a state of siege.

The Rise of JihadThe withdrawal of the Soviet Union fromAfghanistan in 1989 helped bring the brew-ing crisis in Kashmir to a head. The successof the Afghan resistance, actually due to itsunique great-power backing, gave armedstruggle new attraction for Kashmiris. Paki-stan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Service,already giddy with the “success” of itsdecade-long Afghan policy that had createdthe Taliban, and bloated by the power it hadgained through it,12 hastened to make hayand had the means to do so. The end of U.S.support for the Afghan jihad after the Sovietwithdrawal meant the ISI no longer had toaccount for what it did with the arms thathad been provided for the Afghan resistance.With plenty of stockpiled arms and no oneto account to, Pakistan could easily divertconsignments to Kashmir—and now at last

there were takers. Beginning in late 1989,thousands of young Muslim men, many nomore than boys, crossed over the Line ofControl from the Indian-held Kashmir Val-ley to train in hastily set up camps in AzadKashmir and Pakistan’s North-West Fron-tier province. Some were to make it as far asOsama bin Laden’s complex at Khost ineastern Afghanistan.

The earliest recruits were candidateswho had been kept out of the 1987 elec-tions, chiefly from the Muslim UnitedFront. But the bulk of recruits were youngcollege graduates without jobs. Educationalreforms in the 1950s and 1960s had createda new middle class, especially in the Kash-mir Valley, and the Indian governmentpoured development aid into the state underevery five-year plan. But successive corruptregimes, including those of the Abdullahs,siphoned off the money, and the economydid not keep pace with the growing middleclass. As Kashmir stagnated and unemploy-ment became a pressing problem, Muslimstudents with few prospects blamed theircondition on Indian rule. Denied a hearing,they resorted to violence. The mujahideenburned buses and destroyed bridges; in Sri-nagar, Kashmir’s capital, they bombed theheadquarters of the National Conference,and shot a National Conference leader andthe vice president of the state unit of theHindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP). Hindus began to be and feel threat-ened, and what started as a trickle of Hin-dus out of the Kashmir Valley soon becamean exodus.

In turn, the Indian government floodedthe valley with troops, there were arbitraryarrests and detentions, and civil and humanrights were subordinated in a way thatKashmiris had not seen since the days ofMaharaja Hari Singh. By the mid-1990s,Muslim militias and the Indian army domi-nated life in the valley, with an estimated10–15,000 mujahideen, and upward of350,000 Indian troops.13 Srinagar was undera double curfew, one imposed by the army

Untying the Kashmir Knot 15

and the other by the militias. Pakistani aidto the latter was increasingly evident. Esti-mated at over $3 million per month in1993, it was briefly suspended under U.S.pressure but resumed on a smaller scale in1994, when it was also diverted from themore secular militias to militant protégés ofthe Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami party.14

This move was an adaptation of Paki-stan’s Afghan policy, which used Islamic political parties as the conduit for jihad, and it crippled the fledgling Kashmiri de-mocracy movement. Kashmiri enthusiasmfor armed struggle had already begun towane by late 1991, and if India had offereda political outlet for Kashmiri grievancesthe uprising might have died a naturaldeath. But India’s weak coalition govern-ments, which rose and fell from the end ofthe 1980s through the 1990s, lacked thecourage for political reform, and Pakistan’sISI began to fill the vacuum with Islamicmilitias of its own creation.

The new Kashmir mujahideen werebred in Pakistan’s radical Islamic schools,15

and trained in guerrilla warfare in both Pa-kistan and Afghanistan. They had their ownhagiography of liberation, an Islamic andmilitarist rather than political history thatwent against Kashmiri norms of coexistenceand fractured Kashmiri aspirations. Kash-miri opposition groups, even in their briefarmed incarnation, traced their roots to afailed political process culminating in therigged 1987 elections. But Islamic militiaslike the Lashkar traced their origins to the1990 assassination of “one squadron leaderand three pilots of the same Indian AirForce whose 704 sorties from 27 October to17 November 1947 landed [the] Indianarmy at Srinagar airport.”16

Unlike most of the Kashmiri groups,the Lashkar’s tale of liberation is a litany ofthe dead and martyred. According to theirwebsite, following the assassination of theIndian airmen, volunteers started pouringinto Afghanistan to train for “Jihad-e-Kash-mir.” Soon afterward, a training center was

established “in the nearby hills” (presum-ably in Azad Kashmir), and then a coordina-tion center was established in Muzaffarabad,the capital of Azad Kashmir, “to organizemujahideen and to facilitate jihad in Kashmir.”17

Since August 1992, the Lashkar claims,their militia has killed over 14,000 Indiansoldiers (the official Indian figure of overalllosses in the Kashmir conflict is just over4,000) and says that 1,500 of its men havebeen martyred. This, they conclude, spellsthe mujahideen’s determination to fight“until Allah’s Deen [religion] prevails onthe earth—this is our Manhaj [spiritualjourney], this is our Jihad, this is the Cen-tral point of our Da’wah [invitation] andthis is our goal.” In Kashmir, they targetedHindus, threw acid on unveiled Muslimwomen, and burned media and entertain-ment outlets.

By the end of the 1990s, there weremore Pakistanis than Kashmiris among themujahideen. The Lashkar’s list of “martyredcommanders,” for example, names men fromall over Pakistan. Mujahideen attacks wereno longer restricted to Kashmir, thoughmost occurred there; the mujahideen hadmore sophisticated arms and communica-tions than they had in the early 1990s, andthey inflicted much greater damage thanthey had earlier in raids on army and policeposts, convoys, and barracks, on governmentbuildings, and on civilians. Within Kash-mir, conflict spread from the Kashmir Val-ley to the Muslim-majority districts of Jam-mu, where Hindus and nomads began to be“ethnically cleansed” from the border vil-lages. Outside Kashmir, the militias tar-geted India’s capital city, New Delhi, andlinked into the Mafia-type network devel-oped by the criminal Bombay financier Da-wood Ibrahim, who fled India for Pakistanin the mid-1990s.

The Indian government adopted increas-ingly draconian measures in response to thiswave of violence, including the use of tor-ture, and civilians were frequently trapped

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in the battle between Indian troops and the Islamic militias. India’s army, once wel-comed as providing security against re-peated Pakistani invasions, and for buildingroads and bringing medicines to remote areas, began to become a hated symbol ofmilitary occupation and human rights abuses. Its counterinsurgency policy of us-ing former mujahideen to fight new recruitsworsened the already fragile law-and-ordersituation and led to revenge killings. WhenFarooq attached the counterinsurgent Spe-cial Operations Group to the Kashmir po-lice forces, Muslim began to be pittedagainst Muslim at an even more intimatelevel.18 By the end of the decade, more than35,000 people had been killed,19 the vastmajority of them Muslims. In the KashmirValley, families who had lost one member atthe hands of Islamic militias and another atthe hands of the security forces became morethe norm than the exception.20

But the place where Pakistan’s Kashmirpolicy had the most far-reaching impact waswithin Pakistan itself. The free rein giventhe ISI to mobilize the Afghan and Kashmirjihad led to the rapid spread of militant Is-lamic schools across the country.21 Jihad ral-lies began to attract crowds of 200,000 peo-ple, and 50,000 volunteers might sign up ata single rally (not necessarily to be calledup). By summer 2000, Islamic militias werecollecting funds for jihad in every shop inLahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Karachi,and Peshawar. Dismayed Pakistanis saw theprecarious lines of separation that had ex-isted between the Afghan jihad, sectariangroups in Pakistan, and the Kashmir mu-jahideen erased. The same men fought inAfghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir.22 Thebulk of them were from poor and lower-middle-class families, whose parents hadturned to religious schools for the lack ofany viable alternative for their children’s education (in 1997, a government surveyfound that more than half the government-funded schools in Pakistan existed only on paper).

Rabid as the Islamic militias were, theLashkar’s website shed light on a softer sideto some of them. For a brief period, in thefirst half of 2000, it hosted a chat room thatmust surely have been run by the militia’sBritish volunteers (the site was created inBirmingham and in its first version had aBirmingham subscription address and bankaccount). Leading the chat was a mock aca-demic discussion of the sexual preferences ofancient Romans, Greeks, and Carthaginiansthat could only have been written by theproducts of an English classroom. And itsoverall irreverence—for instance it featuredan ongoing correspondence mocking Osamabin Laden and General Musharraf, amongothers—raised more questions than the restof the site answered as to whether it was at all possible to develop a profile of the jihadi.23

It would take an Orwell to show howthese ambiguities of identity coexisted withthe certainties of jihad when preached bythe ISI’s favored clerics. What does emerge,however, is a tangled skein of distinct andseparate motives that were combined byforce of circumstance and led to the death ofthousands. Most of the young volunteers forjihad in Kashmir were little more than can-non fodder in a war they had earlier onlyread or heard about.

The Reluctant Search for PeaceInternational concern fixed on Kashmir afterthe Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in thesummer of 1998, which brought a new levelof urgency to an already deteriorating situa-tion. Having been castigated across theworld, with Washington leading the chorus,Indian and Pakistani politicians began aslow and largely ritual dance around theComprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, confidence-building measures to contain the conflict,and talks to find a long-term solution to theKashmir problem. The result was a highlypublicized meeting in Lahore between thetwo countries’ prime ministers, in early1999, which was accompanied by the easing

Untying the Kashmir Knot 17

of visa restrictions and an agreement to re-sume negotiations under working groupsthat had been set up in earlier talks in1996–97.

The Lahore meeting was trumpeted asthe start of a new peace process, and in some ways it was. For the first time sincethe 1950s, the two countries’ leaders agreedupon immediate steps to improve relationsthrough trade and freedom of movement.But the hopes that these steps raised provedillusory. Two months after the Lahore meet-ing, a napping India was stunned to discov-er that Pakistani troops and guerrillas hadoccupied chunks of the mountainous Kargilregion, which lies between the KashmirValley and Ladakh.

As the facts filtered out, it was clearthat both India and the United States hadunderestimated the depth of the anxietythat the Lahore meeting would arouse inPakistan over the fate of Kashmir, especiallyin the army and the ISI.24 The Kargil incur-sion occurred because Pakistan’s prime min-ister, Nawaz Sharif, in seeking to assuagethe anxiety of his military and security ser-vices, suggested a limited escalation of ten-sion over Kashmir. The army chiefs pres-ented him with a plan that combined retak-ing the peaks in the Siachen range that In-dia had occupied in 1984, with smuggling amass of arms and guerrillas into Kashmir.As former Pakistani prime minister BenazirBhutto later disclosed,25 the plan had beenpresented to successive premiers who hadshelved it, recognizing that it was tanta-mount to an act of war. Sharif was not sowise.

The Kargil offensive caused an interna-tional outcry, and India responded by carpetbombing (the Kosovo air war was in itsthird month) Pakistani positions on the In-dian side of the border. The air campaigncost India roughly $300 million, and thecountry lost 2,000 soldiers. Pakistan admit-ted to losing 500 fighters. While Indiabombed, reports that Pakistan, with helpfrom China and North Korea, was much

further down the road than India in opera-tionalizing its nuclear weapons hit the U.S.headlines. It looked as if the unthinkable,nuclear war, might actually threaten.26

Stunned by the scale of the operation hehad sanctioned, Sharif flew to the UnitedStates in July to announce the withdrawal ofPakistani troops and guerrillas from Kash-mir. Derisively dubbed the “WashingtonDeclaration” in Pakistan, his announcementwas sullenly received as an act of nationalhumiliation, and, fearing a military coup, hetried to scapegoat the army chief, Gen. Per-vez Musharraf. After two weeks of wildbrinkmanship, culminating in an attempt tooust Musharraf, the army took over in abloodless, and popular, coup in October1999. After the coup, violence in Kash-mir—which had already risen sharply fol-lowing the Kargil war—increased. Contem-porary newspaper accounts indicate that be-tween the fall of 1999 and the summer of2000, seven people died each day on averagein army-militia conflict.

India saw the coup as an opportunity toturn up the heat on Pakistan for sponsoringterrorism. The attempt garnered a mixed in-ternational response—India’s own record inKashmir was hardly pacific, and its cam-paign increased the tensions between NewDelhi and Islamabad—but Pakistan’s Islam-ic militias had already raised U.S. concernsabout the country’s stability.

With an economy that had plungedfrom crisis to crisis since the 1998 nucleartests, and the country in hock to interna-tional lending agencies that urged his gov-ernment to roll back the Kashmir jihad,Musharraf began to look for ways to de-esca-late the conflict with India. The years 2000and 2001 were marked by a series of Paki-stani initiatives, most of which ended infailure. A “de-weaponization scheme,”aimed at curtailing possession of illicitarms, was abandoned after Pakistani reli-gious and militia leaders made a show of re-sistance; so too were attempts to curtail thegreat arms bazaars in the tribal agencies of

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the North-West Frontier province and totax the great smugglers’ bazaars around Pe-shawar. A decision to close down operationsto collect funds for jihad ended when thegovernment agreed to leave Islamic partiesand militias alone if they refrained from sec-tarian conflict within the country.27

The year 2000 was similarly marked byfailed back-channel efforts between Indiaand Pakistan to secure a lasting cease-fire inKashmir, with each attempt ending in vio-lence. A July 2000 cease-fire between theIndian army and one of the larger and olderKashmir militias could have been expandedinto an overall cease-fire with all the mili-tias, who worked together under the UnitedJihad Council. Instead, it was left in tattersafter two days of carnage in which over 100Hindus were killed. The Indian governmenttried again, in October 2000, with a unilat-eral cease-fire; though this decreased the In-dian army’s human rights abuses in Kash-mir, violence actually increased while it last-ed, and it was called off after three months.

Relations between the two countriesplummeted still further in July 2001, whena summit held in Agra at India’s initiativebetween Musharraf and Indian prime min-ister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ended in dis-array. The talks focused on Kashmir, and itshowed how far Vajpayee had moved the In-dian position. At Lahore, Kashmir had beenput on a back burner. In Agra, it was upfront. However, the two countries onceagain discovered that they could not agree,or even agree to disagree.

Pakistan wanted a declaration in whichKashmir was recognized as the central issueof conflict between the two countries, whichIndia had long refused. India was finallyready to grant that recognition but in returnwanted Pakistan to eschew violence, or sup-port for violence, in Kashmir. For Pakistan,this was too high a price to pay. A tight-lipped Musharraf departed for Islamabad.Once again there were massacres in Kash-mir, this time in Jammu, and the Indiangovernment declared both Jammu and the

Kashmir Valley “disturbed areas,” in whichthe security forces could make preventive arrests, shoot on sight, or cordon off andsearch entire villages.

It looked as if the two countries werelocked in implacable hostility, and thatKashmir was doomed to an endless cycle ofviolence and siege. Then came the Septem-ber 11 attacks in New York and Washing-ton, which altered the dynamic sharply.Pakistan became a key U.S. ally in the waragainst terrorism, broke its links to the Tali-ban, and began to deal with its Islamic ex-tremists. A decline in the Kashmir conflictmight have ensued naturally, but India wor-ried that Pakistan would continue to sup-port the Kashmir militias. When India’sparliament was attacked by suspected Paki-stani militants on December 13, 2001, theIndian government canceled air, rail, androad links with Pakistan, recalled its ambas-sador from Islamabad, and sent 500,000troops to the border. With troops in Af-ghanistan and Pakistan, and the renewedthreat of a war between India and Pakistan,the United States pushed Pakistan to breakwith the Kashmir jihad. On January 11,2002, Musharraf delivered a path-breakingaddress to the Pakistani nation, in which hesaid Pakistan would no longer allow its soilto be used for terrorism, and soon after hearrested close to 2,000 Islamic militants andclosed over 300 of their offices.

New OpportunitiesThe Bush administration had already begunto deepen ties with India when the Septem-ber 11 attacks occurred, and its new rela-tionship with Pakistan added a sense of ur-gency to pushing for peace between the twocountries. Though Secretary of State ColinPowell urged India to reciprocate Mushar-raf’s initiatives by withdrawing troops fromthe border, or at least by lifting some of its sanctions, India put more currency in the mujahideen’s threat of relocation fromPakistan to Azad Kashmir. Troops would remain until late spring, the Indian

Untying the Kashmir Knot 19

government said, when the snows meltedand it would be possible to see whether therate of cross-border movement had fallen. Inthe meantime, India asked Pakistan, as afurther token of good faith, to extradite 20men wanted on terrorism charges in India.Pakistan balked, but a month later wasforced to take two of the men on the Indianlist into custody over the kidnapping of theU.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

Once again, Indian aims were fortu-itously fulfilled. But in March 2002, Paki-stan released the bulk of the militants whohad been arrested two months earlier, in-cluding the heads of the banned Lashkar andJaish, both of whom vowed to reignite theKashmir jihad.28 In other words, the mes-sage from Pakistan was clear: the biggestobstacle to the Lahore peace process and theAgra summit—the Kashmir jihad—wouldnot recede until India engaged with Paki-stan to seek new opportunities to containthe conflict, and perhaps even to find along-term solution.

The initiative now lies with India, notbecause “the ball is in its court,” to use an-other favorite phrase of Indian and Pakistanipoliticians, but because India can act with-out Pakistan to some extent. Whether mili-tia attacks rise or decline in the near term,India has the power to move from a militaryresponse to the conflict to a policy of con-tainment to limit violence, scale down hu-man rights abuses, and open a peace processwith Kashmiri groups, such as the All PartyHurriyet Conference, an umbrella organiza-tion of armed and civilian groups seekingindependence for Kashmir.

None of this is easy to do. Ten years ofconflict have systematically weakened Kash-mir’s government, from law enforcement tothe justice system to revenue collection, aswell as having set back its civil society.Though Kashmir has not suffered the kindof physical damage that war often inflicts,its polity is badly fractured. There areenough weapons around to ensure that low-level conflict will continue even if the mili-

tias fade out. Criminal networks havegrown, and Kashmir has a nascent blackeconomy that feeds on the state’s endemicculture of patronage.

Limiting the violence will entail, at aminimum, not only better training, equip-ment, protection, and redeployment of the security forces, which are trigger-happybecause they are so vulnerable, but thor-oughgoing reform of Kashmir’s police andintelligence systems, especially counterin-surgency organizations, such as the SpecialOperations Group. Scaling back troops and decommissioning the Special Opera-tions Group will also go a long way towardcurtailing human rights abuses, especially if reform of Kashmir’s prison system and judiciary follow. Indications are that the Indian government, perplexed as to how (if at all) it can “win back the hearts andminds” of Kashmiris, is open to advice on these issues. Kashmir’s hated counter-insurgents have begun to be reined in and investigations have begun into somecustodial deaths. The government has al-ready sought the Bush administration’s help in border stabilization and could benefit from emerging doctrines on how to maximize human security in conflict-ridden areas.

Opening a peace process with Kash-miri independence groups may prove to be more difficult in view of the fragmenta-tion that has occurred. Already weakened by Pakistan’s fitful yet rigid support in the 1990s, the dozen or so Kashmiri inde-pendence groups are factional. They are also outnumbered by Kashmir’s politicalparties, which include branches of the main Indian political parties as well as local Kashmiri contenders. The ten years of conflict have bitterly divided both inde-pendence groups and political parties, andhave brought regional as well as ethnic tensions to the fore—between Ladakh, the Kashmir Valley, and Jammu, and be-tween Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, andSikhs. A peace process will have to con-

20 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2002

sider some form of devolution within Kash-mir itself as well as autonomy for the state.

The Indian government, which knowsthat groups like the Hurriyet embody Kash-miri mistrust of India, is wary of holdingtalks with them lest by doing so it givesthem the power to represent Kashmiris thatthey as yet lack. More importantly, talkswith groups like the Hurriyet are bound toreopen the question of Kashmir’s status,which India is anxious to avoid and hopesmight fade, given Pakistan’s new direction.But historical grievances generally do not goaway unless they are replaced with incen-tives, and what India really has is the chanceto explore the terms for an amicable settle-ment, rather than the opportunity to im-pose one.

India is pinning its hopes on state as-sembly elections in Kashmir, scheduled forSeptember, and is trying to get talks startedwith Kashmiri groups on how to ensure thatthere is wide participation in them. Butgroups like the Hurriyet fear that these elec-tions, like others before them, may yield nomore than a change of leadership (if that).Given India’s past performance, and its pres-ent sorry record of counterinsurgency, theirfears are shared by most Kashmiris. The In-dian government is well aware of this fact,but it might be tempted to go ahead anduse the elections as a way of postponing oth-er decisions on a lasting settlement.

This would be a mistake. If India wantsto win Kashmiri hearts and minds, the gov-ernment needs to give Kashmiris hope. Oneway to do that is to implement the autono-my that was promised in 1952, and letthese be the first elections for the transfer ofpower. Neither the Hurriyet nor Pakistanwill sign on to such an offer, but it willwipe out a key Kashmiri grievance andmight well pave the way for a future settle-ment with Pakistan.

From the days when the United Nationswas seized of the dispute, most of the pro-posals for a solution have devolved on a di-vision of the state between India and Paki-

stan because neither country, nor China, willrelinquish the territory it holds without go-ing to war. The choice, therefore, is basicallybetween a hard partition that would allowthe two countries to integrate directly theirrespective parts of Kashmir, and a soft parti-tion that would allow open borders andwould ultimately dissolve the lines of divi-sion. A hard partition may be attractive onpaper, but every effort to achieve it in Kash-mir has failed because Pakistan believes itshould be along lines of religious difference,so that the Muslim majority areas go to it,and India believes it should be along theLine of Control. (New Delhi also fears theHindu backlash a new division of Kashmircould bring upon India’s Muslim populationof over 120 million.) A soft partition is alsounlikely to be formally accepted by Pakistanat the moment, because its leadership can-not be seen to ratify the territorial statusquo. In any case, it is difficult to imagine anopen border in Kashmir if the rest of theborder between India and Pakistan wereclosed.

The Best Option for KashmirGiven this situation, autonomy is onceagain the best option for Kashmir, providedit is seen as an open-ended formula. The ac-tual provisions of Article 370 of the IndianConstitution, which conferred autonomy onKashmir, were quite far-reaching. The onlyportfolios under central government controlwere defense, foreign affairs, and currency. Ifthese were further substantiated by genuineguarantees of inviolability, demilitarization,and free and fair elections, they might go along way toward satisfying Kashmiri aspira-tions29 but will not necessarily resolve thedispute with Pakistan or settle the Kashmirpartition. However, an adaptation of North-ern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement for-mula, embedding autonomy in a trilateraland wider regional framework, might pro-vide the solution.

Under such a framework, Azad Kashmirwould remain under Pakistani control, and

Untying the Kashmir Knot 21

Jammu and Kashmir would remain with In-dia. Both countries would guarantee autono-my, and in both parts of Kashmir state as-semblies could be reconstituted to ensurethat minorities were adequately represented.Strategically and culturally distinct Ladakhcould be given its own autonomy, eitherwithin Kashmir or directly within the Indi-an federation. Both countries would alsoguarantee demilitarization, and work towardfreedom of movement—of people, goods,and services—and a soft border, under thesupervision of an India-Kashmir-Pakistanadvisory or coordinating body. DividedKashmir could, at the same time, plan ajoint future through an Azad Kashmir–Jam-mu and Kashmir development council. Ifthe South Asian Association for RegionalCooperation could be simultaneously jump-started, as the Gujral government had triedto do in 1996–97, and the Vajpayee govern-ment appeared set to try, economic renewalin Kashmir would be part of overall tradenormalization between India and Pakistan.

One or another version of an “autonomyplus” solution has been on the agenda forclose to a decade now, and countless Indianand Kashmiri negotiators have tried toachieve agreements based on autonomy, in1993, 1995, 1996, 1999, and 2000. Paki-stan has privately considered the solution,and it has been repeatedly discussed in poli-cy circles and the media, but it has neverbeen put on an official agenda. The back-channel negotiators for Sharif and Vajpayee,Niaz Naik and R. K. Mishra, held wide-ranging negotiations on an autonomy pack-age, and this provided the context for theLahore summit of 1999, but the issue wasnot officially discussed. From interviewswith track-two interlocutors during theAgra summit of July 2001, I gather that itwas again discussed in the back-channelrun-up to the summit. As before, it was toform the unspoken context for an officialdeclaration that would cover much the sameground as the Simla and Lahore agreements,but would make Kashmir a priority.

There is, however, one significant differ-ence between the present unofficial discus-sions of autonomy and earlier negotiationson the issue. India is willing to make a softborder—or soft Line of Control—a key ele-ment of the autonomy package, and Paki-stan is willing to accept Kashmiri decisionson what kind of solution they want. Thoughthe two governments suspect each other ofusing these changes as bargaining chips,they can be pushed to renew negotiations onautonomy, and more important, to go pub-lic with the proposals.

Before that can happen, the two coun-tries need to agree on a phased de-escalationof conflict in Kashmir. Since the Decemberparliament attack, India has relied on inter-national, and especially U.S., pressure onPakistan to crack down on the militias oper-ating from its soil, while India pursuesthem in Kashmir. Now India is also adopt-ing cautious steps to roll back its counterin-surgency policy. But for either country tosustain these policy shifts, they need the in-centive that only mutually agreed de-escala-tion provides. Indications are that the twocountries are cautiously edging toward re-newed talks, but as yet each continues tospurn the other’s offers of de-escalation.

What can the United States or the widerinternational community do to push the twocountries into pursuing the peace proposalsthat they have tentatively discussed? Theonly real lever the United States and thewider international community have is overPakistan, which is dependent on interna-tional aid and lending. They have used thislever wisely by tying aid to action againstIslamic extremists without making it condi-tional. But an equally useful angle would beto push Pakistan to let its business andcommercial groups set policy on trade nor-malization with India. The InternationalMonetary Fund and the World Bank are al-ready involved with Pakistan’s economic re-structuring. Giving consumer and industrialinstitutions a role in economic policy is animportant element of restructuring, and

22 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2002

trade normalization could be an invaluablemeans of confidence building for the twocountries.

Although, by comparison, the UnitedStates and the international communityhave relatively little leverage over India,New Delhi is anxious to hold fresh electionsin Kashmir this September. That means thecentral and state governments have barelyfive months to establish conditions for freeand fair elections—i.e., conditions in whichpeople feel free enough to make their ownchoice. Without Pakistan’s cooperation, themilitias will be able to disrupt Indian effortsto restore basic security in Kashmir. Indianeeds to recognize that Pakistan is an essen-tial partner for peace in Kashmir, even moreso because it plays a key part in Kashmir’sproblems, and that at present the UnitedStates and its allies are in a position to exertleverage over Pakistan in favor of a peaceprocess. That position may not last verylong. More than any other country, theUnited States has India’s ear, and here is amessage it should convey unequivocally.•Notes

1. Www.markazdawa.org.pk, October-December2001. Another poll, still running, asks whether theLashkar or the United States, India, and Israel are thetrue terrorists; the poll is programmed to select thelatter.

2. Kamal Siddiqi, “Muridke Complex: A Nurs-ery for Taiba Men,” Dawn (Islamabad), May 7, 2000.

3. Vijay Dutt, “British Muslims Biggest Patronsof Lashkar, Jaish,” Hindustan Times (Delhi), January4, 2002.

4. Sonia Trikha, “General Gets Last MinuteBreather,” Indian Express (Delhi), February 2, 2002.

5. Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Pearl Ab-duction Was a Warning, Suspect Says,” WashingtonPost, February 18, 2002. A more detailed version ofthis article was published under Khan’s byline in theNews International (Islamabad), but was later pulledoff the newspaper’s website, in response to pressureby the Pakistani government.

6. Russell Brines, The Indo-Pakistani Conflict(London: Pall Mall Books, 1968), pp.68–80.

7. In 1949, the United Nations set up a moni-toring group for India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to re-port on observance of the cease-fire line. After the1972 Simla Agreement, India took the position thatnow that the dispute was to be resolved bilaterally,UNMOGIP was no longer necessary. Though UNMOGIP

continues to occupy office space in New Delhi and a mansion in Srinagar, it has since monitored thecease-fire line only on the Pakistani side of the border.

8. It has been argued that this division sharp-ened the distinction between the syncretic Islam ofKashmiriyat and the Sunni Islam of the Muslim dis-tricts of Jammu, which now form Azad Kashmir. See Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency (NewDelhi: Orient Longman, 1993), p. 17.

9. Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy,1849–1990 (Karachi: Oxford University Press,1992), p. 297.

10. Ajit Bhattacharya, Kashmir: The WoundedValley (New Delhi: UBS, 1994), pp. 214–15.

11. As New Delhi governor during the 1975–77Indian Emergency, when Indira Gandhi imposedmartial law on the country in order to avoid the fallof her government, Jagmohan oversaw the eviction ofthousands of Muslims from old Delhi.

12. The ISI is generally held to have become astate within a state during the Afghan war, when itdealt directly with the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and othersupporters of the Afghan jihad, but it had already ac-quired some of its powers during Bhutto’s rule, whenhe used it to suppress political opposition.

13. These numbers rise and fall according to theintensity of conflict, but they have not fallen below150,000, or risen above 400,000, since the rise of thearmed conflict.

14. Human Rights Watch Arms Project, India:Arms and Abuses in Indian Punjab and Kashmir (NewYork: Human Rights Watch, 1990), p. 20; and R. A.Davis, “Kashmir in the Balance,” International DefenseReview, April 1991, p. 301.

15. Ahmed Rashid, “Radical Islam’s New Fron-tiers,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 78 (November/December1999).

16. “Eleven Years of the Laskhar-e-Taiba,”www.markazdawa.org.pk.

17. Ibid.18. Times of India, February 19, 2001.

Untying the Kashmir Knot 23

19. According to Indian government figures.Kashmiris put the figure at 70,000, but in generalcasualty figures taken during crisis, whether officialor unofficial, tend to over-enumerate.

20. “Disquiet in the Valley,” Times of India, edi-torial, December 9, 1999.

21. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Education of a HolyWarrior,” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2000;Ghulam Husnain, “Inside Jehad,” Time (Asian edi-tion), February 5, 2001.

22. Rashid, “Radical Islam’s New Frontiers”;Jessica Stern, “Pakistan’s Jihad Culture,” Foreign Af-fairs, vol. 79 (November/December 2000).

23. The chat room was shut down in early 2001, after news of the existence of the website wascarried in U.S., British, and Indian newspapers.(While searching the site, I also found nestled among grandiose pronouncements on holy war thestartling announcement that Wrigley’s chewing gum was no longer halal, that is, no longer permit-ted to Muslims.)

24. Brigadier A. R. Siddiqi, “The Military andIslam,” The Nation (Lahore), February 28, 2001.

25. “Benazir Says She ‘Vetoed’ Kargil-like Oper-ation,” Dawn, February 9, 2000.

26. Dexter Filkins, “N. Korea Aid to PakistanRaises Nuclear Fears,” New York Times, August 23,1999.

27. The Nation, February 21, 2001.28. Indeed, the Lashkar head, Hafiz Sayeed, is

calling for a pan-Islamic jihad against India over theGujarat riots. “Editorial,” www.markadawa.org.pk.

29. Variants of this package were proposed lastyear, on a ten-year trial, by Kashmiri leaders in Paki-stan as well as liberal Pakistani analysts, with theimportant corollary that other options should be re-viewed after the trial period. See Ikram Sehgal, “Un-tangling the Kashmir Knot,” The Nation, January 1,2001.

24 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SPRING 2002