Quotes of the Day

Sometimes it seems nobody wants peace in Kashmir. When two masked gunmen dressed in Indian police uniforms gunned down Abdul Gani Lone at a rally in the leafy summer capital of Srinagar last week, the list of suspects was notable for including almost everyone. Some naturally pointed the finger at India and its secret service: for decades Lone had staunchly opposed Indian rule in Kashmir. But the 70-year-old former lawyer had modified his stance in the past two years, and that had survivors, including Lone's son Sajjad, pinning the assassination on Pakistan, its powerful intelligence agency the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and Kashmir's Islamic guerrillas. Sajjad, who succeeds his father in Kashmir's most powerful separatist alliance, even vocally wondered whether his father's allies were involved: men who were standing alongside him minutes before he was shot. Lone had been evolving into that Kashmiri rarity: a man pushing for peace. Nearly everyone agrees that's why he died.

And with his death, the clouds of war grew immediately darker. Last week in India and Pakistan—and most concentratedly in Kashmir—the talk was not of whether there will be conflict, but when and what form it will take. Since 1947 the South Asian neighbors have squabbled over the lush Himalayan foothills; and since 1989 more than 35,000 people have lost their lives in a separatist rebellion, partly fueled by Pakistan. Lone's death followed a militant attack at an army camp in Jammu the week before that left 31 dead, and India declared it had lost patience with Pakistan's "cross-border terrorism." Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told some of the 750,000 Indian troops massed with heavy artillery and short-range ballistic missiles all along the western front to prepare for a "decisive battle." He used the same alarming phrase a day later before the civilian press. Vajpayee ordered thousands more jawans, or soldiers, to the 3,000-kilometer-long border with Pakistan and moved five warships to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan responded by pulling 4,000 men out of peacekeeping duties in Sierra Leone and stationing them along its eastern frontier. It is considering withdrawing thousands more of its soldiers from the coalition hunt for al-Qaeda fugitives on the Afghanistan border. On Saturday, it performed a provocative test of a medium-range Ghauri missile. With mutual nuclear annihilation as the ultimate escalation, the subcontinent once again regained its status, in Bill Clinton's phrase, as "the most dangerous place on earth."

Kashmir is the locus of that terrible peril because, for most of the players, continuing conflict works. It works for the militants, who have found an escape from grinding poverty in the gun and the cash and prestige it attracts. That's true of both the indigenous Kashmiri militants and the "guest mujahedin" who come in from Pakistan, veterans of ISI-run training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and former Taliban-ruled territory in Afghanistan, who subscribe to the same ideal of waging a purifying jihad.

Trouble in Kashmir also works for Pakistan. While President Pervez Musharraf publicly denounces militant incursions from his side of the border, it would be political suicide for him to denounce their aims. Nor does the Pakistani President's rhetoric blind anyone to the memory that in 1999 he commanded the operation to seize strategic passes in the mountains of Kargil on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LOC). Moreover Musharraf's announcements of a crackdown on the militants ring more than a touch hollow. While five insurgent groups have been banned and bank accounts have been frozen, some of the arrested leaders have been freed, the bank accounts are reported to have been emptied before they were closed and the incursions and attacks inside Indian territory continue, including a December attack on Parliament in New Delhi in which 14 people died.

Lately, all-out war has also become increasingly attractive to India. Vajpayee's limping, pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is only too aware of the restorative powers of a good fight. War talk and fulminations against Muslim militancy have successfully rid India's newspapers of reports of the excesses of the BJP's hard-line supporters in Gujarat, where more than 1,000 Muslims have been killed in a 10-week religious pogrom. Conflict and crisis also allow India to ignore the average Kashmiri's main complaints: the nagging injustice of Indian rule, rigged elections, rampant official corruption, police torture and murders by soldiers. And with the U.S. enthusiastically prosecuting its war on terror in Afghanistan, New Delhi feels the time is right for its own crackdown. In Kashmir, it is: even Kashmiri militants, who desire independence from India, agree that their guest mujahedin are as nasty as they are unwelcome. "They are trying to Talibanize Kashmir," says activist Mohammed Kaleem. "Their only objective is to destroy India." Mehbooba Mufti, vice president of the pro-India People's Democratic Party, says the jihadis are giving Vajpayee's government exactly the justification it needs: "They always want to keep the Kashmir pot boiling."

So far, India seems to have calculated correctly. While expressing concern at the prospect of war, U.S. President George W. Bush has said he understands India's anger and frustration. European Union external affairs commissioner Chris Patten, who visited New Delhi and Islamabad last week, described India's patience as "stretched almost beyond breaking point" and the situation as on a "knife edge." Bush has stopped short of publicly admonishing Pakistan, Washington's key ally in the war on terror, but he's dispatching burly Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage to Islamabad next week, and his mission will be to deliver a heavy, private bruising. "If anyone can threaten to crack Musharraf in half, it's Armitage," says one State Department source. (Armitage can bench-press 160 kilos) For his part, Vajpayee has been hinting that New Delhi's military strategy has received covert approval, saying last week "world opinion is on our side but they are not saying so openly."

Exactly what New Delhi is planning remains a mystery. "Wait and watch," was Vajpayee's heavy warning last week in Srinagar. Both sides have taken care not to publically flaunt their nuclear capabilities: Islamabad swiftly denounced one hard-line minister who did. Vajpayee told local newspaper editors in Jammu that as a first step New Delhi was considering abandoning a treaty that ensures the free flow of three rivers including the Indus, which originate in Indian-administered Kashmir and run through the mountains to irrigate Pakistan's northeastern bread basket. A second option is surgical strikes by the air force and commando teams on jihadi training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The third is a pounding of Pakistani posts along the LOC in Kashmir followed by a limited invasion to push it back a few kilometers and allow India to take and block passes used by militants crossing into its territory.

Pakistan says it is preparing for the last two scenarios. "The actions that the Indians have taken tell us that they have the capability to launch air strikes on the so-called camps, besides having the capacity to start a fierce ground offensive," says one Pakistani general. "We have set our defenses accordingly and we are prepared for a limited war in and around Kashmir." For now, Pakistan says it is attempting to placate its neighbor by targeting Islamic militants on its soil. Late last week, diplomats were indicating that India was considering giving Pakistan one last chance. But like India, Pakistan too has a limit to its patience. "No matter what Musharraf does, it will never be enough for India," says one Western diplomat. Adds a senior Pakistani military source: "We may be tempted to finally say enough is enough." As Abdul Gani Lone discovered last week, peace is seldom popular in Kashmir.

• ALEX PERRY Srinagar
• In Kashmir, the conflict never stops