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The two sides declared a cease-fire in November 2003, and later began peace talks, but progress has been tortuously slow. Last week, in the wake of the quake, India flew more than 25 tons of medicines, blankets and tents to Pakistan, and there were tales, later denied by Islamabad, of Indian soldiers rushing across the front lines to dig Pakistanis out of their collapsed bunkers. But the decades-long mutual suspicion that New Delhi and Islamabad have of each other is hard to overcome. The tsunami was a tragic catalyst in bringing peace to Aceh, where a separatist insurgency had been under way for 30 years. But in neither Islamabad nor New Delhi is there any sense among officials that the earthquake may end hostilities in Kashmir. The conflict is too deep-seated, and involves two proud nations that find it hard to give ground. Prem Shankar Jha, a political columnist for the Indian magazine Outlook, argues that the cooperation between India and Pakistan during the tragedy "will undoubtedly help," but adds: "The earthquake is a very, very small thing in the entire peace process." Others don't even hold out this tiny hope. Says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management: "There will be some tokenism, but six months from now, there will hardly be a memory of it." Indeed, the Indian army said it had killed eight militants who tried to cross over the night after the temblor struck, and another eight two days later.
With fighting so common, locals at first misunderstood what had happened on the morning of Oct. 8. Indian Kashmiri Mussadiq Hussain Manhas, 54, heard a deep cracking inside the earth, and thought, "Maybe the war has started again." But then the ground "bounced," he says, "and it was clear this was not the work of men." Recounts Manhas: "I threw myself onto the ground, but the walls began toppling on me. So I ran to a walnut tree and clung to it. It was swinging like a pendulum in a clock. I could see walls and houses falling all around me, and cracks were appearing in the earth beneath my feet. Rocks were breaking off the mountains and crashing down."
On both sides of the border, villagers wondered where the soldiers were when they were most needed. "If they want us to be their people, if they think this is their place, then their priority should be their own people," says Manhas, a village elder in Kamal Kote. "If they don't help us, if they don't give us what we need, it's going to be in our hearts for a long time." Yet five days after the quake, the Indian Kashmiri mountain village of Skee, which was flattened, had received no help, even though it overlooks Uri, a base for thousands of Indian troops. There had been no air-drops of food, water or medicine, and no search and rescue teams that might have found survivors in the debris, say Skee villagers. All too often, say residents near the garrison posts, the army took care of its own casualties before it ventured out into the towns and villages. "We had to look after ourselves," admits Indian army spokesman Colonel Hemant Juneja. "Guaranteeing the nation's security is never less than our first priority."
In Pakistan, Musharraf's military regime prides itself on discipline and efficiency. But it took 30 hours for Musharraf to request extra helicopters from the U.S. (five Chinooks and three Black Hawks were summoned from combat duty in neighboring Afghanistan). His hesitancy, says Samina Ahmed, director of the Islamabad branch of the International Crisis Group, was a mixture of hubris and ignorance—at least in the early aftermath of the quake—over how calamitous the damage was. "The earthquake shows that the military lacks management skills," says Ahmed, faulting the slow pace of the army's response. "They can get boots on the ground, but that's about it."
It took Pakistani soldiers three days to reach Balakot, a town of 20,000 people that was reduced to a muddy smear, even though it is only 40 km up the road from their base in Mansehra. And when the military got to a collapsed school building to help dig out some 200 students trapped inside, enraged parents hurled stones at the soldiers. "For two days there were helicopters flying over us," says Javed, a shopkeeper whose son was one of the children entombed in the school. "We waved at them with red pieces of clothes but they just went by." In some places, British, French, Turkish and Iranian rescue teams arrived days before the Pakistani army did. When choppers eventually touched down in wrecked mountain hamlets, survivors mobbed the crews and fought each other for blankets and packets of biscuits. Some Pakistani officials reported that several times, stranded earthquake victims clung to helicopters as they lifted off, nearly causing crashes. In many cases, people didn't wait for the army. Thousands of volunteers began flooding up into the mountains, carrying shovels, pickaxes and iron rods to dig for survivors. Down in the main cities, collection centers popped up, and well-wishers donated tents, blankets, food and even cloth for burial shrouds.