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KASHMIR QUAGMIRE
America has no dog
in the fight
By Satu P Limaye
The 50-year-old Kashmir dispute has all the
attributes T S Eliot assigned to history. It has "many
cunning passages, contrived corridors" and "deceives
with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities".
During the past year, as India and Pakistan faced off
militarily and the US searched for al-Qaeda and Taliban
terrorists nearby, the dispute seemed especially
dangerous, US interests in the subcontinent compelling,
and America's influence and Pakistani as well as Indian
receptivity to US mediation high. Many called for US
mediation to resolve the dispute. These calls, however
well-intentioned, are misguided.
Kashmir's
dangers and costs, US influence, and Indian and
Pakistani receptivity to mediation are overstated.
United States interests in Kashmir are negligible; and
the value of resolving Kashmir to improving relations
with India and Pakistan and achieving wider strategic
objectives are debatable. Anyway, the prospect of a
Kashmir compromise is remote. Most problematic is the
dispute's "whispering ambitions". Kashmir is not the
lone or even most important cause of India-Pakistan
enmity. Irreconcilable nationalisms, India's growing
power asymmetry with Pakistan, and India's desire for
regional pre-eminence and Pakistan's determination to
prevent it are the cores of discord.
Pakistan,
which most seeks mediation, can least afford compromise.
An option for the US is to offer Pakistan a security
guarantee in exchange for a Kashmir compromise, and
simultaneously move to "transform" relations with India.
This approach has two limited merits. First, it could
resolve Kashmir. Second, it would call the
subcontinent's two enduring bluffs. India's is that it
is reconciled fully to the creation of Pakistan.
Pakistan's is that it fears only Indian hegemony, but
does not harbor ambitions to be equal to it - whether by
pulling India down or pushing itself up. The major
demerit of such a policy is the requirement for a
massive US commitment of diplomacy, cash, military
equipment, security guarantees - and possibly military
presence. US interests in India, Pakistan, or their
amity, do not justify such a profound commitment.
Behind-the-scenes facilitation and episodic crisis
management, though cumbersome and unsatisfying, are
effective and commensurate with US interests.
Kashmir's exaggerated dangers and
costs
India and Pakistan have fought two brief,
limited wars over Kashmir since their independence in
1947. Given India and Pakistan's overt nuclearization
and shared penchant for brinksmanship, today's dangers
seem greater. Divergent risk assessments exist about the
possibility of nuclear war. Still, policymakers must
consider its humanitarian costs and strategic
implications. India and Pakistan pay for Kashmir in
lives, treasure and reputations. Kashmir thwarts India's
global ambitions, as does the diplomatic and perceptual
hyphenation with Pakistan it produces. Pakistan is being
undermined by the Kashmir conflict's guns, violence and
radicalism. The Kashmiris bear the brunt of conflict.
Kashmir's dangers and costs are sobering, but
should not be overdrawn. Brinksmanship is used by all
parties to purpose. Weaker Pakistan ratchets up tensions
to gain US pressure on India to negotiate. India uses
coercive diplomacy to get US pressure on Pakistan to
halt the infiltration of militants. Both seek these ends
without war: Pakistan because it might lose; India
because it might not win. Each wants the US to hold them
back, while pushing their interests forward. Militants
use dramatic attacks to loosen India's grip on Kashmir,
and warn Pakistan against reducing commitment to their
cause. Outsiders use acute tensions to leverage
influence. Tensions employed carefully are creative.
Outsiders should not be "guided by vanities" that they
are the most important bulwark against war.
Nor
should the negative implications of nuclear war in the
subcontinent be exaggerated. Horrific as the
humanitarian costs would be, they must be set against
the staggering existing humanitarian challenges in the
region. Second, many feared that India and Pakistan's
1998 nuclear blasts would unhinge the nuclear order.
They did not. Similarly, if India and Pakistan use
nuclear weapons, other countries involved in disputes
with their neighbors will not necessarily follow. A
nuclear war in the subcontinent could give a fillip to
nonproliferation efforts. Resolving Kashmir would remove
a nuclear flashpoint, but not the capabilities and
underlying antagonisms that make nuclear war possible.
Kashmir is not the magic formula for fixing the
subcontinent's ills or America's difficulties there.
Identifying it as such allows India and Pakistan to
blame only each other and manipulate the US.
Illusory US influence and regional
receptivity
A beguiling but illusory notion is
that US leverage and Indian and Pakistani receptivity to
it is at a peak. India's reliance on Washington to wring
and validate commitments from Pakistan to halt
infiltration into Kashmir, and its desire for closer
ties do not make New Delhi receptive to mediation. India
is peeved at Washington's new-found friendship with
Islamabad and doubts that Washington will hold Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf to his pledge to
permanently end infiltration. Pakistan suspects that the
US has been complicit in India's coercive diplomacy and
is disillusioned that Kashmir is seen as a terrorism
problem rather than as a freedom struggle. India and
Pakistan's grievances indicate that the US is well
placed to play a mediatory role. But they also show that
neither is really ready to receive it.
America has no dog in the Kashmir
fight
America's interests in Kashmir are limited.
Kashmir's future is not the target of a unified,
powerful lobby within domestic politics or the subject
of US domestic laws. Its intricate history rarely and
fleetingly overlaps with American history. The dispute
is unfamiliar to most Americans save a few academic and
government specialists. Kashmir contains no resources
the US, or its allies and friends, must have. Its
dispensation does not involve clear ideological values
that America holds dear. US allies and friends are not
directly threatened by the dispute or clamoring for its
resolution. The chance of another power displacing
America's centrality in the subcontinent and addressing
the dispute to America's detriment is negligible. The
dispute sometimes detracts from other US priorities, but
not unsustainably so. American credibility depends far
more heavily on the outcome of other flashpoints.
Long-standing US commitments are not at stake. The
Kashmir dispute is not equivalent to the cross-strait
quandary involving China and Taiwan. Kashmir's
line-of-control (LoC) is not Korea's demilitarized zone.
Simply put, the US does not have a dog in the Kashmir
fight.
The dispute does complicate US relations
with India and Pakistan and wider strategic objectives
(eg, the war on terrorism) but not unmanageably so.
During the Cold War and during a decade of Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, America relatively
successfully pursued its core interests while managing
rather than resolving India-Pakistan tensions or the
Kashmir dispute. The global war on terrorism need not be
different. Indeed, pressing for resolution of Kashmir
now threatens to hamper, not ease US relations with
India and Pakistan and the pursuit of wider strategic
objectives.
Pakistan can least afford
compromise
An irony of the Kashmir dispute is
that Pakistan, which most wants mediation, can least
afford compromise. First, Kashmir is central to
Pakistan's national identity in a way it is not for
India. Second, any reasonable compromise would involve a
tacit recognition of the current LoC, a position India
already accepts but Pakistan does not. Musharraf
recently reiterated that the LoC is part of the problem,
not part of the solution. Third, the Kashmir dispute
allows Pakistan to assert parity with India in
perceptions and diplomacy - if not real power. Kashmir
is the hyphen in the India-Pakistan relationship; a
punctuation mark vital to Pakistan's grammar of
geopolitics. If Kashmir is resolved, Pakistan loses a
way of blunting India's ambitions for regional
pre-eminence. Even Pakistan's possession of nuclear
weapons does not afford the same parity. Pakistan's
nuclear weapons especially matter when they are linked
with the Kashmir conflict. Finally, the Kashmir dispute
serves Pakistani leaders as a domestic pressure release
valve. Musharraf, mocked at home for behaving like
Busharraf (ie, too cooperative with President George W
Bush in the global war on terrorism), makes like
Musharrafat - hedging by supporting the Kashmir freedom
struggle.
What's so funny about
behind-the-scenes facilitation and episodic crisis
management? By providing Islamabad with a security
guarantee and economic and military assistance, the US
theoretically could make a Kashmir compromise palatable
to Pakistan. US protection of Pakistan would also serve
as a restraint on it. India might accept such an
arrangement if US support helped Islamabad feel secure,
end support for the Kashmiri militancy completely,
marginalize its domestic extremists, stabilize its
economy, and establish a sustainable democracy. Once
Pakistan is secure, a US-India relationship to include
military sales, technology transfers and economic
cooperation could theoretically develop. Is it worth it?
Not now. Such an approach would lock the US in a
relentless and expensive engagement; more enduring and
costly than trying to resolve Kashmir - much less manage
it.
At a time when Washington seeks solutions to
international problems rather than to manage them,
behind-scenes-facilitation and episodic crisis
management might seem an unsatisfying sop - even an
abdication of bold leadership. But management of the
Kashmir dispute saves the US from making promises it
cannot keep, making commitments that outweigh benefits,
and hitching itself to a region whose importance to the
US must not be over-sold. Calibrating levels and types
of engagement with interests is a tricky and dynamic
challenge. Currently, US efforts call for management,
not mediation of the Kashmir dispute.
Other article in this series:Olive branch or poisoned
chalice?
Satu P
Limaye is director of research at the Asia Pacific
Center for Security Studies (APCSS). Used by
permission, Pacific
Forum CSIS, e-mail
pacforum@hawaii.rr.com.
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