Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Changing the Balance of Power
Both India and Pakistan have also attempted to use their armed forces to change
the regional balance of power. The closest the two have come to a decisive
turning point was in 1971, when the Indian army achieved the surrender of the
Pakistan army in East Pakistan. However, rather than pressing on to a decisive
victory in the West—which would have been very costly and might have
brought other states into the contest-India settled for a negotiated peace and the
Simla agreement. Both the United States and China provided verbal support for
Pakistan in 1970-71, but neither seemed prepared to take any direct action that
would have prevented India from defeating the Pakistanis in East Pakistan.
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A
second opportunity came in 1987 during the Brasstacks crisis, when India had
conventional superiority and Pakistan had not yet acquired a nuclear weapon.
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By 1990 both India and Pakistan had covertly exercised their nuclear options,
and seem to have concluded that the risk of escalation had reached a point where
the fundamental balance between the two could not be achieved by force of arms.
This did not prevent the discreet use of force, and Pakistan adopted a strategy of
hitting at India through the support of separatist and terrorist forces, and in 1999,
a low-level war in Kargil. This now raises the prospect of escalation to nuclear war,
but so far there has been no Indian or Pakistani advocacy of a
decisive
nuclear
war.
KASHMIR
Kashmir is both a cause and the consequence of the India-Pakistan conundrum.
It is primarily a dispute about justice and people, although its strategic and
territorial dimensions are complicated enough.
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As in many other intractable
paired-minority conflicts, it is hard to tell where domestic politics ends and
foreign policy begins.
There are two Kashmirs. Besides the physical territory, another Kashmir is
found in the minds of politicians, strategists, soldiers and ideologues. This is a
place where national and sub-national identities are ranged against each other.
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The conflict in this Kashmir is as much a clash between identities, imagination,
and history, as it is a conflict over territory, resources and peoples. Competing
histories, strategies, and policies spring from these different images of self and
other.
Pakistanis have long argued that the Kashmir problem stems from India's
denial of justice to the Kashmiri people (by not allowing them to join Pakistan),
and by not accepting Pakistan's own legitimacy. Once New Delhi were to pursue
a just policy, then a peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem could be found.
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For the Pakistanis, Kashmir remains the 'unfinished business' of the 1947
partition. Pakistan, the self-professed homeland for an oppressed and threatened
