RALEIGH – The conflict between India and Pakistan has taken another turn for the worse, thanks to more Kashmiri terrorism, and the prospect of two nuclear-armed powers going to war again is both compelling and horrifying. Stuck at home with more than a foot of snow on the ground, I can’t stop checking the headlines in the Indian and Pakistani papers.
The stakes are huge. If you want a scary local angle, another war over Kashmir would likely complicate the mission of American troops in neighboring Afghanistan, where the search continues for Al Qaeda and Taliban thugs hiding from justice. Our own Marines from Camp Lejeune remain in the theater. If the worst-case scenario arrives, we could become involved in a South Asian war fraught with great peril to our men and women in uniform, to millions of innocent civilians, and to peace and stability throughout the region.
We’ve posted a couple of pieces on NCAtWar.com that compare the Kashmiri conflict to the Israeli-Palestinian one. There are some important similarities. The autocratic Pakistanis — despite being outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered on the diplomatic front by the democratic Indians — aren’t just going to give up on their goal of seizing control of all Kashmir, a majority Muslim land long under the thumb of first Sikh and now Hindu sovereignty.
Why do the Pakistanis care so much about this remote province? It, quite literally, comes with the name. In 1933, as Muslims in India were developing a strategy to ensure their rights in the coming break with Britain, expatriates at Cambridge University in England circulated a four-page memo outlining their vision of an independent Muslim state in northwest India. They wrote that the name of the country would be both a declaration of faith — “Pakistan” translates as “land of the pure” — and an acronym identifying the Indian provinces to be included.
“P” was for Punjab, expected to form the core of the new state. “A” stood for Afghan, a term used not to describe present-day Afghanistan but what was called the Northwest Frontier Province (full of the now-famous Pashtuns). “K” was for Kashmir, “S” was for Sindh (where the port city of Karachi is located), and “tan” referred to Baluchistan, the westernmost province.
I don’t mean to take Pakistani concerns about the people of Kashmir lightly (though I also don’t buy their argument that Muslim rule would necessarily be preferable to Indian rule). But at a basic level, the Pakistanis can’t just abandon this cause. It is part of the legend, the poetry, of their national birth.