It's a good question. In November 2003, India and Pakistan declared a cease-fire along their disputed border from the Siachen Glacier through Kashmir. The truce, which has held, is part of a thaw in the hostility between the two countries. Nowadays, Kashmiris can travel by bus across the hilly, barbed-wire front line to visit relatives—the first time they have been able to do so for 50 years. Businessmen are hatching plans to pump oil from Iran through Pakistan to India's factories, and Pakistani musicians and actors are heading for Bollywood spotlights. In June, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during a visit to Siachen, said he wanted to turn the battlefield into a "peace mountain." A few days later, India's army chief General Joginder Jaswant Singh said the Indian army had drafted a road map that would convert the glacier and its surrounding peaks into a demilitarized zone. However, years of mistrust bedevil the peace process. Neither nation wants to be the first to pull its troops off the ice for fear that the other would rush in. Vijay Oberoi, a former Indian army vice chief of staff and an influential military analyst in New Delhi, has doubts about Pakistan's true intentions. "We have suffered when we trusted them," he says. The Indians see their own position on the Siachen Glacier in grand terms. "The fact that India is on Siachen, and in control of it," says Lieut. Colonel J.S. Pundir, "is a sign that we can be a superpower." The Pakistanis are equally suspicious of the Indians. "We don't want to be here," says Captain Nazir, "but the Indians moved in first, and we've sacrificed a lot of blood to keep them from advancing farther into Pakistan."

The origins of the ice war date back to 1949, after India and Pakistan came to blows over possession of Kashmir, a former kingdom coveted by both countries. Negotiators agreed on a cease-fire line that stopped at a map coordinate known as NJ9842, a mountaintop northeast of the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. In vague wording, which would come back to plague both nations, the agreement stated that the cease-fire line would extend from NJ9842 "thence north to the glaciers." This, according to the Pakistanis, put Siachen firmly inside their territory. The Indians think otherwise. New Delhi insists that because Siachen is the source for the Nubra River, which flows eastward into India, the glacier should belong to them. In the mid-1970s, Pakistan began to issue climbing permits to foreign mountaineers who wanted to explore the Karakoram Range, which has some of the world's highest peaks. Then, in 1977, an Indian colonel named Narinder (Bull) Kumar was leafing through a mountaineering magazine when he spotted an article on international expeditions venturing onto the glacier from the Pakistani side. Kumar persuaded his superiors to allow him to lead a 70-man team of climbers and porters to the glacier. They returned in 1981, climbed several peaks and walked the length of Siachen. In an interview with Outside magazine in 2003, Kumar described the glacier as "like a great white snake ... going, going, going. I have never seen anything so white and so wide."

Bull's secret trek was spotted by Pakistan. On patrol, some Pakistani soldiers found a crumpled packet of "Gold Flake" cigarettes—an Indian brand—and their suspicions were raised, according to a senior Pakistani government official. Soon, the Indian expedition on Siachen was shadowed by the Pakistanis. At army headquarters in Rawalpindi, Pakistani generals decided they had better stake a claim to Siachen before India did. Islamabad then committed an intelligence blunder, according to a now retired Pakistani army colonel. "They ordered Arctic-weather gear from a London outfitters who also supplied the Indians," says the colonel. "Once the Indians got wind of it, they ordered 300 outfits—twice as many as we had—and rushed their men up to Siachen." When the Pakistanis hiked up to the glacier in 1984, they found that a 300-man Indian battalion was already there, dug into the highest mountaintops. The Indians control two of Siachen's three passes, and two-thirds of the glacier. Says Lieut. Colonel Abid Nadeem, Pakistani commander at Gyong, which at 4,266 m is the highest battalion headquarters in the world: "The Indians were climbing heights. And we were climbing heights. Then the shooting started. And so the war began."

Battles for these nameless peaks often involved surreal acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. In April 1989, for example, the Pakistanis decided to try to dislodge an Indian squad from a saddle between two peaks known as the Chumik Pass before reinforcements arrived. First, a platoon of Pakistanis, roped together, tried scaling a 600-m cliff to reach the Indian post, but they were wiped out by an avalanche. Time was running out; Indian reinforcements were approaching. So a Pakistani lieutenant, Naveed Khan Qureshi, 27, with no mountain-warfare training, volunteered for a crazy mission. The plan was for Qureshi to be dangled from a tiny helicopter by a rope and then dropped on top of the peak, above the Indians. Slapped by high winds, the helicopter stalled and went into a dive. Qureshi was still underneath it, swinging to and fro. "I was sure that he was going to get caught in the tail rotor blades," says the pilot, Raheel Hafeez Sehgal, now a colonel. Sehgal pulled the chopper out of its stall and headed for a lower ridge. Qureshi was cut loose—and fell straight into a crevasse. Miraculously, he survived, but was trapped there until a second soldier was airlifted in. The two men were stranded in a blizzard for two days until the weather cleared long enough for Sehgal to land four more troops and supplies. Trouble was, their position was 150 m below the Indian outpost instead of above it. Lashed together by ropes, the six men advanced up the mountain, and eventually overran the Indians' bunker. From that vantage point, the Pakistanis began to pound a lower Indian base on the glacier with mortars and rockets. A month later, the two countries realized the madness of trying to slug it out, and agreed to demilitarize the sector. The pact has held firm—proof, says Pakistani military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan, that Siachen can be a place of peace.

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