THE LAST INDIA-PAKISTAN WAR ended in 1971, but in one barren corner of Kashmir the killing has not stopped. On the 6,100-m-high Siachen Glacier, which sits in a no-man's-land claimed by both nations, soldiers still exchange artillery barrages-when they can dig out from the deep snow.

After the Peruvian government captured Abimael Guzman three years ago, it seemed the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebellion he had led would sputter out. But in the trackless jungles of the Huallaga Valley, Senderista guerrillas in July killed 47 police and government soldiers: 16 to 21 in a single ambush that ranks as one of the bloodiest events in the 15-year insurrection.

Then there are the Kurds, whose suffering so touched the world's heart in 1991 when TV pictured them starving and dying on mountaintops in Iraq. They have long since found refuge in what amounts to their own autonomous zone in northern Iraq, protected by allied air power from Saddam Hussein's armies. Under that shield, however, the Kurds for the past 15 months have been busily killing one another in a civil war to decide which of two factions will control their supposed haven. Even if a shaky cease-fire holds, other groups supported by neighboring powers (Iran, Syria, rebel Kurds in southeastern Turkey) are likely to keep Iraqi Kurd killing Iraqi Kurd for a long time to come.

These are only three of dozens of intractable conflicts around the world that grind on year after year. Last week, as usual, the press was focused on the Balkans, where hopes for peace rose when representatives of the three warring factions tentatively accepted a framework in which they would share power in a Bosnian government. But Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslims have not even agreed on a cease-fire, much less worked out the details of who will control what land.

A Bosnian peace will be devilishly difficult to achieve and maintain, if the history of other ethnic battles is any guide. There are many smaller-scale Bosnias, and most show no signs of resolution. In fact these endless wars are all but forgotten by almost everyone except the participants. (And sometimes even by them. Indian newspapers that once ran regular lists of those killed in the Siachen Glacier fighting now ignore that continuing bloodshed.)

Some conflicts, like the one in Afghanistan, once drew correspondents and camera crews, but eventually faded from the world's TV screens. Others, like the civil wars in Sudan that began in 1958 and have flared on and off for 26 of the subsequent 37 years, have always been fought in a sort of news vacuum.

Their very obscurity makes it difficult to count how many of these forgotten wars are still raging. The U.S. Defense Department uses a figure of about 30; other calculations run as high as 46. The enumeration depends on some hard-to-measure factors: Should the count include situations in which fighting has stopped for the moment but may resume at any time, since two or more heavily armed sides continue to glare at each other and no formal peace has been signed? That is the case in most of the wars that have erupted around the rim of the former Soviet Union. Indian troops during the past 20 years or so have been fighting to put down at least 10 rebellions by tribes in the country's mountainous northeast that are seeking greater autonomy or outright independence. Do these fights add up to 10 separate wars or, as New Delhi would like the world to believe, no war at all?

However the number of wars is fixed, it has remained distressingly stable. The end of the cold war and the collapse of communism have not had much effect. Marxist guerrillas who have been battling the government in Colombia for the past 30 years have actually added recruits since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All too often when one war does at last flame out, another flares up--sometimes next door. In West Africa the vicious fighting that has killed at least 150,000 people in Liberia over the past six years ended in August with an agreement under which all the country's warlords will have a voice in a new government. Simultaneously, though, a four-year-old rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone has blazed with horrifying intensity. Not long ago the insurgency had so simmered down that opposition politicians accused the government of inventing a phantom rebellion to maintain its grip on power. But there is nothing make-believe about the fighting this year. Travelers report seeing severed heads on pikes in forest villages, victims with hands cut off or eyes gouged out, men and women who had been shot in the genitals at close range. As in Liberia, the combatants are often boys not yet in their teens, who sometimes clothe themselves weirdly in wigs and dresses and use drugs to hop themselves up for killing.

Savagery is all too typical of the forgotten wars. Many are small-scale and fought with relatively primitive weapons in sparsely populated areas. Even so, the death toll has been staggering. U.S. estimates suggest that in southern Sudan alone, battle or famine has taken the lives of 1.3 million people since 1983. Not only has the incessant fighting disrupted farming, but both the Khartoum government and the southern rebels have targeted relief supplies, stealing the food to distribute to their own soldiers while peasants starve.

The causes of the wars vary widely. Many conflicts are fueled by ethnic or religious hatreds that erupt after a colonial or other occupying power leaves. Others begin as personal struggles among rivals for power in an area without any strong central authority, as in the officially nonexistent Kurdish autonomous zone in Iraq.

Other wars are continuations or resumptions of once celebrated wider conflicts that have never quite died out. Lebanon, for years the center of Middle East violence, is now mostly at peace after 15 years of civil war and Israeli invasion. Almost unnoticed by the world press, though, a nasty little war has flared up in the past two years pitting Hizballah guerrillas against Israeli soldiers and local Lebanese militia allies still occupying a "security zone" in the south. Israeli commanders have staged artillery and air attacks on Lebanese villages thought to harbor the guerrillas, killing some civilians too, while Hizballah has ambushed Israeli patrols and sporadically fired rockets into northern Israel.

The amazing thing is how many wars continue and sometimes escalate long after the original cause has been forgotten or even disappeared. The war in Afghanistan began as a resistance movement against the Soviet invasion almost 16 years ago, but it still rages even though the last Soviet troops pulled out in February 1989. No tribe or faction since has been able to cement its rule over the whole country. A group called Taliban seemed to be coming close early this year, but it failed to take the capital of Kabul, which remains subject to the artillery and rocket attacks that have reduced the city to a pile of rubble.

Why do some obscure wars seem immortal? "Because nobody has won," says Harald Muller, research director of the Hesse Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Enemies that are unable to vanquish each other, he adds, can nonetheless keep an inexpensive war going forever. "One needs only light weapons: hand grenades, small rocket launchers and mines, which are abundant and cheap." And as such a war grinds on, killing comes to seem normal, especially to men who have grown up wielding AK-47s and know no other trade. "They can't think in any other way," says Chester Crocker, chairman of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

In some cases, it seems only outside pressure can end these interminable carnivals of destruction. But the major powers are increasingly reluctant to intervene. The end of the cold war has ended any chance that the outcome of a conflict in a corner of Asia, Africa or Latin America could tilt the world balance of power. And many long-running wars are fought in areas where the major powers have no economic or strategic interests.

Besides, the history of what efforts the big powers have made to intervene is discouraging. Diplomacy has had some successes, but is difficult in situations where hated rivals have for decades talked only with guns. Often, too, there are many more than two sides to bring together. The Sudanese war began as a rebellion of black Christians and animists in the south against a government dominated by Muslims of Arab descent in the north, but the rebels have since splintered into seven factions that fight one another as well as the government. Jimmy Carter did persuade all parties to agree to successive cease-fires that lasted from March through July, but warfare promptly resumed at the beginning of August. No surprise. Sally Burnheim, spokeswoman for a United Nations relief operation in Sudan, notes that the combatants have often used cease-fires to regroup and prepare for new offensives.

Intervention by armed peacekeepers has usually been futile or worse. Since the U.S.-led U.N. force pulled out of Somalia this year, the country has reverted to warlord-vs.-warlord combat strikingly similar to preintervention 1992. African peacekeepers led by Nigerian troops became shooting participants in the Liberian war. Some old Africa hands think the intervention might have prolonged the conflict. Perhaps the worst failure was the attempt of the Indian government to end the struggle between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils in Sri Lanka. After four years of war, India in 1987 brokered an agreement under which the Sri Lankan government granted some autonomy to the Tamils in the northeast, and New Delhi sent a peacekeeping force to disarm the so-called Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who insisted on complete independence. The Indians found themselves fighting a full-scale war against the Tigers, but that did not win the hearts and minds of the Sinhalese. In fact, a Sinhalese rebellion broke out against the Colombo government, which the rebels contended had no business inviting Indian troops onto the island for any purpose. The Indians pulled out in March 1990, and the war goes on.

There is one exception--sort of--to this sorry record: peacekeeping a la Russe. Moscow has at least damped down, if not exactly ended, nearly all the wars in the Soviet republics that declared themselves independent nations upon the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Its method: dispatch huge forces to turbulent areas; have the troops fight more or less openly on whichever side is most favorable to Moscow, switching back and forth if necessary; then virtually dictate the terms of a cease-fire and enforce it brutally.

Even this approach has not succeeded entirely. In the central Asian republic of Tajikistan, the 8,500-man Russian 201st Motorized Rifle Division polices a cease-fire, while 17,000 Russian border guards stand watch over the frontiers. Nonetheless, Muslim fundamentalist and other antigovernment forces driven into exile in Afghanistan and Pakistan regularly stage cross-border raids, capturing Tajik villages and sometimes whole districts until forced out again. Guerrilla war continues deep inside Tajikistan too.

Successful or not, Russian-style peacekeeping is an isolated phenomenon. Probably no other nation would risk domestic and world condemnation by using such heavy-handed tactics.

Officials of nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) that try to bring food and medical supplies to war-torn areas, and of private foundations like the Carter Center that work to resolve conflicts, argue that the governments should intervene in constructive ways--partly out of humanitarian concern, partly to enhance the global stability nearly all desire, partly because wars left to fester for years sometimes metastasize into surrounding areas.

What exactly can the big powers do? Organize and protect major relief efforts. Set up and guard safe havens for refugees, without regard to their politics. Press hard on "preventive diplomacy," seeking to contain or stop wars in their early stages, and never mind if this requires dealing with deep-dyed, certified villains.

The opposing argument is rarely made openly, because it sounds too heartless. It is that most of the obscure wars are forgotten precisely because they do not threaten the interests of anyone except the participants (and civilians trying to eke out some kind of life amid the shooting). Besides, efforts to stop them never seem to work. So stand aside and let the combatants fight until one side wins or all sides are too decimated to continue. There is reason to believe that this is in fact the unspoken policy of the U.S. and other powers. Rightly or wrongly, most wars seem destined to grind on and on, as bloody, as merciless--and as forgotten--as ever.

--Reported by Tamala M. Edwards/ Washington, Anita Pratap/New Delhi, Andrew Purvis/Nairobi and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow, with other bureaus