Looking Down the Barrel

New fighting over Kashmir, which both India and Pakistan lay claim to, has loomed as a possible complication in America's battle against terrorism ever since President Bush declared war. Until then, the U.S. gave Pakistan the cold shoulder, in punishment for its 1998 nuclear test, and snubbed its leader, Musharraf, who came to power in a coup. Now, suddenly in need of Pakistan as a staging ground for the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. was embracing the country and offering $600 million in aid, a figure that will reach $1 billion by the end of the year. Mostly Hindu India, which has been at odds with mostly Muslim Pakistan since the departing British partitioned the subcontinent into the two countries in 1947, grew fearful that the U.S., which had been growing closer to India, would now tilt toward Pakistan. Then, on Oct. 1, Muslim extremists attacked the state legislature building in Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing 38 people. In mid-October, while Secretary Powell was visiting Islamabad, the Indians shelled Pakistani army positions in Kashmir, breaking a 10-month cease-fire and reminding the U.S. that India would not be ignored.

Next came the Dec. 13 rampage. At 11:40 that day, one of the Toontown-type sedans used by Indian bigwigs got through the Parliament gates in New Delhi because it had an official-looking light on top and a home ministry decal on the windshield. Five militants got out and started firing assault rifles and grenades as they moved toward three separate entrances of the structure. None got inside; one man, who was wired with explosives, detonated himself near the main gate, through which he could have reached the chamber filled with legislators. After some 20 minutes of gunfire, all five militants were dead, along with eight paramilitary security guards and a gardener who was caught in the crossfire.

The suicide mission wasn't terribly sophisticated. The windshield decal that gave the terrorists access to the compound was anything but official. It read, in fractured English: "No body allows to stop this car. India is very bad country and we hate india we want to destroy india ... brother bush he is also a very bad person he will be next target." Once the carnage was over, the government recovered the terrorists' cell phones, with records of recent calls to Kashmir and Pakistan. Arrests in New Delhi and Kashmir came up with some alleged collaborators.

The police put an alleged accomplice, Mohammad Afzal, in front of television cameras, where he admitted helping the terrorists reach New Delhi from India-controlled Kashmir. New Delhi announced it was fully satisfied that Pakistan was behind the plot, though evidence was scant. In Islamabad the expected hot denials had an unmistakable timbre of truth. In the wake of Sept. 11, such an assault on India was probably the worst thing that could happen to Musharraf & Co. The general turned President condemned the attack. But it hardly mattered what Musharraf said. India already realized that the attack on Parliament, though similar to suicidal assaults of the past in more remote reaches, could alter the goalposts of its conflict with Pakistan—thanks to Sept. 11.

For 12 years India has been trying to put down an independence insurgency in the part of Kashmir it holds. Its official line is that the insurgency is fueled by Pakistan, not by the Kashmiri people—that it is a proxy war. The world has disregarded that argument, knowing India was stubbornly ignoring its own problems with the mostly Muslim Kashmiris, who have revived a call for a plebiscite that the United Nations promised them in 1949 to determine whether they would be part of India or part of Pakistan.

Pakistan, on its side, did aid the insurgency, although it claimed it gave only moral and political support. One thing it never denied was that militants were based on its soil, many in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. That's a dangerous claim in the post-Sept. 11 world. It means you are harboring terrorists, just as the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda. "America must ensure that those who are part of the war on terrorism are themselves not guilty of providing a safe haven to terrorists," proclaims hard-line Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani, referring to Pakistan.

New Delhi has withdrawn its top diplomat from Pakistan, canceled train and bus service across the border and widely publicized its troop and hardware movements, always threatening to go further. "The mood of the nation is to hit back," says Sahib Singh Verma, a senior leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Indians were instructed by the media what the logical escalation of pressure would be: limited air strikes, sorties across the border to hit terrorist camps, perhaps an abrogation of a 41-year-old treaty that would deny Pakistan vital waters from rivers that originate in India. After that: all-out war.

Militarily, Musharraf could do nothing but match India's escalation, moving troops to the 2,900-km border and ordering retaliatory shelling across the Line of Control in Kashmir. Politically, he was being pushed to the wall. For more than 50 years, Pakistan has been dedicated to "liberating" Kashmir from India, and Musharraf has gone further than most in pursuing that goal. As army chief of staff, he ran Pakistan's six-week (unsuccessful) battle for the sparsely inhabited mountains of Kargil in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Most Pakistan watchers knew that Pakistan would have to change its Kashmir policy after Sept. 11. "We hoped they'd have longer," says a Western diplomat in Islamabad.

To turn away from the Kashmiri rebels, especially under pressure from India, was a lot to ask of a Pakistani leader. It was hard enough for Musharraf, under U.S. pressure, to abandon the Taliban, whom Pakistan had supported before Sept. 11. But the Kashmir cause is much closer to the hearts of Pakistanis, who partly define themselves through their opposition to India. Anyway, Musharraf had few options. "If he didn't give the appearance of responding to Indian concerns, he might have a war on his hands, and it would be a war he'd lose," notes Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.