Asia
Lay Down Your Guns
New Delhi and Islamabad are talking nice, and Washington is pushing them to discuss Kashmir. But peace won't come unless Pakistan's Musharraf can rein in the jihadis
BY TIM MCGIRK / ISLAMABAD
It's official: India and Pakistan may start playing cricket again. That doesn't seem like much, but any sign that hostility is easing between the two nuclear-armed neighbors is worth cheering. Still, a far trickier game lies ahead: solving their long-simmering dispute over Kashmir뾞nd, specifically, reining in the violent militants who keep the Kashmir pot boiling.
U.S. President George W. Bush sent Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, an ex-wrestler, to New Delhi and Islamabad last week to lend support뾞nd apply pressure. Before Armitage landed, leaders from both countries were quick to show Washington they were actively pushing for peace. In addition to hurling cricket balls, India and Pakistan have agreed to resume air and road links next month, as well as restore full diplomatic relations, which they suspended 17 months ago. But both sides know that any hope of peace talks could easily be sabotaged by a violent incident like the March 24 massacre of 24 Kashmiri Hindus by unidentified gunmen. Indeed, convincing the militants to hand over their Kalashnikovs is the key to peace in Kashmir뾞nd it may prove impossible. Says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a South Asia expert at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad: "There are extremists who want to torpedo these negotiations."
Saad, a burly Kashmiri in his mid-30s with a closely cropped beard, is one of them. Eyes ablaze, Saad뾵ho prefers not to disclose his full name for security reasons뾠ontinues to talk of unending war in Kashmir. These days, however, he's not so sure of high-level support within Pakistan. For an interview at his home in Islamabad, he insists we drive a mazelike route because, he claims, Pakistani intelligence agents, who were once his friends and mentors, are now keeping him under surveillance. Saad says he commands 70 fighters뾞 fraction of the 2,000 to 3,000 guerrillas who, according to the Indian military, are still operating in the Kashmir Valley.
Publicly, at least, Pakistan is trying to distance itself from jihadis like Saad. Last week, Armitage said that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf gave him "absolute assurance that there was nothing happening" across the Line of Control and that guerrilla camps in Pakistan's Kashmir territory either no longer existed or "would be gone tomorrow." If Pakistan does indeed seal off the Kashmir border, as the U.S. is insisting, some militant groups will wither, starved of Islamabad's covert training, arms and cash. Already in Muzaffarabad, the main city in Pakistan's side of Kashmir, unemployed jihadis are scraping through by driving cabs and tending shops. Their commanders had to sell off fleets of four wheel-drive vehicles, gifts from the Pakistani intelligence agencies. But Saad hasn't lost hope. "This American pressure on Pakistan will slow us, but it won't stop us," he vows. It mustn't, Saad adds. "If the militancy ends, what will bring India to the negotiating table? Nothing."
His view is shared by many Pakistani military officers: backing the Kashmiri militants, whose ranks are swelled with Pakistani recruits itching for a holy war against the Hindus, has been a low-risk and cheap way to tie up hundreds of thousands of Indian troops in the freezing mountains of Kashmir. But some Pakistani intellectuals are starting to argue another line: that after 14 years of guerrilla fighting and more than 30,000 deaths in Kashmir, the Indians are not backing down. "You can't keep following this path if it leads nowhere," Hoodbhoy says. This opinion is gaining currency among influential government officials and policymakers, especially in the wake of Sept. 11 and the Bush Administration's success in Iraq. Convincing the generals and their boss, Musharraf, who planned one of the most successful incursions in the Kashmir conflict뾲he capture of several strategic peaks in the Kargil region in 1999뾦s a tougher job.
Still, Musharraf is halfway there. After Sept. 11, he earned kudos from Washington for helping catch more than 450 al-Qaeda suspects and trying to slow the flow of holy warriors into Indian-held Kashmir. Although the number of militants crossing into Kashmir dipped slightly, India now claims that Pakistani intelligence once again has opened the tap, sending perhaps hundreds of fighters across every month and furnishing them with guns, rocket-propelled grenades, radios and daily intelligence on where Indian troops are patrolling. For the Bush Administration, this presents a credibility gap. On a visit to Washington last week, General Ehsan ul Haq, chief of Pakistan's leading spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was shown evidence of the ISI's continued dabbling in Kashmir. This was followed up with a warning, say diplomats, that the Bush Administration won't tolerate Pakistan's provocative meddling any longer. And after Gulf War II, such warnings tend to grab people's attention.
Publicly, Pakistan says it's not aiding the Kashmiris. But privately, Pakistani officials have told the U.S. that time will be needed to scale down their country's support for the militants. Otherwise, they say, Musharraf may face a backlash from extremist cells, which still abound in Pakistan, as well as from religious parties and some of his own officers. Pakistani officials also argue that Musharraf doesn't exert full control over the wilder extremists roaming Kashmir, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba, which are widely blamed for terrible civilian atrocities. Even without support from Pakistan, though, the militants could wreak havoc. One jihadi in Muzaffarabad says that the guerrillas have stashed huge supplies of weapons inside Indian-held Kashmir and that they could press on with their war long enough to provoke the Indians into breaking off peace talks.
In Muzaffarabad, militants say that they were recently told by the ISI to "hibernate"뾲o lie low in case the upcoming dialogue between India and Pakistan fails to yield any progress. Then, says one commander from the Lashkar-e-Toiba, Pakistan's support will resume뾠overtly, as before. Several of the militants interviewed by Time failed to mask their sense of betrayal by Islamabad. "We feel helpless because we never thought that Pakistan would stop supporting us," says one ex-militant from the Lashkar-e-Toiba who recently gave up his cross-border attacks out of frustration. This indicates that ISI, despite its many denials of helping the militants, still flexes some power over the groups' chiefs, if not their more extremist holy warriors.
Before peace talks can proceed, India must also start making concessions. For starters, Pakistan wants India to thin out its military presence in Kashmir. Pakistan also talks about chronic human-rights abuses뾲here are still 3,000 people "missing" in Kashmir who were picked up for questioning and never returned. Last year, after being elected chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir state, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed dismantled the feared special forces responsible for most of the abuses. In Srinagar, Kashmir's ancient lakeside city, some Muslim elders are encouraged by the words of peace emanating from New Delhi and Islamabad. Abdul Ghani Bhat, chairman of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 26 Kashmiri separatist parties and groups, said he was "optimistic" about the future. "The boys with guns will have to fall in line," said Bhat. "They will have to listen to reason." For now, the spectacle of India and Pakistan facing off on the cricket field sounds like a welcome turnaround for everybody. But the Kashmiris would appreciate something more enduring: peace.
—뾚ith reporting by Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Ghulam Hasnain/Muzaffarabad, Syed Talat Hussain/Islamabad and Yusuf Jameel/Srinagar