Opportunity opens for India and Pakistan to settle dispute

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): After 13 year of bloodletting on icy Himalayan heights, India and Pakistan are still waging a silent war over the control of the Siachin Glacier. There is little discussion in either country of issues and costs involved, but now a new opportunity is opening up for the combatants to try and resolve their dispute over the glacier, the world's highest battlefield.

An upcoming series of India-Pakistan talks involving foreign secretaries, then foreign ministers and finally prime ministers provides an opportune setting for efforts to halt the bloodshed on snow. The foreign secretaries meet in New Delhi from Friday, while the foreign ministers and prime ministers are scheduled to hold talks next month.

An end to the conflict, which has claimed hundreds of lives on both sides, would be the most significant confidence-building step the two neighbors can take in the prevailing political situation on the subcontinent.

The 6,000-meter glacier, the world's second highest, has been accorded greater strategic importance by Indian and Pakistani policy-makers than warranted by military realities. Its strategic value is self-evident from the fact that it is situated where the borders of Afghanistan, China, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan converge.

However, control of the glacier does not confer any military advantage so significant either nation should be willing to pay dearly in term of human lives and military resources. In fact, as India's experience shows, control of the glacier is a military liability despite the fact that the Pakistan Army has suffered more casualties in combat. Indian troops have controlled the main glacier since 1984.

The glacier war is actually an extension of the two countries' confrontation over the disputed mountainous territory of Kashmir, whose control is divided among India, Pakistan and China.

While the first signs of conflict emerged in the early 1980, India's Siachin warfighting strategy evolved as part of the Rambo syndrome that gripped national policy between 1984-1988, spawning a series of military adventures and maneuvers that included the interventions in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, the blockade of Nepal and major troop exercises along the borders with China and Pakistan.

Chastened by those experiences, Indian foreign policy today is consciously seeking to live down the image the country projected in the 1980s. Foreign Minister I.K. Gujral's imaginative diplomacy has helped rebuild relations with the smaller neighbors that were unsettled by Indian assertiveness in the 1980s.

The Siachin conflict -- a product of an ill-defined line of control in Kashmir -- is a challenge to the deal-making ingenuity of the new Indian diplomacy. Only innovative diplomacy can help break the military stalemate over the 80-kilometer-long of rock and ice.

As India is wearing the Siachin boot with which it has kicked back every Pakistani attempt to penetrate the two access passes, it can negotiate from a position of strength. However, it has to ensure that its negotiating strategy does not bleed national interests.

Past moves to resolve the conflict ran aground despite progress principally because of the Pakistan government's reluctance to accept any deal that could be attacked domestically as selling out arch-enemy India. Pakistan Prime Minister Mohammad Nawaz Sharif's recent return to power in a landslide election victory has helped restart talks with India. But Sharif's options are circumscribed by the powerful, meddling Army.

It is an open question whether the Pakistan Army today views a Siachin solution with favor (a rescue from a bloody predicament) or scorn (let the Indians stew on the glacier and continue to pay higher costs). There is also the risk that Pakistan may still want to link Siachin with a comprehensive dialogue on Kashmir.

The two nations' interests would clearly be served by a Siachin settlement founded on a mutually accepted line of control in the glacier region, which flanks Kashmir territory ceded by Pakistan to China in 1963. The Indian Army will not give up its control of the main glacier without an internationally recognized line of control, lest Pakistani troops link up with Chinese forces at Karakoram Pass and threaten the Buddhist Ladakh region.

A unilateral withdrawal is not a serious option for India because the country lacks the punitive capabilities to effectively deter a Pakistani military encroachment. At the same time, New Delhi can no longer turn a blind eye to the high costs of the Siachin operation and its interminable causalities, two- thirds of them from frostbite, altitude sickness and avalanches.

If Siachin is to be demilitarized, then both sides will have to agree to a line of control. Pakistan would like the line to run from the bottom of the Saltoro Range in a northeast direction to the Karakoram Pass and meet with the Chinese line of control in Kashmir, almost a fifth has been annexed by Beijing. India, using the reference in the 1949 Karachi Agreement to the line being northwards, has put forth a position that lays claim to Siachin and, implicitly, to an adjoining area ceded by Pakistan to China.

Without flexibility on both sides, there can be no halt to death by fire and ice at Siachin. A settlement can emerge only by expanding previously agreed principles: Redeployment of forces to minimize risks of conflict; no use of force; and determination of the new positions.

There is no reason India and Pakistan to continue to bear mounting losses on Siachin. It is never too late to cut losses. A Siachin settlement will reinforce the pragmatism and maturity India and Pakistan displayed when they signed a pact some years ago to attack each other's nuclear installations.

The writer is a professor of security studies at the New Delhi-based independent think-tank, the Center for Policy Research.