The Battle for Kashmir

Prabha Chandran Journalist Jakarta

The test firing of three nuclear missiles by Pakistan in the last week and the killing of leading Kashmiri separatist leader Abdul Ghani Khan Lone have sent two messages to India.

The first is from Islamic fundamentalist forces that there is no place for moderates like Lone in the Valley. The second message is from Islamabad, that India risks nuclear war by pursuing jihadi militants across the border.

A more charitable interpretation -- which India hopes is the case -- is that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is flexing his muscles domestically before clamping down on these militants under severe international pressure. But how far can he go without losing the support of his Army and the public who have made Kashmir their raison d'etre? The question has become critical with the routing of Islamic jihadi militias in Afghanistan.

India has long warned that flushing out the al-Qaeda and other terrorists from Afghanistan would have a bloody fallout in Kashmir and so it has come to pass. Being forced out of Afghanistan, they are now active in the North Eastern Frontier Province of Pakistan. Bin Laden was reportedly filmed here six weeks ago -- and in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), from where they have unleashed a wave of unprecedented terrorist attacks in Kashmir in the last three years.

The fact that POK is the staging ground for some of the bloodiest suicide bombings, hijackings and other attacks on Indian military and civilian targets is too well documented to lend credence to Pakistan's claim that it is only providing diplomatic and moral support to freedom fighters.

This support has in the last two years alone, facilitated the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar, the bombing of the Kashmir State Assembly and the Indian Parliament in New Delhi not to mention an armed insurgency in Kargil where the two armies fought a bloody battle for months.

Comparisons are odious but the scale of death and destruction in the once idyllic Valley of Kashmir is clearly the most pressing challenge before the international community today. For the truth is, the people's movement in Kashmir has been completely hijacked by Islamic terrorist organizations like the Hizbul Mujahiddin, who work closely with al-Qaeda.

These people care little for the welfare of the Kashmiris and less for the enormous suffering they have unleashed in the sub- continent, their one point agenda is to find a new base from which to operate now that Kabul is gone.

A victory for fundamentalist forces here would set the world back to where it was before Sept. 11, 2001. After all, the ordinary Afghan did not want to be 'liberated' by the compassionate bin Laden any more than does the ordinary Kashmiri, which is why the moderate Lone had to go. His possible victory in the forthcoming Kashmiri elections may have paved the way eventually for greater autonomy for Kashmir within the Indian union.

As for Pakistan, it enjoys less sympathy and credibility among Kashmiris than at any time since independence. It has betrayed its own creation, the Taliban, for a fist full of dollars. It has managed to alienate the extremists and its own economic and political bankruptcy is highlighted by a series of military coups which have alienated the vast majority of Kashmiri moderates.

On the eve of what could still result in Indian military action against terrorist camps in POK, it is time to ask some basic questions: Can Pakistan continue to support the same terrorist militias in Kashmir that it is turning in to the Americans in Afghanistan? Can India show the statesmanship required to accommodate the autonomous aspirations of the Kashmiris? And can the world allow two nuclear powers to continue this 50-year war of attrition without taking a moral position on terrorism and its consequences as it did on Sept. 11?

General Musharraf says these terrorist forces are beyond his control -- well, then, why not team up with India and root them out, because, after all Pakistan is bound to do just that according to Security Council Resolution 1373, which it signed on terrorism? It is time for the newly-elected leader to prove his democratic credentials and his sincerity that his nation is not an exporter of terrorism.