New York Times
May 16, 1998

NUCLEAR ANXIETY: IN INDIA
New Delhi Premier Indicates Resolve to Produce Nuclear Weapons
By JOHN F. BURNS

DATELINE: NEW DELHI, May 15 -- Only 48 hours after India ended a series of five underground nucleartests that stunned the world, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee indicated today that India would not hesitate before deploying the nuclear weapons the tests were designed to perfect.

"We do not want to cover our action with a veil of needless ambiguity," Mr. Vajpayee said in an interview with India Today, a news magazine. "India is now a nuclear weapons state. We have the capacity for a big bomb now, for which a necessary command-and-control system is also in place. Ours will never be weapons of aggression." Both the magazine and the Government released transcripts of the interview.

Indian nuclear experts said the "big bomb" Mr. Vajpayee mentioned was apparently a reference to the largest explosion, on Monday, of what India described as a "thermo-nuclear device," meaning a weapon with many times the explosive power of the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan in 1945.

Mr. Vajpayee's remarks, which took the form of written responses to questions from India Today, did not indicate that India had already deployed nuclear missiles, or even that deployments were imminent. Rather, he seemed to emphasize that India, having demonstrated the ability to detonate nuclear warheads designed to be mounted on missiles, would not now be persuaded to stop short of producing them when it is ready.

The remarks appeared to close off a crucial avenue for diplomacy that American officials had hoped to explore as they seek to persuade Pakistan, India's arch-rival, not to respond with tests of its own. A delegation sent by President Clinton arrived today in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, and met with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and other top officials, who indicated they had not yet decided whether to conduct a test and suggested they might still be dissuaded.

And at a summit meeting in Birmingham, England, Mr. Clinton won agreement on a firm statement criticizing India, but failed to mobilize other nations to take punitive action against New Delhi.

In the interview, Mr. Vajpayee, leader of a Hindu nationalist party that came to power at the head of a 14-party coalition Government only two months ago, was alternately blunt and conciliatory. He said the blasts proved that "we mean business" about becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, and vowed that India would not be "cowed down" by economic sanctions from the United States, Japan and half a dozen other nations. "India has the sanction of her own past glory and future vision to become strong," he said.

The Prime Minister called India's critics, including the United States, "hypocritical," adding: "Some of the countries which have talked of sanctions, or have otherwise criticized our action, have themselves not only conducted far more nuclear tests than we have done, but they have also built huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Many of them are enjoying the shade provided by somebody else's nuclear umbrella."

But the harsh words were accompanied by reassurances regarding India's resolve to be a responsible member of the "nuclear club" it gate-crashed with its tests.

"I would like to assure the people of the world, especially in our part of the world, that there is no cause for worry at all, much less any alarm, on account of India's action," he said. "All that India has done is conduct five nuclear tests. You place this fact in the context of the hundreds of nuclear tests that have been carried out by several countries so far, and it becomes obvious that India's action does not in the least warrant consideration of worst-case scenarios."

American officials had hoped that even if Pakistan did stage a nuclear test, they could still head off an arms race by persuading India and Pakistan to forgo military deployments of nuclear weapons. Mr. Vajpayee's remarks today did not ultimately exclude that option, since his Government or a successor could conceivably change India's policy as the economic sanctions begin to bite.

Another possible avenue of appeal appeared to have been closed off when Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party, India's main opposition group, announced that the party supported the tests. In remarks that were reported today, Mrs. Gandhi abandoned the equivocal stand that had been taken by other party officials earlier in the week.  "The nuclear question is a national matter, not a partisan one," she said.  "On this, every Indian stands united."

Western weapons experts have estimated that it could take India anywhere from months to several years to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles in any numbers. Starting in 1993, India has test-fired three versions of the Agni missile, designed to become an intermediate-range nuclear missile, able to hit targets up to 1,500 miles away. A shorter-range missile, the Prithvi, with a range of 250 miles, has been more extensively tested, and Indian forces also have artillery capable of firing nuclear-tipped shells at battlefield range.

Together, these weapons would give New Delhi the power to hit targets anywhere in Pakistan and in southern regions of China, the country Mr. Vajpayee identified as India's primary security concern. Shortly before the tests, India's Defense Minister, George Fernandes, described China as India's "potential No. 1 enemy," and said some of China's fast-growing arsenal of nuclear missiles were targeted on India.

Mr. Vajpayee confirmed the role that national pride played in the decision to carry out the tests. His Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People's Party, leads a movement that has worked for 70 years to persuade Indians that an assertive Hindu pride is the solution to India's problems. That stance has alarmed India's minority of 120 million Muslims, as well as Pakistan, a Muslim state created out of the partition of British India in 1947.

"India has never considered military might as the ultimate measure of national strength," Mr. Vajpayee said. "It is a necessary component of overall national strength. I would, therefore, say that the greatest meaning of the tests is they have given India shakti, they have given India strength, they have given India self-confidence." Shakti is a Hindi word meaning power, commonly used when referring to Hindu gods.

He noted that Hindu nationalists had been advocating "the cause of India going nuclear" for 40 years, and had done so because of "a stark regional and global reality," meaning that China and other major powers had nuclear weapons stockpiles and showed no sign of abandoning them.  "The world knows the truth about the progress -- or rather, the lack of it -- made by the nuclear powers in the direction of nuclear disarmament," he said. "The world community should appreciate the fact that India, the second most-populous country on earth, waited for five decades before taking this step."

He said his Government, like all Indian governments since the 1950's, preferred a "nuclear-free world," but had concluded that efforts by the United States and other nuclear powers to prevent the transfer of nuclear technology were "singularly ineffective." This was a reference to reports, confirmed by United States intelligence, that China has transferred missile-building and bomb-making technology to Pakistan. As a result, he said, India's tests were "a minimal response necessary" to protect India's security.

Mr. Vajpayee renewed his Government's pledge to "discuss certain provisions" of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that 149 nations, but not India or Pakistan, have signed. But he said the treaty should require nuclear powers to abandon their nuclear weapons programs, a condition certain to be rejected.

On the effect of sanctions, Mr. Vajpayee was dismissive. "Yes, our action has entailed a price," he said. "But we should not worry about it. India has an immense reservoir of resources and inner strength. If we tap this reservoir, this benefit will be a hundred times more than any price that we may have to pay in the short term."

New York Times
May 29, 1998
NUCLEAR ANXIETY: THE OVERVIEW
PAKISTAN, ANSWERING INDIA, CARRIES OUT NUCLEAR TESTS; CLINTON'S APPEAL REJECTED

By JOHN F. BURNS

DATELINE: NEW DELHI, Friday, May 29

Pakistan responded to India's nuclear tests on Thursday with underground nuclear tests of its own. Within hours, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared his country a "nuclear power," fulfilling a secret plan made by a predecessor nearly 30 years ago that Pakistan would build an "Islamic bomb."

In announcing that it had conducted five underground nuclear tests, Pakistan's first, the Islamabad Government simultaneously said it was already fitting nuclear warheads on a type of missile said to be able to strike targets across most of north and central India.

The news set off pandemonium in the Indian Parliament, which had been hotly debating India's recent nuclear tests. The announcement raised the specter of retaliation by India, Pakistan's archrival, which said after it conducted five tests of its own two weeks ago that it would begin fitting nuclear warheads on a range of missiles, including several developed specifically for targets in Pakistan.

"Today, we have evened the score with India," Mr. Sharif announced in a solemn television address about three hours after the tests, which were carried out at 3:30 P.M. Thursday (6:30 A.M. Thursday, Eastern time) at a testing range in the Chagai Hills, a desert region in the remote southwest, close to the borders with Afghanistan and Iran.

As he spoke, Pakistanis poured into the streets to dance and fire guns in the air, and crowds jammed mosques to offer prayers.

Early today, Mr. Sharif's Government declared a national state of emergency, further heightening the sense of crisis that has gripped the subcontinent since the first Indian nuclear tests on May 11. The statement was issued shortly after midnight by the titular President, Mohammed Rafiq Tarar, acting under constitutional provisions that may be invoked when Pakistan's security falls "under threat of external aggression." It was not clear whether Mr. Sharif intended to go further, by curbing civil rights, suspending Parliament or taking other measures that Pakistan has often resorted to in its 50 years as a nation. Officials in Pakistan said privately that they did not expect such moves, but noted that Mr. Sharif would need emergency powers to respond quickly if India reacted to the Pakistan tests by actions that push the two countries closer to a military confrontation.

Tremors from Pakistan's tests registered at seismic centers as far away as Australia, Sweden and the United States, although American intelligence officials said Pakistan had probably tested only two weapons rather than the five announced.

Pakistan described its tests as "a complete success," but offered no details about the types of weapons involved or their explosive power. But a separate Government statement said the Ghauri missile, test-fired on April 6, was "already being capped with nuclear warheads to give a befitting reply to any misadventure by the enemy," meaning India.

Some Indian officials have said it was the Ghauri test that touched off the tests ordered by India's Hindu nationalist-led Government. 

President Clinton, who had made the last of five telephone calls appealing for restraint from Mr. Sharif only hours before the tests, quickly announced that the United States would impose the same package of economic sanctions on Pakistan that it applied to India after its tests. The sanctions include a suspension of American economic aid, a ban on American bank loans to government institutions and pressure for a cutoff of aid from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which have propped up Pakistan's debt-laden, enfeebled economy for years.

"I cannot believe," Mr. Clinton said. "that we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th century, when we know it is not necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national greatness, or to personal fulfillment."

When the first shouted word of Pakistan's tests has heard in the Indian Parliament, a Communist leader, Somnath Chatterjee, interrupted a speech condemning India's tests and addressed himself directly to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Hindu nationalist leader who approved the Indian tests. "You have started a nuclear arms race in this region," he said.

Mr. Vajpayee left the chamber to check with other officials, returning quickly to make a statement. "If this is true, then India's policy has been vindicated," he said.

Later, Mr. Vajpayee rejected suggestions that India had set off a nuclear spiral, saying it had acted only because of concern about Pakistan's covert nuclear program. "In fact, Pakistan forced us to take the path of nuclear deterrence," he said.

He did not rule out retaliation. "India is ready to meet any challenge," he said.

Asked if India might set aside the moratorium on nuclear testing it declared after its tests, Mr. Vajpayee replied, "A new situation has been created, and it will be taken into account in formulating our policy."

The tests set off widespread alarm around the world, with statements of condemnation from Russia, China, Britain and a score of other nations, some of which, including Japan, Australia, Germany and Sweden, announced economic sanctions of their own against Pakistan. Many economists predicted that the sanctions, especially if they include a cutoff in emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund that have repeatedly staved off bankruptcy for Pakistan, could be a body blow to an economy that has staggered from crisis to crisis for decades.

The hours before the tests were marked by extreme tensions in Islamabad and New Delhi after Pakistan summoned India's diplomatic envoy to a meeting at 1:30 A.M. on Thursday and accused India of planning a pre-emptive military strike "before dawn" on the Chagai Hills testing center.

Simultaneously, Pakistan's representative to the United Nations, Ahmad Kamal, met Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York, and asked him to intervene with the United States and India to halt any Indian attack.

Pakistan issued a statement saying any Indian attack on the nuclear installations would "receive a swift and massive retaliation with unforeseen consequences."

India, which signed a pact with Pakistan in 1988 under which both nations undertook not to attack each other's nuclear installations, responded with a statement describing Pakistan's allegation as "vicious propaganda" and pledging to abide by India's obligation under the pact.

American intelligence officials expressed skepticism about Mr. Sharif's assertion that Pakistan was already mounting nuclear warheads on its missiles, as well as about Pakistani officials' assertions that India had threatened to attack the nuclear test site hours before the detonations.

Unlike India, which undertook elaborate deceptive measures ahead of its tests, catching even the Central Intelligence Agency off guard, Pakistan made its preparations under close scrutiny from Western intelligence agencies. About 24 hours before the tests, officials in Washington said American spy satellites had detected last-minute steps at the Chagai Hills site, including the pouring of concrete into the shafts prepared for the tests, and said the blasts could come at any time.

By going ahead with the tests, Mr. Sharif turned his back on a broad package of American military and economic assistance Mr. Clinton had offered if Pakistan held off.

Many economists, in Pakistan and elsewhere, have said Pakistan's $32 billion in foreign debt and more than $30 billion in domestic debt made it far more vulnerable to the sanctions imposed by Mr. Clinton than India is. A similar point has been made by Indian politicians who have supported New Delhi's tests, some of whom have said India's deeper pockets will enable it to outspend and eventually ruin Pakistan if a nuclear arms race develops.

In rejecting the American overtures, Mr. Sharif said he was bowing to overwhelming domestic political pressures, from military chiefs, opposition

leaders like former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and powerful Muslim clerics. Ms. Bhutto had vowed to "take to the streets" at the head of mass demonstrations in a bid to force Mr. Sharif from office if he did not go ahead with the tests, and she had even urged Western powers to mount a "pre-emptive" strike on India's nuclear installations to help Pakistan.

It was Ms. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who as Pakistan's President committed the country to a covert nuclear weapons program in the early 1970's, telling associates that the world needed an "Islamaic bomb" to match those under the control of Christians, Communists and, once India's secret nuclear weapons program matured, Hindus. After Mr. Bhutto was overthrown by the Pakistani Army in 1977 and hanged in 1979, there were reports that some of the financing for the Pakistani program came from other Muslim countries, including Libya.

But according to Western intelligence reports and court records, an equally important role was played, in most cases inadvertently, by Western countries. Since the 1970's, Pakistani scientists and intelligence agents have illicitly obtained much of the know-how needed to build nuclear weapons, as well as many of the components. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the physicist who oversaw the tests, is said to have played a key role by photocopying classified documents while he was working in a laboratory in the Netherlands in the 1970's.

In his television address, Mr. Sharif, a 48-year-old industrialist who has alternated in office with Ms. Bhutto since the end of military rule in 1988, spoke of the nuclear tests as a national rite of passage as well as an inevitable" defensive measure after India's nuclear tests.

"Today, we have made history," he said, speaking in Urdu, the national language. "Today, God has given us the opportunity to take critical steps for the country's defense. We have become a nuclear power."

The Pakistani leader described India as "an expansionist power" and claimed that New Delhi had "started" all three wars between the two countries in 1947, 1965 and 1971.

But he reserved some of his strongest language for Western powers, saying they had ignored repeated pleas from Pakistan. "The big powers have never taken us seriously, and have accepted India's falsehoods instead," he said.  "So what happened today must be seen as a natural reaction on our part."

But Mr. Sharif devoted most of his address to the economic challenge facing Pakistan. He said he had ordered all Government ministers to move out of their official residences, and announced that he would leave what he described as the "palatial" Prime Minister's residence, a $50 million mansion. He said the residences would be turned into schools, clinics and welfare centers.

He said sanctions would give Pakistan an opportunity to abandon decades of profligacy and corruption, especially by a small minority of rich Pakistanis, who he said had "mortgaged" the country's future. He announced an immediate end to the import of foreign luxury goods like cars and television sets, a crackdown on rampant tax evasion and a drive against smuggling, which has cut into the customs duties that are the Government's largest revenue source.

"By imposing sanctions, the Western powers will have done us a favor," he said. "They will have given us a chance to effect a revolution in our way of life, to learn to live within our means and to stop this cynical wastage of our national resources. We must conserve every penny of foreign exchange, and treat it like oxygen, essential to our country's survival. We will have to be disciplined, at all times, in all places."

In another decree today, Mr. Sharif imposed "temporary restrictions" on all foreign exchange transactions in Pakistan and a mandatory "holiday" for all banks. The moves appeared to be an effort to halt a flight of foreign investment and a run on the hard-currency bank accounts held by many wealthy Pakistanis.

For many Pakistanis, belt-tightening is likely to be superfluous, since tens of millions live in conditions of extreme deprivation, with menial jobs or none at all, no access to safe drinking water and little in the way of education or medical care. By most estimates, Pakistan is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world.

But as was the case in India after its nuclear tests, the streets of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, as well as scores of other cities and towns, were filled with celebrations by Pakistanis from every rung on the economic ladder.

"I'm very glad we've done it -- it was the right thing to do," said Raisuddin, a butcher in Karachi, a city of 15 million people that was virtually paralyzed by traffic jams as people headed for the city center to join in the festivities, according to an Associated Press report.

Chart: "CHRONOLOGY: The Birth of Two Nuclear Powers"

Some of the important events as Pakistan and India developed their nuclear weapon capabilities.

1940's

1948 -- India establishes an Atomic Energy Commission for exploration for uranium ore.

1950's

1955 -- The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission is established.

1958 -- India begins designing and acquiring equipment that could lead to atomic weapons.

1960's

1965 -- A Pakistani nuclear research reactor reportedly starts functioning. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announces: If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry. But we will get one of our own.

1968 The Non-Proliferation Treaty is completed. India and Pakistan refuse to sign.

1970's

1974 -- India tests a device of up to 15 kilotons and calls the test a "peaceful nuclear explosion." Pakistan's Prime Minister Bhutto reportedly tells a secret meeting of Pakistan's top scientists of the intention to develop nuclear arms.

1980's

1987 -- Leading Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan says Pakistan has a nuclear bomb.

1990's

1990 -- President Bush imposes military sanctions on Pakistan for pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

1992 -- Pakistan says it has the components and know-how to make at least one nuclear explosive device.

1997 -- India announces development of supercomputer technology that can be used to test nuclear weapon designs.

May 11-13, 1998 -- India conducts five underground nuclear tests; declares itself a nuclear state.

Yesterday -- Pakistan detonates nuclear devices.

(Sources: Associated Press; The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control,The Risk Report: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction; U.S. Geological Survey)

The Race Is On -- and May Be Hard to Stop

By Steve Coll
Washington Post
Friday, May 29, 1998; Page A01

Since the moment at the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev shocked the public by musing out loud about abolishing nuclear weapons, the world's security has been shaped by a seemingly inexorable trend -- the decline of nuclear arms as legitimate instruments of military and strategic power.

Now, under the deserts of a subcontinent far from Western capitals and even farther from Western understanding, the prospect of nuclear war has returned to the global stage, as Indian and Pakistani leaders test nuclear bombs amid aggressive, sometimes apocalyptic rhetoric that echoes hauntingly the most irrational phases of the West's "Dr. Strangelove" period.

The subcontinent's sudden nuclear breakout stems mainly from the recent rise to power in India of a sometimes virulent Hindu nationalist movement whose hard-line elements seek nothing less than to reinvent modern India, breaking sharply from its 50-year experiment with constitutional secularism. For the extremists in this movement, defying the world by acquiring nuclear weapons and starting an arms race with Pakistan is but a means to these long-sought domestic ends.

But what unfolds in the weeks and months ahead has implications that extend far beyond the subcontinent, as global leaders struggle to hold on to the progress that has been made since the Cold War in halting the spread of nuclear weaponry worldwide.

"If these actions by India and Pakistan are not reversed -- and I know that's difficult -- we can expect other states to follow suit over time, because what [the tests] indicate, especially the Indian tests, is that the acquisition of nuclear weapons can be viewed as a legitimate way to increase national prestige," said Thomas Graham Jr., the longtime U.S. arms-control negotiator who led the successful U.S. effort in 1995 to win indefinite extension of the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And if the existing nonproliferation regime begins to unravel because of a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent, Graham predicted, "it will mean that the world will begin to proceed down the path toward widespread nuclear proliferation that we narrowly avoided back in the 1960s."

The gravest immediate threat, of course, is not to the rest of the world, but to Indians and Pakistanis themselves. Uncertainties on each side about the other's exact nuclear and missile capabilities, deep mutual suspicion at both the governmental and popular levels, poor communications across the border and an active dispute in the Kashmir region that involves exchanges of artillery fire are all combining to make the emerging crisis extraordinarily dangerous.

Nor is there any indication that either side plans to pull back anytime soon. Pakistan announced yesterday that it plans to deploy nuclear warheads on its medium-range Ghauri missiles, which have been flight-tested and can strike many major Indian cities. If this is not mere bluster -- and the Indians have no way to know for certain one way or the other -- Pakistan may have leap-frogged India in their strategic rivalry by moving to deploy proven nuclear missiles. The Ghauris fly much farther than any missiles India could bring into the field in the near future, according to Western analysts.

"The Pakistani official announcement that they are mating warheads with missiles -- that's such an important threshold that's been crossed," said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center and a specialist on South Asian military and nuclear affairs. "The Indians don't have a match."

India's options, should it decide to try to deploy nuclear weapons rapidly, would be to try to fit them on its short-range Prithvi missile -- which can barely clear the Indian border and would pose risks to India's own population in any nuclear exchange -- or else to strap nuclear bombs onto jet aircraft and hope that at least one or two could penetrate Pakistan's patchy air defenses if a strike were ordered. The Indians have announced publicly that their own medium-range missile, the Agni, is ready for deployment, but many Western analysts believe that assertion to be a bluff, estimating that the Agni is at least a year or two away from deployment.

"I'm afraid the Indians are going to say, 'We're going to match you in kind, and then some,' " said Sumit Ganguly, a specialist in South Asian defense issues and the author of a recent book on the Kashmir dispute. "I'm afraid that with the Pakistanis [testing and announcing deployments], it becomes a point of no return, particularly with this government [in New Delhi]; they are not going to let up."

The most dangerous flash point, as it so often has been during previous conflicts between India and Pakistan -- including two of the three wars they have fought since 1947 -- is Jammu and Kashmir, an idyllic mountain province of India that was once a magnet for tourists but is now a cauldron of rebellion by Kashmiri Muslim militants seeking to break away from Indian rule. The eight-year Kashmir rebellion has helped draw both the Indian and Pakistani armies to the disputed region in force, where they routinely trade fire across an international demarcation line and accuse each other of egregious provocations.

Over the last few days, this dangerous situation has been exacerbated by the saber-rattling declarations of L.K. Advani, the home minister in India's Hindu nationalist government. A week ago, Advani warned Pakistan that India's nuclear tests had "brought about a qualitatively new stage in Indo-Pakistan relations" and said that Pakistan should "roll back its anti-India policy, especially with regard to Kashmir."

Then, on Saturday, Advani was given charge of affairs in Jammu and Kashmir -- a development that has alarmed Pakistani officials, not least because Advani and others in his party have been talking loosely about authorizing military "hot pursuit" of Kashmiri rebels into Pakistani-controlled territory.

Pakistan's own published military doctrine has long held that to prevail in a conventional conflict with India -- which has a great advantage in numbers of soldiers, tanks and aircraft -- Pakistan would have to move quickly and boldly to strike deeply into Indian territory and try to force an early end to the conflict.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Indeed, until India's Rajasthan desert shook on May 11 with the force of Shakti -- the Hindi word meaning power that India's government chose as the code name for its nuclear devices -- the last several years had been marked by extraordinary achievements in global nuclear arms control, progress so extensive, at least on treaty paper, that few would have forecast it even five years earlier.

Just 20 months ago, calling it "the longest sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history," President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which bars all nuclear test explosions by its more than 150 signatory nations. After persuading such reluctant countries as China and France to sign -- and overcoming resistance from some of his own military advisers -- Clinton declared that the treaty had pushed the world "toward a century in which the roles and risks of nuclear weapons can be further reduced, and ultimately eliminated."

The 1996 test ban pact followed by a year the permanent extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which provides the basic architecture of international efforts to contain the spread of nuclear arms. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's demise, the NPT regime had been greatly bolstered by the decisions of threshold nuclear powers, such as South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, to forswear nuclear arms and submit to international inspections.

Despite resentments among many Third World governments that the nonproliferation treaty allows the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France to retain nuclear weapons while making only vague promises to get rid of them eventually, the consensus for strengthening the treaty and its nuclear inspection regime proved so strong in the early months of 1995 that even such radically anti-Western countries as Libya, Iraq and Iran went along with it in the end.

It is uncertain whether that anti-nuclear momentum will prove strong enough to withstand India's and Pakistan's declarations that they wish to become the world's sixth and seventh declared nuclear weapons powers. While persuading the two countries to cap their programs or reverse course any time soon looks like an enormously difficult task, it may be possible to prevent their example from spreading to other threshold countries, argue some U.S. officials and outside arms control and foreign policy specialists.

But that goal may depend in part on the signals the world sends to threshold countries in the months ahead about the costs of going nuclear. So far, the major powers have shown little will to punish India and Pakistan severely, in part because of the powers' various economic and strategic ties to the region, and in part out of fear that any effort to isolate the two subcontinental rivals as they undertake a nuclear arms race will only make a bad situation worse.

August 9, 1998
New York Times
Some Disputes Get Settled. Then There's Kashmir.
By JOHN F. BURNS

NEW DELHI, India -- In an era when some of the world's bitterest disputes have begun to give way to accommodation, the enmity between India and Pakistan over Kashmir erupted again over the past 10 days in ways that underscored how intractable and potentially dangerous the confrontation has become, especially since both countries have now demonstrated their ability to build and detonate nuclear weapons.

Unlike hostilities that have yielded, or begun to yield, in Germany, Ireland, the Middle East and South Africa, those in Kashmir show every sign of being frozen in time. After 50 years of division, two wars and ceaseless propaganda, the territory remains the touchstone of all that sets India and Pakistan apart -- all the religious, cultural and territorial passions that have raged since the partition of British India in 1947. As such, it remains the most likely flashpoint of another war, one with potential now to involve nuclear weapons.

Despite the hazards, just about everybody involved, including ranking Indian and Pakistani officials and Western emissaries who have talked with both sides, seems to agree that the issue is so tangled in resentments that there is almost no likelihood of settlement, and that the 1.1 billion people of Pakistan and India will stay hostage to the dispute for years to come.

From this pessimistic viewpoint, India will continue to regard the predominantly Muslim territory as essential to its security and coherence as a secular state; Pakistan will press, without real hope of success, for India to honor its pledge in the 1950s to allow a United Nations-supervised plebiscite among Kashmir's 9 million people to choose between India and Pakistan.

The latest demonstration of the intransigence on both sides came in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, when the two prime ministers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, met during an annual conference of South Asian leaders at the end of July, only to fall quickly into old arguments over Kashmir. Still unable to agree even on procedures for discussing the territory, Vajpayee and Sharif abandoned plans to restart broader negotiations that have faltered on and off throughout the 1990's.

Even before the leaders reached home, their failure was echoing in Kashmir. Artillery duels across the 550-mile "line of control" that separates the Indian and Pakistani armies reached a new crescendo, killing dozens of civilians. Before dawn Monday, armed men identified by Indian police as Kashmiri Muslim rebels crossed from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir into the neighboring Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and opened fire on two groups of sleeping construction workers. Police said that 34 men, most or all of them Hindus, died, with a dozen others wounded. Later in the week, at least another 50 people died in similar attacks.

In the past decade, at least 30,000 and perhaps 50,000 civilians have been killed in the Kashmir dispute, most of them victims of the struggle between Indian forces and Muslim rebels that Pakistan has armed and financed in the Kashmir Valley, the heartland of the old, undivided Kashmir. Unable to seriously challenge Indian control in the valley, the rebels have shifted their attacks increasingly into less heavily-fortified areas to the south, and now beyond Kashmir's borders. These forays employ terror tactics, mostly against Hindus, that have prompted waves of anger across India.

The slaughter in Himachal Pradesh was at least the seventh such incident involving unarmed Hindu victims this year. Villagers at a remote settlement have had their throats cut for refusing to eat beef on the orders of Muslim rebels, and members of two wedding parties have been gunned down while waiting for buses to take them home. Counterpart attacks across the frontier in the Pakistan-ruled part of Kashmir, with Muslim civilians as victims, have been blamed by Pakistan on Indian commandos. Although India has denied the Pakistani allegations, Indian officers acknowledge that commando missions across the line of control have been one means of punishing Pakistan for supporting the rebels.

Yet despite the scale of the violence and the risks of a wider war, Kashmir's miseries have only rarely attracted the attention that has focused on other long-running international disputes. Perhaps because it is a small territory, tucked up in the folds of the Himalayan mountains, and with a history not widely known outside the region, Kashmir and its problems have been largely a specialists' domain.

A compelling example was the sporadic interest, at least in the West, in the plight of six Western tourists, two of them Americans, who were kidnapped by Muslim rebels while on hiking trips in the Kashmir Valley in July 1995. One American escaped; a Norwegian was savagely murdered in the first month, his headless body dumped on a village path. In 1997, Western diplomats concluded that the other four hostages -- two Britons, a German and the missing American -- were almost certainly killed in December 1995.

But how many Americans who had known the name Terry Anderson could identify Donald Frederick Hutchings, a neuropsychologist from Spokane, Wash., as the American hostage missing in Kashmir?

This indifference could be jolted if India and Pakistan remain at an impasse over the territory, and refuse even to discuss it, raising the risks that the violence may someday provide the spark for another full-scale war, like the ones that erupted in 1947 and 1965.

Although both nations said after the nuclear tests that they were ready to negotiate measures that will lessen the risks, even the kind of "confidence-building measures" that helped stabilize the Cold War will be impossible until negotiations begin; and those, in turn, are blocked for now by the animosities and suspicions that envelop Kashmir.

In the meantime, some in India and Pakistan question whether the two governments really want to lessen tensions. Vajpayee served as foreign minister in the late 1970s -- a time when many in both countries say relations between India and Pakistan improved more than at any time since 1947. But he is today the parliamentary leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that has never truly forgiven Pakistan for the partition of 1947.

In its five months in power, Vajpayee's 14-party coalition has tottered from one domestic crisis to another, causing Indian skeptics to worry that party hard-liners might welcome renewed hostilities in Kashmir for the political boost it might give them among India's 700-million Hindus.

And Sharif, like every Pakistani leader, has shown an instinct to stoke up tensions over Kashmir whenever his domestic problems mount. He reaped a surge in popular backing after ordering Pakistan's nuclear tests in May, but his support has since plummeted across his country, largely because of a weak economy made worse by international sanctions imposed after the tests.

In Colombo, even Pakistani journalists accused Sharif of "playing the Kashmir card," meaning that he used the Kashmir issue to block any move toward lessening tensions with India, partly in the hope of boosting his popularity at home.

To Sign or Not to Sign? India, Pakistan Must Answer at Home on Joining Nuclear Pact

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post
Wednesday, October 14, 1998; Page A17

NEW DELHI—Despite a flurry of signals abroad that India and Pakistan are finally prepared to endorse a nuclear test ban treaty, their politically weak governments must overcome serious hurdles at home before making a firm and formal commitment.

The biggest obstacle is the mistrust and resentment many Indians and Pakistanis feel toward the United States. Washington has been placing heavy economic and diplomatic pressure on both countries to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty since May, when the neighboring rivals alarmed the world by unexpectedly conducting a series of nuclear weapons tests.

In India, there is a widespread belief that the country's nuclear coming of age has given it the technological confidence to sign such a pact -- and, at the same time, the right to punish its American sponsors for what Indians see as years of arrogance and hypocrisy in their dealings with the region. New Delhi's signature, it is argued, should not come cheaply.

"We have obeyed the rules for 50 years, we have no record of aggression, we don't covet territory. No one has the right to tell us we cannot have the nuclear option," said Natwar Singh, a former foreign minister and senior leader of the opposition Congress party.

Singh's advice to the government is go slowly, be cautious, look for the middle ground but do not lose sight of India's overriding concerns: promoting security at home and full disarmament abroad. And his message to U.S. officials sounds like that of pro-government advisers.

"They should remember, we are not a banana republic," he said in an interview last week, complaining that the five nuclear powers act like "judge, jury and executioners" toward developing countries. By sanctioning India while ignoring China's nuclear advancements, he added, Washington is "pampering a dictatorship and pestering a democracy."

Others take a more generous view, arguing that a newly nuclearized India can afford to drop its defensive posture vis-a-vis Washington. They note that during his visit to the United Nations last month, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made it clear to U.S. leaders that India is playing in a bigger league. "We have shown the world we can test. We have shown the world we can stand up to pressure. There is no need for us to keep showing the world perpetually," said K. Subrahmanyam, a foreign policy columnist for the Hindu Times. "Signing [the test-ban treaty] wouldn't cost us much, and it would give us a feeling of being good...Why not humor them a bit?"

While in New York, Vajpayee said India would be willing eventually to adhere to the treaty under certain conditions. Even though President Clinton has canceled a November trip to the region, in part because U.S. officials felt neither India nor Pakistan had made enough progress in bilateral talks on nuclear issues, government aides here say the gap between the U.S. and Indian positions has been "narrowing fast."

Yet they also warn frankly that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest party in India's fragile coalition government, is too weak politically to rush the issue, which could crop up in three key regional elections next month. For years, Indians were told by their leaders that the test-ban treaty was a tool of Western hegemonic designs, and that makes Vajpayee's stance a vulnerable target.

"It is easy to demonize the BJP on this treaty," said one Foreign Ministry official. "There is no broad understanding of it. The Congress party has no other major issues, and this could give them a handle." On the other hand, he added, if the BJP does well in November, "it will be an indirect endorsement" of Vajpayee's position, and the government could move more swiftly toward signing.

In Pakistan, where Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also has expressed general support for the test ban, the country has a history of close strategic relations with the United States, and the ruling Muslim League party enjoys a solid majority in parliament. Yet popular and political opposition to the test-ban treaty has been spreading, not declining.

In recent weeks, antagonism to the treaty has become entwined with public outrage, especially among conservative Muslim groups, over the U.S. missile strikes in August at alleged Muslim terrorist bases in neighboring Afghanistan. The attacks emboldened Islamic hard-liners in Pakistan, who denounced the United States in street protests.

"Do the United States, England, France have orders from God that they should be nuclear powers and not us?" asked Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami movement, speaking from a truck to several thousand supporters recently in downtown Islamabad. Placards in the crowd read, "CTBT = Criminal Treaty by Terrorists."

Sharif, already under siege for economic and foreign policy blunders, is desperate to get out from under the U.S. sanctions imposed on his poor and debt-ridden nation. At the United Nations late last month, he echoed Vajpayee in saying Pakistan was prepared eventually to abide by the treaty -- a reversal of Pakistan's long-standing position.

But a cantankerous array of opposition parties in parliament is in no mood to hand Sharif any diplomatic victories, while experts have raised a nationalistic drumbeat against letting India gain the upper hand militarily and letting the United States manipulate Pakistan's economic dependence.

"The present leadership of the country has taken a road which . . . would entangle us more and more in the American trap," Khurshid Ahmed, chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad, wrote recently. Without proper safeguards, he said, the treaty will squander Pakistan's new stature as a nuclear power. One step on this slippery ladder, and Pakistan will start "sliding down to reach the lowness of humility."

With such sentiments still abounding in both countries, even if substantial progress is made in the next rounds of private talks with U.S. officials, the leaders of India and Pakistan may find their hardest negotiating awaits them at home.

February 22, 1999
New York Times
India and Pakistan Agree to Reduce Risk of Nuclear War
By BARRY BEARAK

LAHORE, Pakistan -- The prime ministers of India and Pakistan pledged Sunday to take immediate steps to reduce the risk of nuclear war and seek solutions to a half-century of raging disputes, including their most volatile source of discord, the conflict in Kashmir.

Agreements between the world's newest nuclear powers were announced in two signed documents and a joint statement, all issued at the end of a historic weekend bus trip to Pakistan by Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first Indian prime minister to visit the country in 10 years. Last May, after the two nations tested their bombs, their leaders spoke truculently of each other as both populations celebrated a sort of nuclear euphoria. Now, eight and a half months later, the two prime ministers amiably sat side by side exchanging smiles.

"We must bring peace to our people," Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, said at a joint press conference in the elegant mansion of the governor of Punjab. "We must bring prosperity to our people. We owe this to ourselves and to future generations." While the atmosphere of the summit meeting was decidedly cordial -- and the very act of their meeting extraordinary -- there had been some expectation of a monumental breakthrough, such as a joint agreement to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The Indians had earlier mentioned a "no first use," pact on nuclear weapons, though that would have disadvantaged the Pakistanis who have achieved strategic parity. On the other hand, the Pakistanis had discussed a "no war" treaty, which would have protected them against the superior conventional forces of a foe they have been defeated by three times.

Instead, the agreements were long on good intentions and short on details. The two countries mostly talked about how they would continue to talk, listing areas for discussion: the liberalizing of visa rules, coordinating trade positions, releasing prisoners and detainees.

A "memorandum of understanding," was presented, the nations promising to build trust in each other through a series of high-level bilateral meetings and to adopt measures that would prevent any accidental launch of their destructive weaponry.

To reduce the risk of a catastrophic war, the nations promised to alert each other to "any accidental, unauthorized or unexplained incident" that might trigger a nuclear exchange. They promised to continue their declared moratoriums on further nuclear trials. They agreed to announce in advance any testing of ballistic missiles.

In a speech on the mansion lawns before hundreds of invited dignitaries, Vajpayee had explained the need for an era of neighborliness and invited Sharif and his wife to make a return visit to New Delhi.

"We can change history but not geography," he said. "We can change our friends but not our neighbors. We have seen hostility for years. Now friendship must be given a chance."

But if friendship is to flourish, the two nations must find a way to solve the issue that is their greatest source of friction, the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

In another of Sunday's documents, billed as the Lahore Declaration, the nations stated that resolution of the Kashmir question was "essential" and that they would "intensify their efforts" to do it. Pressed to elaborate at the press conference, neither prime minister was eager to say much more about a matter that provokes dark passions.

"The question of Jammu and Kashmir is being discussed on an agenda that has been accepted by the two parties," Vajpayee said matter-of-factly. "The discussion is going on. It is very difficult for me to say what solutions will emerge."

Kashmir, once the Himalayan summer paradise of Mughal emperors, has been the cause of two wars between India and Pakistan since they became independent in 1947.

A hundred years before, the British had installed a Hindu maharajah in the predominantly Muslim territory. At the time of partition, this Hindu ruler, Hari Singh, desperately wanted Kashmir to remain independent, though, after fighters from Pakistan invaded his realm, he thought better of it and chose to be part of India.

The war that followed made enemies of the two infant nations, a bloody start that has presaged a bloody half-century. The fighting was halted by a cease-fire in 1949 after the United Nations interceded. At the time, India was in control of two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan the rest -- more or less how things remain Sunday. Pakistan wants its larger neighbor to honor a 50-year-old pledge to give a choice to the Kashmiris through a plebiscite.

Both nations have hundreds of thousands of troops stationed along the 550-mile "line of control" that separates their holdings. Volleys of artillery fire echo through the lush valleys, a matter easier for the world to ignore before India and Pakistan added nuclear bombs to their arsenals.

Over the years, some 30,000-50,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, most of them victims of the struggle between Muslim rebels and Indian forces.

Pakistan claims to provide only moral encouragement to the militants while India insists that the aid is a lethal mix of training and weapons.

As if to dramatize the difficulties in any talks about Kashmir, 20 Hindus were murdered there on Friday night, an event that chased some of Vajpayee's diplomacy off the front pages back home. As he returned to New Delhi on Sunday night, reporters questioned him about whether he had discussed the slaughter with his Pakistani counterpart.

"I told him the killings must stop," Vajpayee answered. "If the killing of innocent men, women and children continues, it will be difficult to normalize relations between the two countries."

Sharif faces similar suspicions about any appeasement regarding Kashmir. Throughout the weekend, thousands of Pakistanis protested Vajpayee's visit, their chief concern being Kashmir. A Saturday night banquet at the historic Lahore Fort was delayed for 90 minutes as 1,000 demonstrators pelted vehicles with rocks. Baton-wielding police had to fire tear gas into the crowd and charge them before the protest was dispersed. Sunday, police fought with demonstrators near the Lahore headquarters of Jamaat-I-Islami, the nation's main Islamic party. About 100 people were arrested, including several senior party leaders.

KARGIL, India (AP) -- Indian air force jets strafed bunkers in the craggy Himalayans in Kashmir today, supporting ground troops trying to evict intruders from Pakistan who have held the snowy mountain peaks for a month.

The Indian military reported 31 militants and six Indian soldiers killed in ground fighting on the ninth day of a campaign that has intensified the longstanding hostility between the two nuclear powers.

Pakistan has proposed sending its foreign minister to India on a peace mission but the two countries were still wrangling today over when the trip will occur.

Showing what he called ``good will,'' Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today ordered the immediate release of a captured Indian pilot, shot down over Kashmir a week ago. The pilot was handed over to the International Red Cross.

Kashmir, a former princely state, has been the cause of two wars between Pakistan and India since their independence from Britain in 1947. Each country holds part of the region and claims the rest.

Muslim militants, who have been waging a bloody secessionist insurrection for more than one decade in Kashmir, want either outright independence or a merger with Islamic Pakistan.

India's air force concentrated its attacks on the Batalik sector, the isolated eastern perimeter where some of the heaviest fighting was underway.

Front-line officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said heavy shelling from Pakistan at Batalik was effectively blocking Indian troops from the approaches to the occupied peaks.

India has said it would consider giving the guerrillas safe passage to return to Pakistan if they sought it, but vowed to remove them -- one way or the other -- from the heights that dominate the northern highway. The road is the lifeline for the military guarding India's northern cease-fire line and for thousands of civilians.

In Pakistan, the umbrella group representing the militants said they would reject any offer of safe passage. The United Jehad Council, comprising 14 groups including four fighting in the Kargil mountains, said the guerrillas would not leave the area because it is their ``homeland.''

India accuses Pakistan of backing the guerrillas in a bid to change the cease-fire line through the territory. It says Pakistani army officers are commanding the militants.

The army claims the guerrillas have been pushed back from many positions and are holding only four or five key locations.

The battle zone is 440 miles north of New Delhi, the Indian capital. India claims it has killed 400 guerrillas so far, but admits that figure is an estimate based on radio intercepts. Before today's battle, India's losses were 46 dead and 12 missing.

Indian Declares 'Onus Is on Pakistan'
Foreign Ministers End New Delhi Meeting Without Agreement on Conflict in Kashmir

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post
Sunday, June 13, 1999; Page A27

NEW DELHI, June 12—The eight-hour visit here by Pakistan's foreign minister today appears to have done little to ease the bitter disagreement between India and Pakistan over who is responsible for the current conflict over the disputed border territory of Kashmir and what must be done to restore peace between the rival neighbors.

Before returning to Islamabad tonight, Sartaj Aziz told reporters he had "no illusions" about solving the problem in one brief visit, but added, "I refuse to be pessimistic...I can say at least the chances of further escalation do not seem strong."

He said both countries have a "huge stake" in restoring the cooperative spirit established when their prime ministers met in February in Lahore, Pakistan, and that he had made some suggestions today about how that could be done.

But Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh set a far more bleak, more unyielding tone in describing his talks with Aziz. He said he had made it "very clear" to his Pakistani counterpart that Pakistan must pull back the guerrillas who occupy a portion of Indian-controlled Kashmir or there can be no diplomatic progress on solving the crisis.

"We made our position clear. The onus is on Pakistan," Singh told reporters tonight. By sending fighters into Indian Kashmir, he said, Pakistan violated the bilateral security agreement reached in Lahore "even before the ink was dry…We now await their response to our demand to vacate this armed intrusion and aggression."

India and Pakistan have been engaged since mid-May in a low-level border war over Kashmir, which both countries claim. When India discovered that several hundred insurgents had infiltrated its portion of the Himalayan region, it launched airstrikes and sent thousands of ground troops to the area. The fighting has continued since.

Both sides have suffered casualties. Two Indian MiG fighter planes and a helicopter were shot down last month near the Line of Control that separates the Indian- and Pakistani-occupied parts of Kashmir, and India says Pakistani forces tortured and executed six Indian soldiers whose bodies were returned to India and buried this week.

No date has been set for further bilateral talks, and Indian officials said their military forces will continue to attack the insurgents aggressively. Military officials said Friday they are "inching forward" in their efforts to surround and drive back or kill the rebels, but that the extreme conditions and high terrain make progress slow and difficult.

The immediate stumbling block to any diplomatic solution is that India insists the insurgency is an operation of the Pakistani army, which Pakistan can and must shut down. Friday, Indian officials produced tapes of two alleged phone conversations between two top Pakistani military officials who seemed to be directing the operation and telling civilian officials what to say about it.

But Pakistan, while acknowledging this week that it has some troops inside the Indian-occupied part of Kashmir, insists that the rebels occupying positions in the mountainous Kargil region are largely Kashmiri "freedom fighters" over whom it has little control. It accuses India of being the aggressor by launching airstrikes and shelling across the Line of Control.

"As soon as Pakistan accepts that this myth making about freedom fighters is an untenable euphemism for Pakistani troops, then we can move forward," Singh said tonight. "The aggression has to be undone by military or diplomatic means, whichever applies first."

Aziz, when asked about Pakistani support for the insurgents, said, "You are talking about freedom fighters. How do you know who they are or where they come from?" Asked where the rebels had obtained their weapons and training, he said, "wherever they have been getting them for the last 10 years." He also asserted that civilian officials are "fully in control" of Pakistan's military and foreign policy.

Aziz said Pakistani forces have been "exercising restraint" in the face of Indian aggression and reiterated Pakistani denials that they had tortured and killed any Indian soldiers. He described the insurgency in Kargil as "the tip of the iceberg. . . . when people demand their rights for 50 years, they have no option but to fight."

Some countries, including China and the United States, have called on India and Pakistan to ease the Kashmir conflict and find a peaceful solution to the problem, which has plagued their bilateral relations for half a century. After Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947, the two countries disagreed on the status of Kashmir and they subsequently fought two wars over it -- in 1965 and 1971.

Both Pakistani and Indian officials said they want a peaceful solution, but India wants to limit its discussions to the current fighting in Kargil, while Pakistan hopes that the conflict will allow it to reopen the much broader issue of Kashmir's legal and political status.

SRINAGAR, India June 24—After nearly a month of fighting in icy reaches of the Himalayas claimed by both India and Pakistan, Indian troops have made enough military gains for New Delhi to all but declare victory in the latest round of hostilities over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

But as Islamic guerrillas cling to their high-altitude position and dozens of Indian troops return home in white-draped coffins, official rhetoric in both New Delhi and Islamabad is focused less on how to resolve the Kashmir conflict than on what the next military steps could be. Indian authorities said this week for the first time that they would consider sending troops into Pakistani territory if necessary, and some observers warned that if the Pakistani-backed guerrillas keep losing ground, Pakistan's armed forces might intensify the fight.

India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads over Kashmir since 1947, when Britain withdrew from India and created Pakistan as a separate Muslim state, and have fought two wars over the region. But the current conflict differs dramatically from the skirmishes that break out each year when the Himalayan snows melt and troops move to commanding heights along the 450-mile Line of Control separating Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The fighting is described by both sides as the fiercest in decades -- and the clash is the first significant one since the weapons tests last year that established the rivals as the newest nuclear powers.

The conflict began to unfold this spring when several hundred armed fighters crossed from Pakistani Kashmir into Indian Kashmir territory and dug themselves into strongholds atop a series of strategic mountain ridges in the Kargil region. Pakistan claims the fighters are Islamic "freedom fighters" whom they support politically but not militarily; India claims the men are largely Pakistani troops, with a smaller number of foreign mercenaries including Islamic militants from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

India, initially caught by surprise, launched unprecedented airstrikes on the region May 26 and then sent in tens of thousands of troops to dislodge the intruders. Indian forces have been fighting a literal uphill battle to rout them ever since.

Each day for nearly two weeks, Indian officials have given increasingly optimistic reports on their progress in beating back the "infiltrators," even as Indian casualties have reached more than 100 killed. Military spokesmen describe each new ridge point taken, each new batch of weapons captured and each new enemy combatant killed, identifying most as Pakistani soldiers.

It is only a matter of time, they assert confidently, before the mopping up operations are completed, the intruders are routed from the hills and the Line of Control is again intact.

On the diplomatic front, authorities in New Delhi are claiming even headier success. They say they are convincing the world that India has been victimized by Pakistani aggression. Statements from Washington and from leaders of the eight top industrialized nations meeting in Europe last weekend have avoided blaming Pakistan by name but have demanded that armed intrusion cease and the Line of Control be restored.

Accordingly, analysts here and in Islamabad say, Pakistani authorities have been badly bruised after their initial euphoria over capturing a chunk of strategic territory and drawing swift international attention to an issue India has always insisted on settling locally.

"The reality is that Pakistan faces daunting challenges . . . to reverse the perceptions of much of the international community about how the latest flare-up started over Kashmir and what should be done to address this," said today's lead editorial in the News, an influential Pakistani newspaper. "Any flight from reality or delusions at this critical juncture will inevitably set back the country's case."

But even though -- and perhaps because -- the tables have tilted toward India so quickly, there is still a danger that the conflict could escalate into a broader war.

Indian officials have repeatedly declared a "no first use" policy regarding nuclear weapons and pointed out that their arsenal is firmly under civilian control. This week, when a grass-roots group affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party virtually demanded that India teach Pakistan a nuclear lesson, officials denounced the statement as irresponsible nonsense.

Some analysts here, however, say they are still concerned that the Kargil conflict could spiral into a major conventional conflict. Indian military officials, frustrated by the difficult terrain and mounting casualty rate,

are reportedly considering an attack at another point on the long Line of Control. And on Tuesday, Indian officials said for the first time that if "national interests" are threatened, they would not rule out sending military forces across the line -- although Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared today that "we do not intend to cross the Line of Control."

Conversely, as Pakistani military officials see their fighters steadily losing ground, they might decide to raise the ante rather than face domestic humiliation. The dispute over Kashmir is an obsessive cause among Pakistan's armed forces, which have long wielded considerable political power at home and have never forgiven India for trying to seize land along the Line of Control in 1972 and 1984.

"The Pakistani army's chief aim is to maintain political primacy. I can't imagine them just going back to the barracks and saying, 'Sorry, we misfired,' " said P.R. Chari, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Srinagar. "If they get desperate and see they are losing power . . . could they indulge in a final madness and stage a coup in order to preempt being called to account for their failure?"

Officially, Pakistani authorities continue to assert that they provide nothing but moral support for the Islamic "freedom fighters" they say launched the incursion. But a Pakistani military spokesman acknowledged last week that some Pakistani soldiers have crossed the Line of Control, and Indian officials recently displayed a taped telephone conversation that seemed to show two Pakistani generals discussing how to run the cross-border attack.

Privately, some knowledgeable Pakistani sources suggested that civilian authorities in Islamabad exercise little control over the military and religious interests that fomented the Kashmir operation. Last week, leaders of armed Islamic groups and former military officers held a rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, threatening to bring down the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif if he "betrayed" the insurgents.

"If Nawaz tried to pull out the support for Kargil, he wouldn't survive," acknowledged a highly placed Pakistani source.

And what happens to relations between the two countries after the Kargil conflict, even if the resolution is acceptable to both sides? The answer is already a matter of debate.

Some Indian officials suggest the longtime rivals can return to their businesslike but wary relationship and continue working to resolve the longstanding Kashmir issue, as if Kargil had never happened. "As far as India is concerned, as soon as the aggression is reversed, we want to go back to normal and reconsider starting a dialogue again," said Raminder Jassal, a spokesman for India's Foreign Ministry. "There is no need for us to get hysterical or inflict punishment on Pakistan. We have a larger vision to ensure an improved relationship and a less hostile neighborhood."

But Sharif said today: "If there is war, or if the present confrontation continues on the borders, it will bring so much devastation, the damage of which will never be repaired."

And even some observers in India's security establishment suggest the clash has done serious and long-lasting damage to the progress that their civilian leaders had recently made toward more cooperative and open relations.

"Peace in South Asia has been set back, there is no doubt," said Asfir Karim, a retired general who edits a journal on regional conflict and serves as an adviser to India's National Security Council. "This is a defining moment, because Pakistan has made it clear they will use military means to obtain its goals in Kashmir. No one in India is in favor of starting another war, but Pakistan wants to put India in the dock. They are playing a dangerous game, and the sooner it is undone…the better."

Fighting Leaves 166 Dead in Kashmir

By Neelesh Misra 
Associated Press
Friday, July 9, 1999

MUSHKOH VALLEY, India (AP) — During fierce fighting Kashmir's Mushkoh Valley, Indian soldiers gunned down at least 50 guerrillas whom Pakistan's prime minister has tried to persuade to pull out of the area, field commanders said today.

Two days of fighting in the fertile valley, some four miles from Pakistan's border has left at least 120 guerrillas and 44 Indian soldiers dead -- the highest casualty in a single operation since the fighting in the disputed province began in early May, Indian officials said.

Soldiers also seized two peaks in the Batalik sector, some 65 miles northeast of Mushkoh Valley, said a senior field commander who declined to be identified.

Gains made by Indian soldiers have been decisive, army chief Gen. V.P. Malik was quoted as saying in today's Indian Express newspaper. Malik had just finished a two-day visit to the battlefront with air force chief A.Y. Tipnis.

India says it has pushed back the Islamic guerrillas several miles toward the cease-fire line that divides the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir from the sector controlled by Pakistan. Indian soldiers have retaken much of the territory but are facing heavy resistance in the Kaksar region.

``Their defenses in the Batalik area are crumbling,'' Malik was quoted as saying. ``Their casualties are very high and we see bodies lying all over.''

India says Pakistani troops are leading the fighters in Kashmir, a region divided between the two countries and claimed in its entirety by both. Islamabad, however, denies that, saying the fighters are Kashmiri insurgents that receive only moral support from Pakistan.

Early today, the militants launched a counterattack to seize a peak that has a view of supply routes from Pakistan, but Indian soldiers held on. The Indian air force bombarded some of the guerrilla positions today, an air force spokesman said in New Delhi. He said the air strikes were successful, but gave no details.

A Pakistani army statement said Indian aircraft intruded into its territory, and Pakistani air force jets twice tried to engage them. India denied the allegations.

In the Batalik mountains, commanders said Indian soldiers captured one of the four ridges in the area after overnight fighting. Only one ridge remains in the hands of the militants, the commanders said.

Indian soldiers suffered setbacks in neighboring Kaksar region, to the southeast, where fighting has raged for days over a barren mountain. Resistance has been fierce and at least two dozen Indian soldiers have been killed.

Indian army commanders on Thursday showed The Associated Press three sacks of letters, maps of Indian army field guns and identification cards of Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry regiment that troops recovered from the mountains.

Despite Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's promise to persuade fighters to withdraw, Indian commanders on the Himalayan front said there was no sign of a retreat. Instead, the guerrillas were attacking positions they lost earlier this week.

Sharif returned to Pakistan on Thursday after meeting President Clinton in Washington and promising to take ``concrete steps'' to end the fighting. He scheduled meetings with top military commanders and his Cabinet.  Sharif hopes to sell the agreement to defiant opposition and right-wing groups.

Religious parties, guerrilla groups and opposition political parties have accused Sharif of betraying Pakistan. The right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami party accused him of treason and threatened to try to depose him.

Pakistan has said it has no control over the militants in the mountains inside India, but observers in Islamabad say if the Pakistan army withdrew its troops and artillery support, the guerrillas would have little chance of holding on.

Guerrillas entrenched among the Himalayan peaks have said they would rather die than retreat in their fight to separate Muslim-majority Kashmir from Hindu-dominated India.

India said Thursday that 639 Pakistani soldiers and more than 150 Islamic guerrillas have been killed in the fighting so far, while 321 Indian soldiers have died, 451 were wounded and 10 were missing. The figures could not be independently confirmed.

Kashmir Crisis Was Defused on Brink of War
As U.S. Reviews Showdown, Nuclear Danger Looms Large

By John Lancaster
Washington Post
Monday, July 26, 1999; Page A01

Two months ago, as fighting raged between Indian and Pakistani forces in the disputed province of Kashmir, American spy satellites revealed a new and alarming development hundreds of miles to the south: In the desert state of Rajasthan, elements of the Indian army's main offensive "strike force" were loading tanks, artillery and other heavy equipment onto flatbed rail cars.

India, it seemed, was preparing to invade its neighbor.

At least in the short term, President Clinton helped avert that prospect during his widely reported Independence Day meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who agreed after hours of tense discussions to withdraw the forces that had triggered the flare-up in early May. But the full dimensions of the crisis are only now coming to light. According to senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the latest conflict over Kashmir came much closer to full-scale war than was publicly acknowledged at the time -- and raised very real fears that one or both countries would resort to using variants of the nuclear devices each tested last year.

"This is one of the most dangerous situations on the face of the earth," said a senior administration official who closely tracks the issue. "It was very, very easy to imagine how this crisis . . . could have escalated out of control, including in a way that could have brought in nuclear weapons, without either party consciously deciding that it wanted to go to nuclear war."

The danger is far from over. The two sides continue to trade artillery and machine-gun fire across the so-called line of control, which divides the rugged Himalayan province between India and Pakistan. On Friday, India claimed that Pakistani forces -- or their guerrilla surrogates -- continue to occupy positions on the Indian side of the line, in defiance of Pakistan's pledge to withdraw.

"This could reverse itself quickly," a White House official acknowledged.

Clinton's short-term success, moreover, follows major setbacks for U.S. efforts to contain the nuclear threat in South Asia. The administration failed to anticipate the five underground nuclear tests that India conducted on May 11 and 13, 1998, or to prevent Pakistan from conducting five simultaneous tests of its own two weeks later.

Similarly, while both countries sought to placate Washington after the tests by indicating a willingness to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the administration has been unable to persuade them to do so.

Against that backdrop, said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear proliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the president's apparent success in defusing the latest crisis over Kashmir represents "a tactical victory in this overall strategic loss that we've suffered."

Cirincione and other analysts acknowledge that Clinton and his senior foreign policy advisers handled the crisis with skill. Besides averting the immediate threat of a wider war, they say, the administration may have nudged both India and Pakistan toward a resumption of the so-called Lahore process -- talks between New Delhi and Islamabad that began when Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made a symbolic bus journey to Lahore, Pakistan, in February.

For those and other reasons, White House officials were eager to tell the story of Clinton's involvement in defusing the crisis and contacted a Washington Post reporter to offer interviews on the subject. Additional detail was provided by Pakistani and Indian officials as well as outside experts.

Especially since last year's nuclear tests, U.S. officials have kept a wary eye on Kashmir, a flash point of conflict between the two countries for half a century.

Still, the first reports of renewed fighting along the cease-fire line did not attract much attention in Washington. The two sides routinely ratchet up their military operations in the spring, when weather conditions improve, and besides, administration officials were preoccupied with the air campaign against Yugoslavia.

On May 9, however, Pakistani-backed infiltrators grabbed the attention of U.S. intelligence analysts when they blew up an Indian ammunition dump near the front-line city of Kargil, destroying 40,000 to 50,000 artillery rounds in a tremendous blast. It soon became clear that up to 700 Pakistani-backed troops -- either Muslim militants, regular army soldiers or some combination of both -- had seized positions on the Indian side of the cease-fire line at altitudes as high as 17,000 feet.

The incursion marked the first time since 1965 that Pakistan had taken and held positions inIndian-controlled Kashmir, and it put the infiltrators in a position to call in artillery strikes on Highway 1A, a major supply route for Indian forces encamped on the desolate Siachen glacier.

Even more ominous than the situation in the province, however, was what was happening elsewhere in India and Pakistan. The Indian army was making defensive preparations along India's main border with Pakistan, and armored units intended for offensive use were leaving their garrisons in Rajasthan, in northwest India, and preparing to move, according to U.S. officials with access to classified intelligence data. Military leaves were canceled nationwide.

"It was precautionary," Naresh Chandra, India's ambassador to Washington, said of the military preparations outside Kashmir. "We were always sure from our side that we would not do anything that would enlarge the conflict on the line of control or the international border."

That is not how the Indian moves were interpreted in Washington, however. U.S. officials noted that as Indian soldiers continued to come home in body bags and lurid tales of alleged Pakistani atrocities filled Indian newspapers, India's strongly nationalistic ruling party -- the BJP, which faces reelection in September -- was coming under intense domestic political pressure to adopt a more forceful response. They feared that if India failed to dislodge the Pakistani infiltrators in Kashmir, it might open a second front that could engulf the two countries in a full-scale war.

They also noted that within a few weeks of the first Indian preparations, Pakistan too began to prepare offensive units. Whether either country would have resorted to nuclear weapons is, of course, pure speculation. U.S. officials refused to say if there was any evidence that either country was preparing to do so. Both India and Pakistan, however, are widely presumed to have produced "weaponized" versions of their nuclear devices that could be delivered from airplanes.

U.S. officials say they could easily envision a scenario under which Pakistani forces, overwhelmed by India's much larger army, could find themselves backed into a corner that could tempt them to play their last and most devastating card.

"There wasn't any question that this thing could have gone to a high level," said a U.S. official who closely followed the crisis. "That's what scared us."

The intelligence warnings set off a frantic diplomatic scramble at the highest levels of the Clinton administration. The president himself was intimately involved in the crisis, dispatching letters to the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers in early June and staying in regular telephone contact with each during the weeks that followed. The thrust of Clinton's message was that each side should show restraint and respect the "sanctity" of the line of control.

In mediating the conflict, U.S. officials said, they strove to maintain "transparency" -- that is, to keep both sides informed of their actions -- in order to allay Indian fears that Washington would tilt toward Pakistan, a close military ally throughout the Cold War. By mid-June, U.S. officials were making it clear that they regarded Pakistan as the aggressor, leaking evidence that Pakistani regular troops were behind the incursion.

Sharif appeared to be looking for a face-saving exit. During a visit to Islamabad on June 25, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, commander of the U.S. Central Command, had received "fairly clear" assurances from his Pakistani counterparts that their forces would withdraw from the Indian side of the line, according to a senior administration official.

But U.S. intelligence analysts saw no evidence of a pullout. On Thursday, July 1, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the administration's point man on South Asia, cut short a vacation in the Hamptons and returned to Washington to deal with the crisis.

On July 3, Clinton called Sharif, "basically to see what's happening," the official said. It was then that Sharif asked to meet with the president. An hour later, Clinton called back and invited Sharif to come to Washington the following day. But Clinton also made clear to Sharif that the meeting had to produce "a positive result," the official said; anything less could "accelerate the downward spiral."

In the end, the president got the commitment he was looking for. By mid-July, Pakistani forces began to withdraw.

Pakistani Military Plane Downed by India

NEW DELHI, Aug. 10 -- An Indian fighter jet shot down a Pakistani military plane this morning near the Indo-Pakistani border, killing all 16 people on board and setting off a barrage of recriminations between the rival countries less than three weeks after they ended their most serious border conflict in three decades.

Pakistani authorities asserted that the plane, a French-made Dassault-Breguet Atlantique naval warfare and sea reconnaissance aircraft, was unarmed and conducting a "routine training mission." They said it had not crossed into Indian airspace when it was shot down just around 11 a.m. local time (2 a.m. EDT) near Pakistan's southern province of Sindh and the Indian state of Gujarat.

The Pakistani high commissioner here, the equivalent of an ambassador, called the incident "a wanton and cowardly act" of "cold-blooded murder," and said Pakistan "reserves the right to make an appropriate response in self-defense." But Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made no immediate comment other than to express regret for the loss of life, and some analysts said Pakistan was seeking to play down the significance of the incident.

Indian military officials immediately accepted responsibility for the shooting, but they charged that the Pakistani aircraft had "intruded" at least seven miles inside Indian territory, for several minutes, and had then "acted in a hostile manner" by turning toward the Indian MiG-21 fighter plane that had intercepted it. The MiG then fired an air-to-air missile at the Pakistani plane, Indian officials said.

Each country said the plane's wreckage was in its territory. Pakistani officials said the plane fell to earth two miles inside Pakistan, and military authorities quickly flew journalists to the crash site to view the wreckage. Pakistani television tonight aired images of border-area swamp, with patches of blood and scattered wreckage visible.

India said its helicopters had found the wreckage a mile inside the border, in an area of empty marshes called the Rann of Kutch. An air force spokesman said the wreckage of the plane had been retrieved and was being brought to New Delhi.

The incident, which killed 11 Pakistani soldiers and five officers, came at a time of extreme tension between India and Pakistan, perennial adversaries that have fought three wars since they became independent nations in 1947. Last year both successfully tested nuclear devices, raising the stakes of their rivalry and altering the security landscape of South Asia.

For eight weeks beginning this spring, Indian troops battled Pakistani-based Muslim guerrillas who invaded a mountainous border area of Indian-controlled Kashmir. Kashmir was divided into Indian and Pakistani sectors in 1948 after both countries claimed the entire region. Since 1989 an armed independence movement has waged a bloody campaign against security forces in India's portion, the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

At least 500 people were killed in this year's conflict, which ended only after President Clinton met with Sharif in early July and pressured him to call off the guerrillas. Pakistan claimed the intruders were Kashmiri insurgents, while India insisted they were Pakistani troops.

Since then, armed insurgent groups have carried out a rash of attacks in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. In the past week, more than a dozen Indian troops have been killed in sabotage attacks in Indian Kashmir. Indian authorities have accused Pakistan of fomenting the assaults, and this week Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee demanded that Pakistan be declared a rogue state for promoting terrorism.

Indian officials said tonight that the downing of the Pakistani plane would make any resumption of diplomatic negotiations between the countries more difficult. They agreed in March to resolve their long-standing differences peacefully, but the spirit of that agreement was seriously undermined by the subsequent border conflict.

The immediate reaction from both countries has been relatively restrained. According to senior military sources in Pakistan, India's director of military operations called his Pakistani counterpart on a special hot line shortly after the shooting and said India accepted responsibility for it. The sources said the Indian official told Pakistan that the shooting was a "reaction to an intrusion" and that India did not want to exacerbate tensions with Pakistan over the action.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed regret at the loss of life and called on both countries to exercise maximum restraint. In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said such incidents "illustrate the need for the two countries to resolve their differences through dialogue." However, he said the United States would play no role for the time being in getting India and Pakistan to talk.

Pakistani officials said the plane--an unarmed, 110-foot-long craft designed for reconnaissance--was regularly used for training missions in the area where it was shot down, and was not used for either reconnaissance or warfare. They said it had taken off from a naval air base 60 miles southeast of Karachi, Pakistan, and was following a flight plan inside Pakistan frequently used in training missions.

But Indian military officials said that the plane strayed well inside India, near the Kori Creek area of Gujarat, and that between May and July there had been eight other intrusions by Pakistani aircraft.

Pakistanis Fire Missiles Toward Indian Aircraft
Incident Comes One Day After India Shot Down a Pakistani Plane

By Pamela Constable and Kamran Khan
Washington Post
Thursday, August 12, 1999; Page A21

NEW DELHI, Aug. 11 -- In the second aerial skirmish in two days over the Indo-Pakistani border, Pakistan fired surface-to-air missiles toward a group of Indian military aircraft, including three helicopters flying journalists to the site where India shot down a Pakistani plane on Tuesday.

Pakistan's military had placed surface-to-air missiles along the border near the site and the country's top security officials called for heightened military preparedness, while India rejected a Pakistani demand that it apologize for downing the naval reconnaissance plane, which killed 16 people.

There were no casualties in today's encounter, but the tit-for-tat incidents strained already tense relations between the two neighbors and appeared to dash any hopes they would resume bilateral negotiations on a variety of issues any time soon.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars in 52 years, and each tested nuclear weapons last year; recently, the two countries concluded an eight-week border clash in the mountains of India's Kashmir state that involved the heaviest fighting between them in nearly three decades. More than 500 Indian troops and Pakistani-based guerrillas died before Pakistan withdrew support for the intruders in July.

Coming on the heels of that conflict, this week's air encounters at the other end of the Indo-Pakistani border have heightened concerns here and abroad about the possibility of full-scale conflict between the two new nuclear powers.

The Clinton administration said it is "deeply concerned" and urged both nations to use "restraint and dialogue" to resolve their differences. "Hopefully, both sides will see that neither has anything to gain by an escalation of this conflict and that reason and cooler heads will prevail," said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin.

He added that "it's hard to be optimistic at this stage" that the two countries will resume amicable dialogue. "If anything, today's events are an indication that we are going in the wrong direction," he said.

In the wake of India's downing of the French-made Pakistani Dassault-Breguet Atlantique aircraft, Pakistan not only moved missile batteries to the border but also conducted defensive air maneuvers in the border area, a region of marshes and creeks subject to competing claims by the two countries.

In Islamabad today, officials at a high-level national security meeting called for "an advanced state of preparedness" and said that any Indian aggression would be met with a "befitting response." Sources said they did not advocate any aggressive action against India but that they played down any prospect of a resumption of talks with India on a number of mutual grievances--including the future of Kashmir, parts of which both countries claim.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz today demanded an apology from India for shooting down the Atlantique, which officials continued to insist was unarmed and conducting a routine training mission within Pakistani airspace. But Indian officials refused to apologize and reiterated their claim that the aircraft had entered Indian airspace on an intelligence-gathering mission. They said it had been intercepted by two Indian fighter planes, warned repeatedly to land and was shot down only after ignoring the requests.

"It seems very curious that a plane on a training flight should be so close to the border," said R.S. Jassal, India's Foreign Ministry spokesman. He called the flight a "provocative act" that followed a "pattern of hostile surveillance actions" by Pakistan in the past year. He said India's reaction was a "purely military response to an intrusion by a military aircraft."

Indian officials, who said the Atlantique can carry bombs and missiles, alleged that Pakistani military planes have violated Indian airspace at least 50 times since January but that none had been intercepted or fired upon before Tuesday's incident. Independent defense experts here said the Atlantique was probably probing India's air defense system in the border area, but they cautioned that this does not mean Pakistan was preparing an attack.

"I wouldn't conclude they are planning anything," said Jasjit Singh, director of the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies and a former Indian air force officer. "I hope we will be sensible too and keep firm control on our response. There is a lot of bitterness on both sides now."

A U.S. intelligence official in Washington said, however, that "there are some signs" that both India and Pakistan are making preparations for further conflict "and they're not being very discreet about them. Both India and Pakistan have indicated which of their military forces have gone on higher alert: Both air forces have gone on higher alert, and the Indian navy has gone on higher alert."

"You have an incident, and the potential for escalation of military conflict is always present," the official said. "And we here are very concerned about that potential." The official noted that both countries' independence celebrations are approaching--Aug. 14 in Pakistan and Aug. 15 in India--and that nationalist sentiments will likely run high. "I would see that as a critical time," the official said. "It's a dicey time to watch."

In describing this afternoon's incident, Pakistani officials asserted that two Indian jets intruded into Pakistani airspace near the Atlantique wreckage site. They said Pakistani antiaircraft batteries fired missiles toward the planes but that none was hit. They said they had no knowledge of any Indian helicopters in the vicinity.

But Indian military officials and journalists traveling in a convoy of three helicopters to the crash site said that one helicopter was nearly hit by a missile fired from across the border before the copter dove to avoid being hit. The helicopters then returned safely to a nearby Indian air base.

Indian Group Capt. P.S. Banghu, an air force officer accompanying the journalists, said the passengers saw a flash and a puff of smoke in the air, which he said "strongly indicated" that Pakistan had fired a missile toward the aircraft. Banghu confirmed that Indian MiG-29 fighter planes were patrolling the area to provide cover for the helicopters, but he said they were several miles farther away from the border.

In New Delhi, meanwhile, officials took pains to show that the Atlantique had crashed about seven miles inside India. They said most of the wreckage fell in Indian territory but that some could have fallen into Pakistan because it was scattered over a wide area. Pakistani officials insisted nevertheless that the plane had been shot down at least a mile inside Pakistan.

The State Department's Rubin noted that India and Pakistan could avoid such incidents by observing their April 1991 agreement to avoid flying military or reconnaissance aircraft within 10 kilometers (6.2 = miles) of their common border without giving the other notice.

Relations between Pakistan and India were strained to their greatest extent in nearly 30 years earlier this summer, as Indian troops battled Pakistani-based guerrillas who invaded a mountainous border area at Kargil in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The intruders, who Pakistan insisted were Kashmiri Islamic rebels, eventually withdrew after the Clinton administration brought pressure on Pakistan.

Since that conflict ended, violence has erupted in populated areas of Indian Kashmir, where armed insurgents have attacked several military installations and killed more than 20 people.

On Kashmir's northeastern edge, meanwhile, Indian and Pakistani troops have been fighting since the early 1980s for control of Siachen Glacier--at 20,000 feet the highest battlefield in the world. Today, India said its troops had driven back attacks by Pakistani forces there and had killed five Pakistani soldiers. There was no immediate comment from Pakistan.

August 12, 1999
New York Times
Kashmir a Crushed Jewel Caught in a Vise of Hatred
By BARRY BEARAK

RINAGAR, Kashmir -- Sadly, alarmingly, endlessly, there is trouble in paradise. The Vale of Kashmir, once exalted for the lotus blooms in its lakes and the yellow tapestry of its mustard fields, has become a valley of despair -- a place haunted by senseless murder and hideous torture, wherever the famously sweet winds blow.

For a half century, India and Pakistan have fought over this land, sustaining a hatred so venomous as to rival any in the world. For each, possessing Kashmir is a matter of life and death, with both persistently willing to forsake the former for the latter.

A macabre carnival of killing has come to mock a once-storied serenity as India suppresses a Pakistani-supported insurgency: people blown apart, ambushed, caught in a crossfire, snatched and disappeared. During the past decade, 24,000 have died by the Indian Government's official count. Others say 40,000 is a better estimate. Others, 70,000.

Here in Srinagar, the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir's summer capital, life has assumed a quality of war-weary numbness and morbid fatalism. "If only we could turn back the clock," said Irfan Maqsood, a 21-year-old student, in a typical lament. "The fighting goes on and on, and for what? We belong to India, and India will never let us go."

People have grown used to the street's stern accouterments. Heavily armed soldiers or policemen are always within sight. Bunkers are maintained every few blocks, their sandbags covered with blue tarpaulin, rifle barrels peeping out of rectangular slits. The police conduct dozens of "cordon and search" operations each day, surrounding a small area and then entering homes and shops, rousting out the men and taking away suspects.

Kashmir is caught in one of the world's violent loops, death begetting death. A grenade is flung into the courtyard of a police station. An hour later, in a crowded, airless hospital ward, Mohammad Yusuf Mir, a wounded policeman strung to an IV, is coupling his moans with an oath: "Whoever did this, I hate them. I curse them. I'll kill them."

The rebellion itself began 10 years ago. Weapons flooded in, tourists scurried out. At first, the insurgency was home-grown. Kashmiri youth, shouting azadi, or freedom, became guerrillas, trying to send India packing with a few well-placed bombs and high-profile kidnappings. Shopkeepers gave them cash. Mothers made them sandwiches.

To New Delhi, this was a threat to its nationhood, to Islamabad an opportunity to wage war by proxy. India has since tried to stamp out the revolt with all the fury of an enraged elephant, while Pakistan has tried to provoke the uprising further and arm it and bend it to its will.

Today, what is left in the valley is a populace stunned with confusion and sorrow, unwilling to give up the dream of independence and yet unprepared to endure more killing. People feel betwixt and between, their fate out of their hands. A common complaint is that India and Pakistan seem pitted against each other in a fight to the death of the last Kashmiri.

"We want to stand up and say to them both, 'Thank you for loving us, but spare us the honor of being your battleground,' " said Muzafar Baig, a prominent lawyer.

In the center of Srinagar, the Kashmir capital, a ``cordon and search'' operation is carried out by the Indian police, looking for Muslim insurgents. Dozens of the police roundups are conducted each day, and there is a sense of numbness in the city after 10 years of mayhem.

Life seems forever transformed. A valley whose culture was once identified with the gentle teachings of Sufi mystics is now overwhelmed by the culture of the gun and the morality of the mercenary. Insurgency and counterinsurgency have bled into one another. Kashmir has become a place of double-crosses and extortion and vaporous truths.

Some days back, "Papa Kishtwari," a man with hard eyes and strong opinions, sat in his house sipping tea as a dozen or so supplicants waited outside to tell him their troubles. His real name is Ghulam Hassan Lone and he is one of the leaders of the so-called "friendlies," onetime insurgents who surrendered and then switched sides, becoming India's eyes and ears against the insurgents and sometimes its fists.

He recalled his days as an anti-India militant. According to him, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency gave him money, guns and marching orders. "They told us what positions to hit," he said. "They gave us a list of people to be shot dead."

Then he changed allegiance. The money was still good, the work similar, he said. He would identify militants for the Indian security forces. "There is a policy of extra-judicial killings," he said, something India denies. "This is done to impress New Delhi."

But the days of the "friendlies" appear to be over. India has changed tactics and relies more on its own intelligence units to ferret out militants. "Pakistan used us, then India used us," Papa Kishtwari said bitterly. "This is what they do in Kashmir -- use us."

The History: Since '47, a Puzzle Without a Solution

Kashmir is one of the world's most confounding morasses, a 52-year-old custody battle where the contesting parties disagree on the details of every scrap ofteir common history.

The very term Kashmir is ambiguous. Most often, it is used as shorthand for the entire Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which has about eight million people.But the state has several distinct regions, of which the fabled valley, with slightly more than half of the population, is but one. Only there do people speak Kashmiri -- and only there do people have a distinct feeling of being a separate nation. Jammu is roughly two-thirds Hindu, though there are districts with a large Muslim majority. Sparsely populated Ladakh is half Buddhist and half Muslim.

Once a princely state ruled by a maharajah, Jammu and Kashmir had even broader boundaries, including territory now claimed by Pakistan and China. In 1947, the year that India and Pakistan were born, the departing British colonial masters demanded that the subcontinent's 562 landed maharajahs opt to belong to one infant nation or the other.

Hari Singh, the state's Hindu maharajah, dithered past the deadline, but then, as tribesmen from Pakistan's northern frontier aided a local rebellion, he decided to cast the lot of his predominantly Muslim domain with predominantly Hindu India.

To many Muslims, it seemed the land had fallen under the thumb of the infidel. War broke out between India and Pakistan, and an ensuing cease-fire left about one-third of the densely populated part of the state with Pakistan, where it remains today.

Jammu and Kashmir, while never happily a part of India, nevertheless lived in relative peace until the rebellion. Statewide, between Jan. 1, 1990, and July 15, 1999, the state police recorded 7,922 attacks with explosives, 9,393 random firings, 12,460 "cross firings," 3,553 abductions, 619 rocket attacks. The years 1993 through 1996 were the worst.

During the past few years, the mayhem had actually moderated. Death tolls were nearly halved, curfews in Srinagar were lifted. Indeed, this spring some 100,000 tourists -- mostly Indians -- visited Kashmir. Dal Lake was again busy with colorful boats, the oarsmen gently paddling while visitors delighted in the graceful swoop of a kingfisher.

But then in late May came "Kargil," the convenient term given to 10 weeks of fighting along snow-capped peaks in Kashmir. Pakistani-supported militants -- New Delhi contends they were mostly Pakistani soldiers -- sneaked into India and seized the high ground above a vital supply route. India responded with air power and a vast deployment, with both sides finally braking at the brink of what would have been their fourth all-out war.

As the Kargil battleground, named for a town in central Kashmir, calmed down, hit-and-run tactics picked up throughout the entire state. More than 1,000 militants have recently crossed into Kashmir, making a total force of about 3,500 insurgents, Indian officials say. "The new ones are better-armed and better-trained than we're used to," said Gurbachan Jagat, the state police chief. "They're professionals, with good radios and heavy explosives."

The character of the insurgency has been steadily changing.

According to Indian military observers, about 40 percent of the militants are now foreigners -- mostly Pakistanis but also Afghans. They belong to various groups -- with varying political and religious beliefs -- but a few of the most powerful, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, are Islamic fundamentalists who have come to Kashmir on a holy war.

While the Vale of Kashmir is overwhelmingly Muslim, a less dogmatic version of the faith is commonly practiced here, and Kashmiri nationalism has never been equated with religion. To some then, it seems the fight for independence has taken odd turns and attracted strange confederates.

Yasin Malik, a chain-smoking, gangling 33-year-old, is head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, the most important group among the rebels. Since 1994, it has abided by a self-proclaimed cease-fire, but it does not condemn anti-India violence by others, anything to keep the pot stirring. Still, Malik has regrets: "It is too bad that when Lashkar-e-Taiba speaks, people believe this is the voice of the Kashmiri people."

The active guerrilla groups are not united in any single military strategy, though they now often avoid the concentration of Indian security forces in the valley and operate in the thick forests and isolated villages of Jammu. One tactic is to massacre Hindu innocents, hoping to set off communal violence. Another is political assassination. Another involves bold rocket attacks against Army installations.

New Delhi continues to use a heavy club to fight back, something that has repeatedly drawn condemnations from international human rights groups. From the Indian Government's vantage point, however, the nation deserves to be commended for restraint.

"We've kept our response low-key and measured," said Gov. Girish Saxena, New Delhi's man in Srinagar. "We did not use tanks and armed personnel carriers. We have generally confined our response to small arms, and that has made an impression on people that we are trying to deal with the situation in a civilized way."

India maintains about 200,000 regular army troops in Kashmir, most of them warily guarding against a Pakistani attack. Fighting the guerrillas is now largely left to 125,000 others from paramilitary units and the state police, Governor Saxena said. Additionally, the state has armed 18,000 villagers -- mostly Hindus in Jammu -- to defend themselves. They call them village defense committees.

That is a lot of firepower -- and the reproach of rights groups continues. Indeed, it is not difficult to locate men with convincing tales of recent torture, ugly engravings on their skin, a palette of black and blue on their limbs. Parents wait by the gates of army camps and police stations, holding photos of sons who have been taken into custody and never seen again.

Bystanders are too often mistaken for perpetrators, said Raja Banoo, whose 16-year-old son has been gone for 28 months. "Before the army took him, they beat him right in front of me and dug a hole and said, 'We'll bury your son alive,' " she said.

The state government opened its own human rights commission in August 1997, but it is widely regarded as toothless.

By and large, the state police have been entrusted to look into rights abuses. Their records show a total of 3,197 complaints, including allegations of 1,105 "custodial deaths," 1,248 "innocent killings" and 512 "disappearances."

Of these cases, barely 3 to 4 percent seem to "merit any follow-up," said R. Tikoo, the assistant director general of the central intelligence division. The rest, he said confidently, are exaggerations or outright lies.

The Future: Could Clinton Act as Peacemaker?

A common sentiment heard in Kashmir comes out as a question: Why isn't the world paying more attention? And if there is a silver lining to the Kargil episode, it is that for a time the world did -- and may still. With India and Pakistan now nuclear powers, hostilities between them have apocalyptic potential. A turning point in the crisis came after Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, met with President Clinton in Washington on July 4.

This may be grasping at straws, but many here are putting considerable hope in a two-word pledge issued after the Clinton-Sharif meeting. The President agreed to take a "personal interest" in urging the resumption of Indian-Pakistani peace talks.

How personally he will be involved, and how interested he truly is, is uncertain. America's position remains that Kashmir is a disputed territory, and a solution is best left to bilateral talks between the two nations. That would be fine with India, which considers Kashmir to be an open-and-shut case and officially refuses to acknowledge that a dispute even exists.

Still, Kashmiris are encouraged. Shahid-ul-Islam, a former guerrilla commander from the group Hezbollah Mujahedeen, said: "We take a positive sign from Kosovo. We had thought Clinton was anti-Muslim, but now we believe he may be an angel for peace."

Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhat, head of the Muslim Conference political party, said: "The President of America wants to go down in the annals of history as a peacemaker. That is why he said 'personal interest.' He will force India to negotiate."

President Clinton hopes to visit the subcontinent early next year -- and certainly the issue of Kashmir will come up. It has poisoned the relations between two poor countries with a combined population of 1.1 billion -- nearly a fifth of all humanity.

But if the President forcefully enters the Kashmir fray, he will find himself wandering within that 52-year-old morass, which has so defiantly resisted solutions.

Twice, back in 1948 and 1949, India committed itself to a United Nations-sponsored plebiscite, allowing the state's people to decide whether to be part of it or Pakistan. This vote, however, was made to be contingent on a pullback of armed forces by both sides, an exercise requiring trust. The vote has yet to occur.

"That referendum must be held and we would abide by the decision, but the choices must include independence," said Malik of the Liberation Front.

But the results of any statewide vote -- even one with three choices -- is likely to leave as many people dissatisfied as there are now. Ladakh and parts of Jammu would want to stay with India, parts of Jammu would prefer Pakistan.

To deal with that prospect, a half century of thinking has yielded any number of options, including joint sovereignty arrangements and ways of dividing up the state between India and Pakistan and allowing the valley to become independent. Regional plebiscites, instead of a statewide one, is another suggestion frequently made.

But nothing will happen unless all parties are willing to negotiate and compromise. "President Clinton could get everyone to talk, don't you think?" said Abdul Majid Wani, a retired engineer who was walking in a cemetery called Martyr's Graveyard. His son is buried there. Ashfaq Majeed Wani, one of the first young men to take up arms against India, was killed on March 30, 1990. He was 23, and when his father identified the body, he counted 21 bullet holes. Ashfaq was also missing several fingers, and the elder Wani proudly speculated that his son died with a grenade in hand.

There are more than 1,000 simple graves in the cemetery, which is beside a soccer field. Wani conducted a brief tour, pausing at one marker or another to describe more death. At the end of one row rested a 4-year-old, Master Shaheed Yawar, killed in a crossfire. Wani did not want the poetics on a nearby sign to be missed. It said: "Do not shun the gun, my dear younger ones. The war for freedom is yet to be won."

The New York Times 
October 10, 1999
India's Hindu Party Gains A Solid Victory

When election returns were counted in India, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party emerged in a commanding position, able to lead a centrist coalition of 24 parties that offered hope that India would now have a durable government, rather than the shaky one that the party had been leading. The big loser was the once-dominant Congress Party, which had hoped to return to power but suffered a humiliating defeat instead.

United Press International 
October 13, 1999
Army still the main force in Pakistan.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- Pakistan has a prime minister, a president and elected lawmakers, but another army coup in a country with a 25-year history of martial law has proved who really runs the show.

Early Tuesday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced he was replacing army chief Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf with an ally, military intelligence chief Gen. Ziauddin.  Army units surrounded government installations in the capital and elsewhere. And by the time Musharraf returned from an official trip to Sri Lanka, Sharif was under house arrest, and the country's radio stations, TV stations and airports were under army control.

The swift execution of the coup, and rumors and warnings stretching back several weeks including one from the U.S. State Department suggest advance planning, although a U.S. spokesman Tuesday claimed no prior knowledge of events.

In a brief speech promised for Tuesday night, but delivered in the wee hours of Wednesday, Musharraf accused Sharif of trying to politicize and destabilize the army and to create dissension within its ranks.

The general declared that Pakistan was ``calm, stable and under control'' and said the army had ``moved in as a last resort to prevent any further destabilization.''

Friction between Musharraf and Sharif had increased in recent weeks, with Musharraf openly criticizing the prime minister for bending to U.S. demands that he pull Pakistan-backed militants out of Kargil in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory claimed by both India and Pakistan.

The militants had infiltrated the Indian side of the Line of Control the unofficial partition that divides Kashmir between the two hostile neighbors and lower-ranking officers of the Pakistan army claimed they were prepared to hold out against a punishing Indian army ground and air assault.

But in July, U.S. President Bill Clinton asked Sharif to withdraw the militants. India claimed Pakistan army regulars were among them a claim denied by Pakistan, but supported by documents found on the bodies of slain fighters.  Pakistan tried to put the best face on the pullout, calling it a public relations victory for the Kashmir cause, but the army was furious at being one-upped, and the Pakistani public were stung by what they saw as a betrayal of a cause they strongly support.

As Musharraf and Sharif blamed each other for the Kargil debacle, calls for Sharif's resignation escalated. But the prime minister was having none of it.  He cracked down on the press and on opposition politicians who forged a 19-party alliance demanding his removal.

In his speech Wednesday morning, the general who was chief of staff of the Pakistan army until Sharif attempted to sack him indirectly warned India not to make any aggressive moves against Pakistan.

``Let no outside forces think that they can take advantage of the prevailing situation,'' Musharraf said as India placed its troops on high alert. 

Both countries tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, and the prospect of a face-off between a hard-line military regime in Pakistan and a coalition led by the right-wing Janata Party in India is making some observers nervous.

``You've got to be concerned about what this means for the safety of Pakistan's nuclear devices,'' said Joe Cirincione, a senior associate with the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank. ``I'm not only talking about who has their finger on the button, but who's got the actual bombs.''

But the nuclear threat seemed not to worry U.S. policy makers late Tuesday. ``I don't think that there is a fear right this moment,'' State Department spokesman James Rubin said when asked about the fate of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. ``That doesn't mean that it couldn't change. ..but right now this is a political crisis, not more than that.''

A White House spokesman downplayed the takeover and suggested it might even prove constitutionally legitimate if Sharif were to resign voluntarily, or if Parliament were to endorse the general's action.

In his announcement Wednesday, Musharraf did not declare martial law, dissolve Parliament or say how long the army would remain in charge, leaving the door open for a brief stay or for something else.

The last general to declare martial law in Pakistan said he would hold elections in 90 days. Eleven years later, Gen. Ziaul Haq was still there. He was killed Aug. 8, 1988, in a plane crash that has never been publicly explained.

Some analysts say Sharif brought about his own downfall. Early in his tenure, he stripped the president's power to dismiss an elected government, and he antagonized the judiciary by interfering with judicial appointments. Samina Ahmed, a Pakistani fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said Sharif's recent moves undermining the authority of Parliament and other institutions weakened the forces that could have prevented a military takeover. ``A majority in Parliament doesn't translate into democratic functioning,'' Ahmed said.

She said the nuclear scenario was unlikely to change under Musharraf's regime, since the army already controls nuclear policy and nuclear weapons. 

January 3, 2000
New York Times
Indian Prime Minister Claims Pakistan Arranged Hijacking
By CELIA W. DUGGER

NEW DELHI -- Facing sharp domestic criticism of his government's decision to negotiate with the hijackers of an Indian jetliner, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today accused Pakistan of being behind the incident and called on major nations, including the United States, to declare Pakistan a terrorist state.

But Mr. Vajpayee offered no evidence to prove his charge. The United States has refused similar requests from India over the past five years, American officials said today.

Pakistani officials have said over the last week that their government played no role in the hijacking and -- in the on-going war of words between these two hostile nuclear-armed neighbors -- have made the improbable suggestion that India engineered the incident to discredit Pakistan. 

In remarks today in Pune, in western India, Mr. Vajpayee called the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 on Dec. 24 "an integral part of the Pakistan-backed campaign of terrorism."

"India, therefore, strongly urges major nations of the world to declare Pakistan a terrorist state," he said. "Our government will work systematically towards this objective."

The eight-day-long hijacking crisis ended on Friday in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when India agreed to the hijackers' demand for the release of three jailed militants in exchange for the freedom of more than 150 hostages. The Taliban, which rules most of Afghanistan, played a crucial role in bringing about the deal.

Released hostages quoted the hijackers as saying that they sought the independence of Kashmir, a Himalayan territory that both India and Pakistan claim as theirs. The three released militants were involved in opposing India's current rule over most of Kashmir.  

Some hostages said they thought at least three of the five hijackers, who spoke Urdu, were either Pakistanis or Kashmiris, while the other two may have been an Afghan and a Nepali. The Indian government has faced harsh criticism at home from opposition parties and leading newspapers, not only for cutting a deal with the hijackers, but also for responding sluggishly to the crisis; for allowing the lax security that enabled the hijackers to board the plane in Nepal with guns, grenades and knives; and for letting the flight leave Indian territory after landing in Amritsar on the first day of the hijacking.

K. Subrahmanyam, the convenor of the government's National Security Advisory Board, called the release of the three militants "a victory for terrorism." And the Indian Express said in an editorial today that the deal with the hijackers was "a defeat, no matter what the government's spinmeisters may say about the move being only a 'tactical retreat."'

Asked today whether his government had compromised the national interest by releasing the three militants, whom it considers terrorists, Mr. Vajpayee told reporters, "I emphatically deny this charge."

"We have, of course, paid a certain price in securing safe release of the hostages," he said. "But it was the best decision under the given circumstances." The Prime Minister's statements laying blame for the hijacking at Paksitan's door were an escalation of comments made on Saturday by Jaswant Singh, India's foreign minister, who insisted that India had proof that the hijackers were Pakistanis and that most of the jailed militants they wanted freed were Pakistanis, too.

But Mr. Singh did not offer proof for those charges. In any case, evidence of the Pakistani nationality of the hijackers and the jailed militants would not necessarily mean that the Pakistani government was behind the incident.

Mr. Singh also stated categorically on Saturday that the hijackers were headed for Pakistan, citing as proof a statement to that effect attributed to the Taliban's information minister in Jang, a Pakistani newspaper.

But on Sunday, Taliban officials said that the man quoted in Jang was not their information minister, and that they did not know where the hijackers had gone.

The whereabouts of the hijackers are still unknown. The Taliban gave them 10 hours to get out of the country after the crisis ended.

American officials said that the Indian government has been trying to have Pakistan added to the United States' list of state sponsors of terrorism for five years without success.  "The Secretary of State must determine that a country's government has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism," a State Department official said. "The secretary has not made that determination with respect to Pakistan."

Indian officials said today that in coming days they will come forward with evidence to prove their charges. C. Raja Mohan, a respected correspondent covering defense issues for The Hindu, a newspaper in India, wrote in today's editions that the government needs to do just that if it is to be believed. "If India does not quickly and credibly justify its allegation against Pakistan, Mr. Singh's statements will be dismissed by the international community as typical, knee-jerk reactions from India," Mr. Mohan wrote.