Spring will only come to Afghanisthan when it begins to thaw in Kashmir

India and Pakistan have been disputing the complete territory of the formerly princely state of Jammu and Kashmir since 1947 and have fought three wars over their claims. Since Jammu and Kashmir was home to more Muslims than Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs, the whole state belonged in the newly formed nation of Pakistan, leaders and citizens in Islamabad felt.
The maharaja, however, signed an act of accession to India, after tribal militias launched an invasion of Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistani. That is why Delhi considers every inch of the princely state as part of its national territory territory. Since the end of the first war in 1949, about 30 procent of Jammu and Kashmir falls under Pakistani control, 60 procent is under Indian rule and, since the Sino-Indian war of 1962, 10 procent is annexed by China. None of these countries has formally recognised this partition, so the borders remain dotted lines on international maps.
The most important obstacle for finding a solution to this 63 year old conflict between India and Pakistan is the enormous symbolic value the Himalayan state has for both countries. Anno 2010, however, water is becoming as important as religion or national identity. 80 percent of Pakistani agriculture is irrigated by riverwater that flows into the country from Kashmir.
In principle, that should not be a problem, since both countries signed an Indus Water Treaty, brokered by the World Bank, already in 1960. That Treaty stipulates that Pakistan has a right to use the three Western rivers –Indus, Chenab and Jhelum–, while India can claim the waters of the three Eastern rivers –Sutlej, Beas and Ravi.
Since a few years, however, Pakistan is getting less water. According to Unesco’s World Water Development Report 2009, available and renewable water resources per capita in Pakistan plummeted between 2000 and 2005 from 2961 to 1420 cubic metres. Multiple reasons explain that dramatic drop: population growth, substandard irrigation systems and inefficient use of water -especially in agriculture, the impact of climate change, but also the construction of a few power stations on Indian territory.
Only the latter aspect is reported at length in the Pakistani media and is repeated in Pakistani official discourse. When Indian and Pakistani secretaries of foreign affairs renewed their official contacts on February 25, water was one of the priorities on the Pakistani agenda.
The growing water scarcity is felt most urgently in the Pakistani part of Punjab, the province that produces about 75 procent of Pakistani wheat and that was named after the fiver rivers that flow into the Indus (panj is five, aab is river). Not only agricultural produce is coming out of Punjab: the province is traditionally the home of most of the military top brass, and hence of the ruling elite.
Wich helps to explain the the importance given to water, and the eagerness to point to India as the culprit for the growing scarcity. That way, downstream provinces like Sindh and Balochistan are distracted from blaming Punjab for their own growning periods of drought and the salinisation of their agrictural lands as a result of the low volumes of water arriving in the Indus.
In 2005, Pakistan sought World Bank arbitration on the Indian constructed Baghliar dam on the Chenab. The final report recognised that India largely kept within the terms of the Indus Water Treaty, though it asked to lower the altitude of the dam and to restict the period of refilling the reservoir to the weeks between June 21 and August 31 –India does not always respect that restriction.

pakistani jihadism

The meeting on February 25 of the secretaries of foreign affairs, Nirupama Rao from India and Salman Bashir from Pakistan, produced little tangible results, the two even failed to agree on a date for their next appointment. We can assume, therefore, that few words have been exchanged on Kashmir or water, Pakistan’s top priorities. But also India’s top priority, terrorism, has been shelved unceremoniously. “Terrorism”, for India, refers to the spectacular attacks on Mumbai, late November 2008, but even more so to the continuing violence in Kashmir.
An armed uprising broke out in and around Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir’s summer capital, in 1989. It was the result of decennia of broken promises and political incapacity. Soon, the indigenous rebellion was taken over by islamist militants coming from or trained, financed and armed in Pakistan. After 9/11, many of those militant outfits were put on the international lists of terrorists organisations. More than any other, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), became known and reviled internationally, because of its participation in attacks on the parliament buildings in Srinagar eand Delhi, in 2001, but more so for planning and executing the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
In the early years, these militant groups were established by or with support of the Pakistani military secret service ISI –even the Obama administration has said so much on the record. Wether and in how far the duo ISI - LeT is still up and running, is very difficult to assess. Jalil Abbas Jilani, Pakistan’s brand new ambassador to Brussels, points out in an interview with us that the Kashmiri militant outfits have made common cause with the Pakistani Taliban the past years, leading them to attack military targets and even, explicitly, ISI buildings.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine the freedom of movement and activity enjoyed by different jihadi organisations and their leaders, if not for protection from well placed circles. In February, for instance, different outlawed militant outfits openly organised a public conference in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan controlled Kashmir or Azad Kashmir, as it is called there. The final resolution of that conference read: “If the Pakistan government can’t extend any political, diplomatic and moral support to the Kashmiri people, it should at least give a free hand to the mujahideen to tackle India on their own.”
That same first week of February, Hafiz Saeed, the former LeT-supremo and current leader of its charitable front organisation Jawaad-ud-Dawa, declared in his home town Lahore that the armed struggle against India should continue and that liberation was around the corner –‘liberating the waters of Pakistan’s rivers’. Saeed and his organisations have their headquarters in Muridke, Punjab, not coincidentially.

Indian diplomacy asserts itself

One would expect a thinderbox like Kashmir to be high on then international agenda, especially iven the nuclear status of both India and Pakistan, but it is not. Even though Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari made a public comment in early January, stating that the region –read: Afghanistan and Pakistan– would only know peace if there would be a ‘just solution’ for Kashmir. Even though former US president Bill Clinton called Kashmir ‘one of the most dangerous places on earth’, back in 1998 already. And even though presidential candidate Barack Obama told Time Magazine, five days before he was elected, that the United States would ‘devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in [Kashmir], to figure out a plausible approach’. Obama knew, however, of the difficulties ahead, as he remarked: ‘Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically.’
Ever since his election, the K-word has been conspiciously absent from his discourse. Richard Holbrooke was designated special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, without a mention of Kashmir. It seems he even is under orders not to touch the Kashmir nerve. An ever more assertive Indian diplomacy could claim that silence as their victory.
Indian Prime Minister Jawarhal Nehru took the conflict to the UN Security Council in 1948, but India has ever since refused any attempt or proposal for international mediation. And the wishes of India do count in a world of  G20’s and BRIC’s, even though president Obama has kept a far greater distance from Delhi than his predecessor George Bush jr. That feeling of not being completely heard or understood in Washington serves to ressurect the chimera of the old Pakistan-China-US axis, and that greatly adds to the nervosity in India’s leading circles and produces a position even less flexible when it comes to talking Kashmir.
Three diplomats at the Indian Embassy in Brussels who were dispatched to answer MO*s questions, spend no times beating around the bush: the relation between Kashmir and Afghanistan exists only in the minds of Pakistani diplomats, desperately looking for a way to divert international attention away from the problems that Pakistan has and creates with extremism and terrorism.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to Brussels begs to disagree. For him, it is clear that peace in Kashmir ‘would dramatically decrease public support for organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba. That would make the struggle against the Taliban and other jihadi groups much easier for the Pakistani National Army as well as for the international coalition and the National Army in Afghanistan.’ Jilani also rejects the idea that Pakistan would be the epicenter of regional unrest and global terrorism.
To counter that, Paksitan has proofs, he says, that “certain elements from within the Indian intelligence agencies support, train and arm certain anti-Pakistan elements from their consulates in Afghanistan.” But, no, the Ambassador cannot show me that proof. That kind material is never made public, het trusts I’ll understand.
His accusation seems to close the circle perfectly: India accuses Pakistan of support for armed groups that keep an armed uprising in Kashmir burning -forcing Delhi to permanently stationing at least 600.000 troops in Jammu and Kashmir to prevent secession. Pakistan in turn accuses India of supporting separatist movements in Balochistan, the province that holds most of Pakistan’s natural resources, and most of the country’s poor. India, goes the claim, seeks to subvert the unity of Pakistan, sabotage its development and divert the army away from the Indo-Pakistan border.

the big chill

The mutual paranoia between India and Pakistan is historically one of the reasons why Afghanistan finds itself in the sorry state it is in today. In the early seventies, India lend a helping hand to then East-Pakistan to become an independent Bangladesh. That defeat of the Pakistani army has left deep trauma’s in the nation’s psyche and gave birth to the doctrine of “strategic depth”.
The concept was developed in Pakistan’s baracks and army HQ’s, wich means that it got injected directly in the arteries of political power: Pakistan is no stranger to military coups and long lasting military rule. Strategic depth means that Pakistan, in the event of an Indian offensive, needs a “reliable” regime in Afghanistan, that would allow the army to strategically retreat on Afghan soil, if needed.
Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s doctrinal Muslim dictator, pursued that strategic goal by channeling American and Saudi money and guns to the fundamentalist mujahedeen that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties. Ultimately, that policy as carried out by the omnipresent military intelligence service ISI, produced the Taliban in the nineties. That explains why Pakistan was the very first and almost only country to ever recognize the Taliban governement between 1996 and 2001.
Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban motivated India to continually support the Northern Alliance, a conglomerate of Tadjik, Uzbek and Hazara militias that kept resisting the Taliban. When the US brought this Northern Alliance to power in Kabul after getting rid of the Taliban in 2001, it was code red in all quarters of the Pakistani army. The sense of alarm shows in the fact that the Taliban and their Arab and Uzbek allies were allowed to retire undisturbed behind the Pakistani border. The current reality in Afghanistan, with more than 100.000 foreign troops desperately fighting to keep the Taliban from returning to power in Kabul, is a direct consequence of the Indo-Pakistan tit-for-tat.
Since 2002, India has invested more than a billion dollar in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. It opened a big embassy in Kabul and consulates in Kandahar, Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad. In Pakistan’s view, that can only be understood as a move from India to encircle it. India, for its part, sees the violent attacks on its embassy in Kabul and on Indian expats not as individual acts of terror, but rather as parts of a consistent policy from Pakistan, subcontracted out to the Taliban and other jihadi organisations. Even US-governement sources confirm the links between the ISI and the Haqqani-network, the Afghan rebels held responsible for the anti-Indian attacks in Kabul.
For optimism about Kashmir, there are few takers. Still, this decennium has seen moments of hope, especially since then general-president Musharraf and the Indian prime minister launched the “back-channel diplomacy”. After more than 24 meetings in hotels in Bangkok, Dubai and London, a solution to the Kashmir conundrum seemed within reach.
The stalemate would be broken by giving a form of autonomy to the whole region, combined with free movement of people and goods, a phazed demilitarisation and joint governement over the area. The breakthrough got stalled at the eleventh hour by the political sinking of Musharraf, then the murder of Benazir Bhutto and finally the Mumbai attack of 26/11 2008.
According to the Indian embassy in Brussels, the back-channel has never ceased to function. Judging from the icy tone the two arch-enemies employ when speaking about or even to each other during the past months, it is clear that not much is left of the creative energy that powered these informal talks five years ago. That is one victory the terrorist orgaisation can chalk up. And, to be sure, everytime relations between the two nuclear powers Pakistan and India chill, the whole region shivers. Meanwhile, NATO surges its troop numbers and stays the fight in Afghanistan, even though the war is planned from valleys and headquarters elsewhere.