On the line of confrontation

JOHN KIFNER
in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir

FOR the flashpoint of a potential nuclear war, the fields in the Jhelum river valley present a tranquil, bucolic scene. Water buffaloes tug at crude ploughs. Shoots of rice are beginning to sprout from watery, mud-walled rectangles. But in the mountains jutting above, up the steep dirt switchbacks, is the Line of Control, an 880-km chain of sandbagged trenches and concrete bunkers where the Pakistani Army is dug in. Across the valley are almost identical Indian fortifications. It was here that the fighting ground to a halt the first time India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir.

"This is very tough terrain," said Brigadier Haider Khan, pointing from his bunker to an Indian strong point atop a cone-shaped mountain. "Good for the defence."

The armies have been here for 50 years - "eyeball to eyeball", the Pakistanis like to say - and the soldiers on both sides do not seem to think anything will change soon. A conventional attack by either side - the Indians have superior forces - would be difficult. The advent of nuclear weapons, the Pakistanis in particular insist, will be a deterrent, not a goad.

For Pakistan, the subcontinent's nuclear arms race and the attendant hand-wringing by the great powers has brought an unexpected boon: Kashmir, a cause long-forgotten by the world and a cause most likely lost, has suddenly moved to the top of the international agenda.

B.K. BANGASH / AP
A Pakistani soldier displays an artillery shell allegedly fired by Indian troops on the civilian population at Chakoti on June 3.

The trouble dates to the departure of the British in 1947, when the 600 princely states chose to affiliate with Muslim Pakistan or predominantly Hindu India. Kashmir's population was overwhelmingly Muslim but its Maharaja, a Hindu, Hari Singh, described by historians as weak and vacillating and prone to the indulgences common to his fabulously wealthy class. While he dithered, Pathan tribesmen, encouraged by leaders in Pakistan, raided Kashmir, and the Maharaja appealed for help from India. An airlift brought in Indian troops, who have remained since, much to the anger of Pakistan.

"Kashmir - that is the problem, that is the critical issue for Pakistan," Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, a retired Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff, said. "It is on that issue that we have fought three wars. We are in a perpetual state of confrontation there; our armies are face to face. This nuclear issue is a result of that conflict."

The mountains, valleys and lakes here in the Himalayas are among the most beautiful on earth. The region was particularly beloved, it be noted, both by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and the father of Pakistan, and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister.

It is not always quiet here. Sporadically, one side or the other will open fire with heavy weapons or even artillery, sometimes to deter or cover infiltrators. There was a long stretch of nearly constant shelling last year from August 23 to October 3, Brig. Haider Khan said - "a tremendous increase, unprecedented" - until calls over a hotline brought an informal ceasefire. Overall, he said, four people were killed and 41 wounded last year in his brigade's sector, while the division as a whole had 12 killed and 93 wounded.

"Our response to such shooting," the Brigadier said, "is we select that post and then we punish it. We hit it and we hit it. I am not mincing any words, we hit it hard. The Indian only understands one language - retaliation."

When two buses of foreign journalists on an Army-guided tour pulled into the village of Chakothi, the men were lined up along the main street, a dozen or so clutching chunks of spent ordnance, ready to have their picture taken. Some appeared to have gone through this exercise so frequently that they had tired of it.

"Why should we have to prove it, that we have been shot at?" Mohammed Nazir, who was brandishing the finned stump of a 120-mm mortar, grumbled to Khan. "You have brought them here again and again to prove it."

Two men pulled a pair of sceptical journalists aside and walked them over the muddy fields to a house where a .30-caliber round was still embedded in a small crater in the stucco. Hajji Alizman, the owner of the house, who came here as a child refugee with his parents in 1947, produced a handful of spent bullets he had found in his yard, two with streaks of red paint still on the tips, indicating they were tracers, usually spaced every fifth round in a machine gun's ammunition belt. But the houses do not show the destruction from repeated pounding by heavy shelling evident in, say, Lebanon or the former Yugoslav republics. Indeed, the buildings appeared to be relatively new, with good metal roofs. At considerable expense, the Pakistani Government has run electricity, a rarity in rural Pakistan, into virtually every building in what officials said was an effort to encourage people to stay.

B.K. BANGASH / AP
Troops at a Pakistani post at Chakoti.

Rather, the real action here, in a part of the world where Britain and Russia once played the 'Great Game', is a kind of proxy war, where the shadowy intelligence operatives on both sides covert aid to dissidents in the fractious country across the border.

In 1989, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began a rebellion against Indian rule. Its goal was an independent country, not affiliation with Pakistan, and its membership, while Muslim, was largely secular in outlook. By about 1995, the Indian authorities had crushed the movement in what human-rights agencies have documented as a campaign of imprisonment, torture and death.

Lately, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which operates outside the military command and was the conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. and Saudi Arabian aid and weapons to the Afghan Mujahideen in their war with Soviet troops, has entered the fray. The ISI sponsors guerilla bands, including Islamic veterans from Afghanistan and Pathan tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province and beyond. Many of these, unlike the original Kashmiri rebels, are Islamic fundamentalists.

For the Pakistani military, the continued strife in Kashmir has a tactical advantage. It ties down large numbers of Indian troops - the Pakistanis put the number at over 500,000, including paramilitary and border forces - keeping them from becoming a conventional threat elsewhere.

The depth of passion over the issue is clear. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg quickly warms to the topic. "That is where the conspiracy started," he said, "where the British, by sinister design, allowed the opportunity for a Hindu raja to play the Indian tune."

New York Times Service

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