Why Kashmir is Tinderbox for a Nuclear War

Historian Eric Margolis at the lewrockwell.com warns that the contested Kashmir region should always be in one’s radar screen since the area is a flashpoint that can precipitately trigger a world war with the pronounced risks of nuclear exchanges.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars and some very large battles over Kashmir. Both claim the entire mountain state. Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, has waged a long covert campaign to insert guerillas into Indian Kashmir to aid a series of spontaneous rebellions against Indian rule by the state’s Muslim majority…

Muslim Kashmiris have been in almost constant revolt against Indian rule since 1947 when the British divided India. Today, 500,000 Indian troops and paramilitary police garrison rebellious Kashmir. Some 40,000-50,000 Kashmiris are believed to have died over the past decade in uprising.

India blames the violence in Kashmir on "cross-border terrorism" engineered by Pakistani intelligence. Human rights groups accuse Indian forces of executions, torture, and reprisals against civilians. Large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs have fled strife-torn Kashmir after attacks by Muslim Kashmiri guerillas. It’s a very bloody, dirty war.

The Kashmir conflict poses multiple dangers. First is the very likely chance that local skirmishing can quickly surge into major fighting involving air power and heavy artillery. In 1999, a surprise attack by Pakistani commandos into the Indian-ruled Kargil region provoked heavy fighting. The two nations, with more than one million troops facing one another, came very close to an all-out war. I have on good authority that both sides put their tactical nuclear weapons on red alert. Angry Indian generals called on Delhi to use its powerful armored corps to cut Pakistan in half. India’s cautious civilian leadership said no.

Second, the Kashmir conflict also involves India’s strategic rival, China. Beijing claims the entire eastern end of the Himalayan border separating India and China, which Chinese troops occupied in a brief 1963 war. China also occupied, with Pakistan’s help, a high strategic plateau on the western end of the Himalayas known as Aksai Chin that was part of historic Tibet.

China is Pakistan’s closest political and military ally. Any major Indian attack on Pakistan would risk intervention by Chinese air, ground and missiles forces in neighboring Tibet.

Third, in the midst of all these serious tensions, India and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons – delivered by air and missile – are on hair-trigger alert. This means that during a severe crisis, both sides are faced with "use it, or lose" decision in minutes to use their nuclear arsenals.

The strategic command and control systems of India and Pakistan are said to be riddled with problems and often unreliable, though much improvement has been made in recent years.

A false report, a flight of birds, and off-course aircraft could provoke a nuclear exchange. By the time Islamabad could call Delhi, war might be on. A US Rand Corp study estimated an Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange would kill two million immediately, injure or kill 100 million later, pollute the Indus River and send clouds of radioactive dust around the globe.

Given the recent skirmishes and the suspension of trade links, as well as the increasing use of territorial claims by governments as camouflage or as diversion to homegrown economic malaise and of the increasing political recourse towards policies of redistribution via financial repression, this area seems more geopolitically sensitive or more fragile than the East Asia’s territorial dispute.