In Kashmir, this year's "annual spring exercises"--as the more worldly local commentators like to joke--escalated into the most severe and sustained bout of fighting since 1971, when India and Pakistan clashed for the third time since Partition. In the Kargil Mountains, at an altitude of 17,000 feet, where the air is so thin the trajectory of artillery shells cannot be predicted and helicopter rotors have difficulty generating lift, Pakistani-backed "freedom fighters", mostly imported from Afghanistan, battled with Indian troops. After eight weeks of fighting, many hundreds of deaths, and international alarm over a possible nuclear exchange, the ceasefire line remains basically where it had been before the fighting began, and Kashmir stays partitioned.
Divided between three nuclear-armed powers--India, Pakistan and China--Kashmir remains one of the great unsolved, perhaps insoluble, questions in world politics. In this Himalayan Kosovo, Kashmir's owners cannot give an inch for fear of setting off a chain reaction of ethno-religious turmoil within their own countries and the surrounding region. Indeed, all but the unfortunate Kashmiris (and even they are divided between Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists) may emerge better off if Kashmir is sacrificed on the altar of regional stability. This predicament may be unfair, but it lends a semblance of order and balance to South Asia.
How did tiny, paradisiacal Kashmir end up in this terrible position? History and geography go a long way toward providing an answer. Indeed, for centuries before the current dispute began in 1947, geography alone practically foreordained that Kashmir would become a pivotal space on the earth's surface.
