LONDON – This is not just currently the world’s most dangerous geological faultline, it is the world’s single most dangerous geopolitical fault line – and there is now a clear connection between the two.
Standing here in this devastated town and looking at the foot ranges of the Himalayas where October’s earthquake tore off a kilometre-long front of mountainside makes one shiver in awe at the earth’s almighty power of destruction. A nuclear war would destroy in a different way – whole cities of the subcontinent would be incinerated.
What is the connection between these two events? Geographically there certainly is. I’m standing near the epicentre of the earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, the one-third slice of Kashmir that Pakistan wrested from India after the first of their three deadly wars. Nearby the two countries have a de facto border, the so-called Line of Control. The Indian part is also largely but not entirely Muslim and many of its inhabitants would prefer to be under Pakistani rule or under their own. Another war could all too easily turn into a nuclear conflict.
But the earthquake has pushed along another connection. Having lost nearly everything, people of all sorts of ranks and persuasions are more convinced than they have ever been that this is the time for making a peace deal with India. Nearly everyone seems to release that only peace with India will allow both sides of Kashmir the chance to recover from years of war and this final blow from the earth itself.
I talked to one old man who had spent three days under a collapsed building before rescue arrived. “Peace is going to happen, compromise is necessary”, he said. I talked to a former government minister who had lost half his family but was composed enough to say, “If I want something I should be ready to give something.”
Even among the jihadists – like Shahebud Din Madui, the president of the ultra militant group, Markazi Jamiat Ahli Hadis – there is a sense of change: “Many jihadists want to give the peace process a chance. But we also think we shouldn’t put down our guns because then India won’t be so willing to negotiate.”
Nearly everyone supports the peace moves made by Pakistan’s president, Perez Musharaff. For the last three years, responding to an initiative made by India’s then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Musharaff appears to have transformed his personality. Gone is the reckless army commander who in 1999 nearly provoked nuclear war as his troops and mujadeen led a joint operation against Indian troops at Kargil inside Indian Kashmir.
In its place is a compromise-minded diplomat. Although India arguably has made the greatest single concession by accepting that it cannot maintain its claim to be the sole ruler of all of Kashmir, it is Pakistan that has set the pace on sensitive concessions, such as being prepared to put on one side the promise made by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to let the issue be settled by a referendum and to accept that most of Kashmir will remain directly under Indian sovereignty.
Moreover, Musharaff has finally cut the umbilical cord between jihadists and the military, although he won’t have the credibility to persuade them to give up the jihad until the immense Indian army presence begins to wind down.
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India perhaps feels too comfortable. If it sits back Pakistan may make more concessions. By agreeing to open crossing gates on the Line of Control, which could blossom into the porous border that the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has long championed, it could take some of the sting out of Kashmiri frustrations. Also India remains wary of conceding too much on Kashmir unless its restless and rebellious northeastern states become even more bent on secession. (But Indonesia, having allowed East Timor to break off, was worried this would embolden Aceh. It hasn’t.)
No one doubts Singh’s personal commitment. “Short of secession, short of re-drawing boundaries, the Indian establishment can live with anything,” he forcefully told me in an interview the day after he became prime minister. And as the Pakistani prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, told me, “Manmohan has a lot of credibility in India and he could deliver”.
But it means Singh pushing his bureaucracy and intelligence services which are resisting strongly. This is the time to push, whilst the military strong man Musharaff can deliver Pakistan. (In a year’s time planned elections might weaken his clout.)
The stakes are worth every sinew of action – the avoidance of a nuclear war and the chance of receiving the large amounts of foreign investment that China now receives, which will secure both countries’ rapid economic advance and undercut the militants who are capable of damaging both regimes.
