The chances for peace between long-time rivals India and Pakistan are better now than they have been for decades. These two countries have faced each other with nuclear weapons since 1998, making the region one of the world’s key trouble spots. Last month, they agreed to a diplomatic road map designed to resolve the issues that divide them.
Among these conflicts is the status of the Muslim-majority Indian province of Kashmir, which Muslim-dominated Pakistan claims and over which the two countries have fought two wars, and come close to fighting several more, since their 1947 partition. The negotiations are scheduled to last for six months. Success is not guaranteed, but there are three reasons to hope.
First, each side has already made a major concession to the other. India has agreed to discuss Kashmir, after insisting that it was a purely Indian affair. Pakistan has agreed to end its support for the militants fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir, which it has sponsored for more than a decade.
Second, powerful forces are pushing both sides to compromise. For India, the most powerful of these is globalization. In the last decade, the Indian government has enacted economic reforms that have given the country a larger and more profitable role in the international economy than ever before. Indian companies have begun to compete in foreign markets. Taking advantage of the presence of millions of well-educated, English-speaking Indians, Western companies have relocated hundreds of thousands of information-processing and call-answering jobs to Indian cities. India is thus poised to achieve Chinese-style rates of economic growth, but for this it needs political stability and an inflow of foreign investment, which the ongoing conflict with Pakistan threatens. India therefore has a significant economic incentive to end that conflict.
For Pakistan, the new pressure to end the conflict began with the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001. The American government insisted that the Pakistani government disown the Taleban regime in Afghanistan, with which it was closely associated. The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, sided with the United States, but in so doing alienated the elements in Pakistani society that supported the Taleban, which are the same groups and individuals most committed to wresting Kashmir from India by force. They have declared Musharraf their enemy, and he has been the target of two recent assassination attempts. Peace with India has become, for Musharraf, a continuation of the policies he initiated after 9/11 and of his battle with his domestic adversaries.
The recent revelations of a black market in nuclear weapons material centered in Pakistan give Musharraf another incentive to come to terms with India. Peace would help to counteract the reputation as an international outlaw with which these bootleg nuclear activities have saddled Pakistan.
There is a third reason for cautious optimism that the South Asian rivals can at last settle their differences: Each country’s leader is unusually well placed politically to do so, for each has spent much of his career steadfastly opposing the other country.
Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister, comes from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has maintained a consistently unyielding position on Kashmir and Pakistan. Before seizing power in a coup in 1999, Musharraf was the head of the Pakistani Army, the institution most active in Kashmir. Just as President Richard Nixon’s career as an anti-Communist gave him the political cover necessary to launch a diplomatic initiative to Communist China in 1972, so Vajpayee and Musharraf can probably persuade their countrymen to accept compromises that leaders with different political histories would not be able to carry through. The United States is in the rare position of having no responsibility for the scheduled peace talks. But if the talks approach success, the need for an American role may arise.
The most plausible settlement in Kashmir would involve an acceptance by both sides of the status quo. Because this favors India, which controls most of the province, it would seem a setback for Pakistan, which might require compensation — of which Washington is the likeliest source — to agree to it. An American financial contribution to a South Asian peace treaty, should one be required, would be a worthwhile price to pay to put an end to one of the longest-running and most dangerous conflicts on the planet.
— Michael Mandelbaum is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
