When the snow melts in Kashmir, the shooting starts. Every year it is the same on the world's most contested border, that which divides the State of Kashmir between its Indian and Pakistani components. This year however the shooting is of an escalated order and much more disturbing. Indian helicopter gunships backed up by MiG fighter aircraft strafed guerrilla positions, killing 160; the first use of such airpower in what passes for peacetime in that powder-keg corner of the world.
As is usual with India and Pakistan when Kashmir blows up, rhetoric from both sides owes as much to fiction as to fact. According to India, its Kashmir border has been infiltrated by Afghan guerrillas who are financed, funded and facilitated by Pakistan. But Pakistan, while admitting the existence of the guerrillas, washes its hands of them; "no one knows where they come from and who they are", according to Mr Sartaj Aziz, the Foreign Minister. That 600 guerrillas could turn up at a border heavily guarded by Pakistan and have "come from nowhere", as it were, is fanciful. They are said to be armed not just with sophisticated mortars and radio equipment but also with snowmobiles and helipads. Hill farmers out for a bit of fun, they are not.
India's justification for the heavy-handed airborne response is equally threadbare. What it needed to do was push 600 guerrillas back four miles. But it has moved in 70 frontline aircraft backed up by more than 10,000 troops. Yesterday, it lost MiG 21 and MiG 27 jets, shot down by Pakistani ground fire. India said both jets had been flying over Indian air space but Pakistan claims that they were downed four miles inside its border with one pilot killed and one captured. The Pakistani claim is easily verified.
There can be little doubt that Pakistan, which cannot be seen to send its own troops over the border, is using mercenaries to keep the conflict alive. Mercenaries in that part of the world would not be hard to come across, especially among Islamic extremists from Afghanistan who would regard the aim of getting all Kashmir under Muslim control as nothing less than a holy war. Pakistan does not want all-out war with India because it would be completely overwhelmed in terms of troops, tanks, aircraft and artillery. But Pakistan would be content to have the dispute escalate to the point where the international community might force India to reach a settlement more to Pakistan's liking than the status quo; much as it did in 1949.
In this regard, India has played into the hands of the Pakistani strategists by escalating what was little more than a routine border skirmish. India should know better but then the caretaker Prime Minister, Mr Vajpayee, may have had his eye on the coming general election when he ordered the jets into the air. Similarly, Pakistan's Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, will relish any diversion for his people from the horrors that the Pakistani economy is going through. This is a conflict which could get out of control all too easily. Both Prime Ministers must quickly get a grip on the situation and move to diffuse it. Their respective countries have already fought two wars over Kashmir. A third war, this time between nuclear-equipped armies, is unthinkable.