Why the India-Pakistan cease-fire could end up burning Washington
The cease-fire between India and Pakistan has held for nearly a week.Pakistan has thanked Donald Trump for mediating a miraculous way out after its most vital military installations were cratered by Indian missile strikes.
India, regarded by a succession of US presidents as an indispensable democratic partner against China, maintains that it halted hostilities in response to direct pleas from Pakistan.Whatever the truth, this is the terrifying reality: The brief conflict that dragged two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of all-out war has neither resolved nor eliminated the reason that gave rise to it.The spark for the outbreak of this conflagration was the savage murder of tourists in the Pahalgam valley in Kashmir on April 22.
Masked terrorists carrying guns cornered holidaymakers, demanded to know their religion, and selected non-Muslims for slaughter: 26 men — Hindu and Christian, many of them newlyweds — were shot in the forehead in front of their wives, who were spared to carry the killers’ “message.” As news of the atrocity spread, Resistance Front, a terror group affiliated with the Pakistani jihadist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), claimed responsibility.The LeT is part of the extensive terror network erected by Pakistan’s military-intelligence cabal, which, unable to beat India in conventional war, assembled a series of armed proxies to bleed it in Kashmir.Pakistan’s murderous quest for Kashmir, over which it has waged multiple wars, is a product of the identity crisis that has plagued the country since its birth.
Hacked out of India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims in 1947, the rationale behind Pakistan’s invention — that Muslims and Hindus could not coexist in one nation — was immediately invalidated when India refused to become a Hindu state and embraced a secular constitution.As long as Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, remains part of a constitutionally secular India, Islamic Pakistan’s sense of itself as the aut...