Paving the road to hell
By Paul Belden

By now, Kashmiris of every religious persuasion have figured out the intelligent response to the news that a Western diplomat is visiting the region to "de-escalate tensions" in their part of world.

Run for cover.

If not, you risk ending up like the father, brother and two other relatives gunned down Sunday night in Surankot, a small village 125 miles northwest of Jammu, the winter capital of the disputed Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) state in Indian-administered Kashmir. Or the five men and three women shot down by suspected Islamic militants in Duadasan Bhala, a village 115 miles north of Jammu, or the 20 people wounded by a grenade in Kokernag, south of Srinagar, the J&K summer capital, both on Saturday.

The two days mentioned in the previous paragraph - Sunday and Saturday last - coincide with, respectively, the day US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage arrived in New Delhi, and the day he left. Reasonable people in this part of the world could be forgiven for deducing that visiting international diplomats bearing good intentions are a menace to society.

The irony is exquisite. Upon leaving India en route to China, Armitage told reporters that he was taking his cue from the physicians' Hippocratic oath: "First, do no harm." Perhaps it had escaped his attention that, in this part of the world, his very presence causes harm. And not only to those whose killings coincide with his semi-seasonal visits.

India has spent the summer preparing for a September election that it hopes will be fair enough, both in substance and perception, to invite the participation of all the region's religious persuasions, be they Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Sikh. Pakistan has spent the same summer trying to sabotage that election in the hope of "internationalizing" the conflict. (And it hasn't been doing so in the shadows; Musharraf, in his August 14 Independence Day speech, openly described the referendum as "farcical", calling it "yet another effort to give a mask of legitimacy to India's illegal occupation of the state".)

Thus, Armitage, just by showing up, is taking a side in this fight, and it is Pakistan's. The side of the undemocratic state sponsor of cross-border terrorism. And for what reason? In order to "de-escalate" the very terrorism whose side he is taking, whose continuance he is encouraging, just by showing up in the first place.

Has it occurred to Armitage that, just maybe, if he were to refrain from parachuting into the region every time Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence activates one of its hit squads, they might give it a rest?

Okay, to be fair to Armitage, that's probably a pipe dream. Deprived of the world's spotlight, the Islamic Kashmiri separatists would more likely just increase the pace of their killings until at some point - a point of pain past all bearing - they finally got the attention they craved. It's a game that any spoiled child knows how to play, a game of screaming louder than the grownups' ears can take.

This is one conflict in which both sides are not equally right. If Armitage actually believes Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Rashid Qureshi's contention that "whenever there is a high-profile visit to the subcontinent, the Indian government has got into the habit of either going into escalation or stage-managing an incident" - then Armitage is a fool.

If it is really true that India "stage-managed" the car bombing, by an Islamic fundamentalist hit squad, of the J&K legislature last October in which 30 were killed; the four-man suicide squad two months later that used a car packed with explosives to try to blow up Parliament House; and the suicide squad that massacred another 34 people near Jammu in May - that was quite a feat of disinformation. All these attacks occurred with Western diplomats at hand.

After the May attack, India decided she had had enough and mobilized for war, scrambling planes, sending warships to the edge of Pakistani territorial waters and moving troops into an offensive military border posture. The diplomats came running, among them Armitage, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw. Together, by means of "shuttle diplomacy", the diplomats averted a war by extracting a pledge from Musharraf that not only would the infiltration over the Line of Control stop, but the terrorist training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir would be permanently and visibly shut down.

Did it work? In a sense, yes. As Lieutenant-General Rajinder Singh, head of India's 14th Corps, told Reuters this week, a mere 200 to 300 rounds of artillery are being exchanged daily in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, north of Kashmir, down from 5,000 a day in May. And the killings of civilians in J&K dropped from 84 in the month of May to 54 in June, according to figures compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal.

But then the killings of civilians went back up in July, to 91. And a month later, Armitage was back.

The Armitages and the Powells and the Straws of the world are not stupid people. They surely realize their "shuttle diplomacy" in South Asia is no more than a pro forma dance to a cynical tune - a tune called in Islamabad. And so long as they continue to step in time, Musharraf's deadly music may never end.

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