FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

LONDON - `Don't worry,' chorused India's and Pakistan's foreign ministers after the widely anticipated failure of a two-day summit last week at Agra, `the meeting helped us understand each other.'

India and Pakistan, created in 1947 from the breakup of British India, don't need more understanding: they understand one another all too well. These old foes, who have fought two major wars, are like a bitterly divorced couple: they know, understand, and consequently distrust one another thoroughly. They recall every hurt, bicker over trivia, and delight in inflicting petty humiliations on the other.

The world should be deeply alarmed by the failure at Agra, a city renowned for that majestic incarnation of love, the Taj Mahal. India and Pakistan are both nuclear armed, with aircraft and missiles on hair-trigger alert in times of crisis. As their leaders were meeting, Indian and Pakistani artillery traded salvos along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani sectors. Eighty civilians and soldiers were killed inside the strife-torn mountain state over which India and Pakistan have fought since 1947.

India's Prime Minister, Atal Vajpayee, and his very able and clever Defense/Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, proposed India and Pakistan normalize relations through trade, more accessible borders, and military exchanges before tackling the thorny question of Kashmir.

Delhi also demands Pakistan admit its key role in supporting a 12-year old bloody uprising by Kashmir's majority Muslim population - which India ascribes to `cross -border terrorism' - that seeks independence from India and/or union with Pakistan. India, which maintains 600,000 soldiers and paramilitary police in Kashmir, is accused by Indian and international rights groups of massive human rights violations in the dirty guerilla war in which at least 75,000 have died. India rejects UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir and insists the state is entirely an Indian domestic matter.

Pakistan's widely underrated president, Gen. Pervez Musharrraf, made a strong showing at Agra, insisting India must resolve the Kashmir conflict before the two foes can embark on normal relations. Otherwise, as he told me in an exclusive interview last year, the Kashmir issue will recede into oblivion - as it nearly had until 1999, when he and Lt. Gen Muhammed Aziz Khan mounted an incursion of Muslim mujihadin and Pakistani commandos into the Indian-controlled Kargil region of Kashmir.

The ensuing heavy fighting cost both sides thousands of dead and, according to US military intelligence, brought the two nuclear-armed nations to within days of all-out war along a 1,700 km front from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. Outnumbered and outgunned by India, Pakistan might have had to resort to tactical nuclear strikes. India would have retaliated, producing, according to the US think tank, Rand Corp, two million immediate dead, 100 million casualties, and a cloud of lethal radioactive dust that would circle the globe.

Pakistani and mujihadin forces were driven back, but the Kargil incursion succeeded, as Pakistan hoped, in awakening the world's attention to almost forgotten Kashmir, and pushing India into talks with Pakistan.

Delhi decided to negotiate with Islamabad: a. under US pressure to lower tensions: b. because India believed it held the upper hand in dealing with diplomatically isolated Pakistan; and c. because of a sharp US tilt towards India begun by the Clinton Administration. Clinton's sudden policy shift may have been the result of US $1 million in `political contributions' channeled by India's intelligence service, RAW, through Indians living in the US, to Clinton, the Democrats, and to his by now notorious library. India was merely following China's example of successfully buying influence in Washington.

India is right in seeking normalized relations and ending the futile Cold War between Delhi and Islamabad. Pakistan is right in demanding that India come up with a political solution to end the bloodshed in Kashmir, whose people clearly want to be rid of Indian rule.

Unfortunately, and most significantly, the two nations failed at Agra to make any progress on the most imperative issue facing them: preventing accidental war by establishing reliable communications between Indian and Pakistani military headquarters, and a hot line between Delhi and Islamabad. Both sides lack early warning systems to give time to evaluate reports of possible enemy attack; both have at best a few minutes to use or lose their nuclear missiles and strike aircraft.

This situation is intolerable, particularly between nations whose armies are at war in Kashmir. The world must aid India and Pakistan to set up early warning systems to prevent accidental nuclear war. India is about to spend US $1 billion on an ex-Soviet aircraft carrier and navalized MiG-29's, yet says it lacks funds for early warning and modern nuclear command and control. Pakistan has no money at all for nuclear architecture.

Delhi and Islamabad must reaffirm their uncertain agreement not to attack one another's nuclear plants. Both should pull back forces from the Line of Control. And both should agree immediately to stop their insane battle in the Karakorams over the frozen, airless, 6,000-meter high Siachen Glacier, the world's highest war, which daily costs India US$10 million and Pakistan $5 million.

After Agra, both sides reiterated their pre-conference positions. In other words, nothing had changed, at least so far. No one expected 54 years of hostility to end in a mere two says, but the world was hoping to see at least a hint of a thaw. But there was none. President Musharraf and PM Vajpayee are due to meet again this fall at the UN in New York. Pray they do better in the city of business than they did in the city of love.

Copyright: Eric S. Margolis 2001

`War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet' by Eric S. Margolis (Routledge New York) is available in leading bookstores and online. `The Houston Review' in a July review calls it `the best book on foreign policy in the new millennium,' and `a masterpiece.'

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