FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

NEW YORK - The mountain of debris that was the World Trade Center still smolders, spreading over lower Manhattan a toxic miasma of rotting bodies, burned plastic, asbestos, and crushed buildings. It took two showers to rid my body of the stink.

America's vengeance has been falling on Afghanistan in the form of B-52 carpet bombing, and 5,000lb blockbuster bombs. US troops are moving to overthrow the Taliban regime in Kabul, which foolishly offered itself up as a target to American wrath.

While all western eyes are fixed on Afghanistan, the immensely dangerous confrontation over Kashmir between India and Pakistan has just gone critical, as this column warned it would on 23 September, when I wrote of the dangers of `an enraged US bull in South Asia's nuclear China shop.' CIA calls the Line of Control (LOC) that divides the disputed Himalayan mountain state between India and Pakistan `the world's most dangerous border.'

Last week, India officials began to speak openly about nuclear war with Pakistan over Kashmir. This week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is rushing to Islamabad and Delhi in a long overdue attempt to restrain the flaring hostility between Pakistan and India.

Kashmir is the only Indian state with a Muslim majority. When India and Pakistan were created by Britain in 1947, Kashmir was left divided after bitter fighting between the two hostile neighbors. Kashmiris were to have decided in a UN plebiscite whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan. But India never allowed a vote in the two-thirds of Kashmir it controlled.

In 1989, after decades of corrupt and often brutal Indian rule, Kashmir's Muslims rebelled and began a guerilla war. Many of the score of Muslim independence groups are based either in the Pakistani-ruled portion of Kashmir(Azad Kashmir), or in Pakistan.

The Kashmiri independence fighters resort to car bombs, mines, assassinations, and occasional massacres of Hindus; Indian forces conduct savage reprisals against civilians, mass executions, widescale torture, gang rapes, and arson, acts strongly condemned by Indian and international rights organizations.

India has long branded Kashmiri separatists as `terrorists' and accused Pakistan on sponsoring `cross-border terrorism.' Pakistan says it only gives the `freedom-fighters' moral support. In fact, Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, has long armed and sponsored some - but not all - of the Kashmiri mujihadin, as well as some Sikh separatists and insurgents in India's eastern hill states. India's intelligence service, RAW, plants bombs in Pakistan, stirs up anti-government extremist groups, and supports Taliban's foes in Afghanistan.

On 2 October, a radical Kashmiri guerilla group launched a suicide bombing attack on the parliament building in Srinagar, capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, that left 40 dead.

Washington last week branded Kashmiri and Chechen independence fighters as `terrorists,' though both are widely regarded internationally as legitimate independence fighters. The US move was clearly payback for Indian and Russian cooperation in President Bush's `crusade against terrorism.'

If the US has the right to attack nations that harbor terrorists, Indians logically insist, so do they. India's PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee says he can't keep resisting public pressure to launch attacks on the insurgent's bases in Pakistani Kashmir, action long been urged by India's generals, who are frustrated by their inability to crush the Kashmiri independence struggle.

Last week, India's External Affairs Minister, Omar Abdullah, warned that Pakistan could use nuclear weapons in any conflict with India. India has about 40-60 nuclear weapons; Pakistan about 20. Both sides nuclear-armed missiles and strike aircraft are on a hair-trigger, 3 minute alert. A single false alarm - say a US Tomahawk missile flying off course - could trigger a nuclear exchange that would kill 2 million immediately and gravely injure 100 million. Indian and Pakistan nuclear reactors are prime targets in any war.

If Washington does not move swiftly to begin resolving the lethal Kashmir dispute, a lot of cities may end up looking like lower Manhattan.

India is also growing uneasy as Pakistan falls increasingly under American control. This past week, Pakistan's besieged leader, Gen. Musharraf, staged a barracks coup, replacing popular nationalist generals with officers who would not oppose US action in Afghanistan. The powerful director of ISI, Pakistani intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmad, whom I met with last year, was forced out by US pressure, just like his nationalist predecessors, Hamid Gul and Javed Nasser.

Washington is urging restraint on India, a virtue it is hardly following itself in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the US blitz against Afghanistan is profoundly - perhaps mortally - destabilizing wobbly Pakistan. Pakistan's sprawling army HQ was just burned down. If Musharraf is overthrown by angry, pro-Afghan Pakistanis, or if the nuclear-armed nation dissolves in chaos, India may be tempted to intervene, gobbling up Azad Kashmir, or even making good on the vow of the Hindu fundamentalists who dominate the current government in Delhi to `crush Pakistan' and recreate the united India of the British Raj.

US troops are about to go into action in Afghanistan between feuding India and Pakistan, while a nervous China watches American forces operate on its sensitive western borders. Adding more danger, Russia, the long-time military backer of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, is pushing troops into Afghanistan. After expending US $6 billion and 2 million Afghan lives to oust the Russians from Afghanistan in the 1980's, the US, blinded by anger, is now inviting them back in.