For 55 years, India and Pakistan have laid claim to the region called Kashmir. In 1947, India gained its independence from the British and was partitioned into two new states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan. Because Pakistan thought they should incorporate the mostly Muslim region, even though its rulers had ceded control to India, the new nations went to war. War occurred in 1947-49 and again in 1965. In those conflicts Pakistan and China gained control of territory in Kashmir claimed by India, though India held onto the most populated areas.

Since 1989 an armed rebellion by Muslim militants in the India-controlled portion has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Most recently, intense diplomacy by the Bush Administration helped diffuse an extremely volatile situation in May, when more than one million Indian and Pakistani troops massed along the shared border. Potential costs of another war have escalated: Both sides now have nuclear capability.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 have radically altered U.S. relations with South Asian countries; specif- ically India and Pakistan. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship had been deteriorating because of the lack of democracy in Pakistan as well as its cooperation with China on ballistic missile proliferation. Now, the U.S. is courting Pakistan: We want it to cooperate in the international coalition against terrorism.

Nuclear nonproliferation had been the central doctrine of U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan. This has now taken a back seat to the new number one priority, the war on terrorism. But as the U.S. has abandoned its emphasis on nonproliferation, the tensions between India and Pakistan have risen. As tempers and tensions flare, both countries may decide to make their nuclear weapons operational, to increase their stockpiles of nuclear material and possibly even to resume nuclear tests.

While India and Pakistan continue to increase their spending to enlarge their stockpiles of weapons grade material, it is unlikely that they will give enough attention to securing this dangerous material, particularly given the financial and technological constraints. This is a critical issue, given the elevated U.S. concerns about nuclear materials and weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups.

In late July Secretary of State Colin Powell visited India and Pakistan to continue pressuring the two countries to make progress on resolving their conflicts. After meeting with officials from both countries, Powell reiterated that the United States was committed to the South Asian region over the long haul, but admitted that efforts to resolve disputes between the two countries had hit a "plateau." He also stated that further progress may not be possible until after elections are held in Pakistan and in Indian-administered Kashmir this fall. Calling on India and Pakistan to create conditions necessary for "free and fair" elections in Kashmir, Powell proposed that international monitors be allowed to view the Kashmir elections. India firmly rejected the proposal.

India and Pakistan continue to disagree on whether the level of militant infiltration across the Kashmir Line of Control (the line dividing Indian-controlled Kashmir from the portion controlled by Pakistan) has decreased. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf repeated that he has ordered a permanent end to such infiltration, while Indian officials state that there has been no decrease, pointing to a spate of recent attacks against Kashmiri citizens.

Secretary Powell stated that the U.S. believes infiltration has gone down, but has no way to confirm the claims of either country.

Israel is once again expressing interest in selling its Arrow theater ballistic missile defense system to India. However, because the U.S. was a partner in developing the Arrow, Israel cannot sell the system without U.S. approval. The Bush Administration has not yet taken a position on the sale, but has shown concern that it might destabilize South Asia and also may violate Missile Technology Control Regime restrictions. Secretary of State Powell stated that the Arrow issue was not raised at all during his weekend meetings in India.

Indo-Pakistan Relations

The region of Kashmir originally came into dispute because the British lacked a coherent method for dividing the states of their former colony. Each ruler or prince was to decide whether his domain would come under the control of either India or Pakistan, presumably based on the ethnic and religious makeup and interests of the population in the region. No other mechanism was set up to be sure that politically effective choices were made, or to ensure against further claims to independence by the individual regions.

In Kashmir, a Hindu ruler governed a largely Muslim population and chose to accede to Indian control. Indians and Pakistanis, however, continue to blame each other for the conflict rather than the faulty partition process.

The original problem has been made worse by the leaders of both countries, as they strive to use Kashmir as a symbol of their national identities. Because Pakistan has defined itself as the "homeland" for Indian Muslims and was created to free Muslims from "the tyranny of majority rule," the existence of a largely Muslim area under Indian rule has been a thorn in Pakistan's side. For India, which has defined itself as a secular state, predominantly Muslim regions have been necessary to demonstrate the secular nature of the state. Because the national self-image was at risk for both, the stakes were raised for both.

Kashmir has become a major issue in the domestic politics of both countries as well. Pakistan, particularly, has used Kashmir as a way to unify a diverse nation. Both civilian and military leaders have used Kashmir as a diversion and as a rallying cry. On the Indian side, the Kashmiri Hindu population, though small, has had disproportionate influence and has been overrepresented in the upper echelons of the Indian government.

Nuclear Issues

The driving force behind the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region was not Kashmir but the Sino-Indian rivalry, which erupted into a border war between India and China in 1962. Both China and India saw themselves as potential great powers based on the sheer size of their populations. One of the prerequisites for a great power is an independent nuclear arsenal, no matter how small. China achieved this in the early 1960s, and it is probable that this was behind India's pursuit of nuclear capability, which culminated in a successful nuclear test in 1974.

The test was a surprise to the rest of the world but a profound shock to Pakistan. Pakistanis have always viewed India with suspicion and suspect an underlying desire by India to undo the partition of 1947 and forcibly incorporate Pakistan into India. Though India's nuclear arsenal was not created to threaten Pakistan, to Pakistanis it was an overwhelming threat. The Prime Minister of Pakistan at the time of the nuclear test by India vowed that Pakistan would match India's achievement, even if it meant Pakistanis would have to eat grass. Pakistan launched a nuclear program, and because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Reagan Administration ignored Pakistan's program in order to solidify the anticommunist alliance needed to sustain the Afghan guerilla war. Pakistan probably went nuclear in 1987.

Preventing Nuclear Terror

The policies the Bush Administration pursues in South Asia will help to determine that region's effectiveness in dealing with both the threat of nuclear use and the threat of nuclear terrorism. If nuclear issues are not seen as the highest priority, and if India and Pakistan get little protest from the international community, both countries will most probably deploy operational nuclear weapons as the tensions between them mount.

At this crucial time in South Asia's development of nuclear capabilities, the Bush Administration and the U.S. Congress must maintain pressure on India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and to rethink the direction of their nuclear policies. The United States must also continue to work with India and Pakistan to contain the Kashmir conflict, to bolster stability, and to prosecute the war on terrorism. It is another major challenge in one of the world's hottest spots.

General Assembly

The Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT), the most widely accepted arms control treaty in existence (187 countries), was open for ratification in 1968. It came into force in 1970, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the initial five nuclear weapons states -- the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and the People's Republic of China. It created a two-tier system, accepting the reality that the five countries holding veto power in the UN General Assembly all had nuclear weapons. The non-nuclear weapons states gave up, voluntarily, the right to develop their own nuclear arsenals on several conditions: (1) that they would have access to and help in developing nuclear technologies of nonweapons capacities, such as energy, and (2) that the nuclear powers pledged to work toward the elimination of their own nuclear weapons. While it is clear that the first group has kept its end of the bargain, the nuclear weapons states clearly have not, creating a double standard that is increasingly resented. The NPT treaty had its five-year required review at a UN Conference in the spring of 2000 with little progress in strengthening its effectiveness. The five nuclear weapons states, including the United States, have made minimum effort to work toward nuclear disarmament. The NPT was threatened in May 1998 when India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests, confirming their nuclear capabilities and their hostility as neighbors. It has been jeopardized in the Middle East by Israel's refusal to bring its nuclear developments into conformity with international law and under International Atomic Energy Agency regulations, even while the United States leads the efforts to assure that Iraq and Iran do not become regional nuclear threats.

Conscious of these dynamics and acutely aware of the pivotal roles of both the United Nations, as the focal point of responsibility for the world community, and the United States, as the major power in that community, the 212th General Assembly (2000) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) reaffirms its long-standing call to end the arms race, and urges:

Reexamination by the United States of both its domestic and international policies, and the seeking of informed public review of its foreign policy perspective and goals for the twenty-first century, to the end that the building of security for the twenty-first century will be based on the extension of the rule of law, the development of strengthened instruments of international governance, the strengthening of arms control and disarmament agreements, the enhancing of instruments of nonviolent conflict resolution, not on the continued enhancement of technological instruments of destruction, shaped originally in the context of the cold war... (Minutes, 2000, Part I, p. 278)