India is having too much fun in Kashmir, to go play in Iraq. And the Bush Administration is just not flexible and creative enough, to come up with a win-win solution that'll get the Indian's interest.
India has 250,000 troops in Kashmir. But the place has nothing. No oil, no industry, not on the route to anywhere. Pretty mountains, inhabited by Muslims who haven't learned to be good Indians, in spite of a half-century of effort by New Delhi. If they withdrew from Kashmir, their border would be shorter and more defensible. It would largely end the chronic tension with nuclear-armed Pakistan. If they don't want to give it to Pakistan, let China have it (China has already grabbed a chunk of the province, and held it since the 1960s). The Chinese have been much more successful than India, in pacifying their minorities (like the Muslims in East Turkistan, and the Tibetans). Communists are good at that kind of thing. Chechnya was never a problem under Stalin.
Those 250,000 Indian troops taken out of Kashmir, could hold enough of S. Iraq (especially after some "population transfers"), to make Greater India self-sufficient in oil. |
