Kashmir: Nuclear Flash Point?
India and Pakistan are locked in an escalating game of chicken.

Sialkot: Pakistan Army has repulsed two Indian attacks across the working boundary along Chirar sector, inflicting huge losses on the aggressor. The Indian Border Security Force launched an unprovoked offense against Pakistan on Saturday night. The attack was effectively repulsed by Chenab Rangers making the infiltrators to flee after inflicting heavy losses on them. Later the Indian army launched another offensive on Sunday afternoon, which was also repulsed.
— January report in a Pakistani newspaper

By WAYNE ANDERSON
Story ran on February 27, 2000
Special to the Tribune

Recent episodes of the NBC television show "The West Wing" featured a fictional American president heading off a nuclear war between India and Pakistan when the Indian army crossed the Kashmir border.

During a recent trip to Pakistan, I encountered people who were impressed with the accuracy with which the situation was portrayed. That war is possible here is based on the fact that these countries have already gone to war with each other three times. This, of course, was before they developed nuclear weapons.

The flash point for the next use of nuclear weapons, if it comes, could be Kashmir, on the border between Pakistan and India
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I was in Pakistan in January as part of a three-member team from the International Center for Psychosocial Trauma. Our director, Arshad Husain, a child psychiatrist at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, Venetta Whitaker of the MU College of Education and I were there to run training programs in trauma psychology. In Karachi, at Aga Khan University, 65 physicians and psychologists attended our workshop, and in Lahore we had 100 psychiatrists, psychologists and police administrators attend our program on serial killers. We also spent a few days in Islamabad, the country’s capital, and met with professionals there.

The people we met were concerned with the traumatic effect of the situation in Kashmir on the people living there. Their concern was supported by the daily reports in the papers about armed conflict in the area.

Our team has been asked to return to run programs on trauma psychology for the mental health workers and teachers in the part of Kashmir held by Pakistan. There were also feelers for us to go to Indian-held Kashmir to work with traumatized children.

The Kashmir problem

Kashmir, often referred to as the Switzerland of the East, is a green-mountain area on the north of Pakistan. At the time of partition from India in 1947, all Muslim-majority areas were to become part of Pakistan. It was expected that Kashmir, with 12 million people and 70 percent Muslim majority, would become part of Pakistan. As the result of some political maneuvers, led by the Kashmir-born Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, it did not become part of Pakistan. Now, one third of the area is administered by Pakistan and two thirds is under the control of what the majority of the inhabitants view as an occupying Indian army of 700,000 troops.