Kashmir: Will US mediation succeed in such a conflict-ridden area?

By: Ricardo Israel - 11/05/2025

Some 60 civilians had been killed when President Trump announced that “after a long night of U.S.-mediated talks, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire.”

Will it last? The doubt stems from the fact that, in my opinion, the most dangerous border on earth isn't Ukraine or Gaza. It's Kashmir in Asia, for the simple reason that those who dispute it (along with regions like Jammu and Ladakh) are nuclear powers, and there is a certain consensus that both India and Pakistan now easily have more than 100 nuclear warheads. India's first explosion, dubbed the "Smiling Buddha," took place on May 18, 1974, while Pakistan's first, known as the "Muslim Bomb," occurred on May 28, 1998, consisting of five simultaneous underground explosions.

In both cases it was surprising for the other atomic powers, but the greatest danger of this situation does not only lie in the possession of weapons of mass destruction, but in a historical context of enormous animosity, great pressure from public opinion in both, and with war confrontations in 1949, 1965 and 1971, in addition to the fact that the very origin of these countries is linked to a tragedy, which has not been forgotten, since along with independence there was a transfer of population that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people in clashes, from person to person, which began with the partition made by the British Empire, both being formally born, one next to the other, India on August 15, 1947 and Pakistan on August 14, although separated between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, a region that under the British Empire was known as Bangala, and which had its own singularity, although it shared the same religion. That separation of more than a thousand kilometers through Indian territory did not last, and in the 1971 war, a new country was born, the eighth most populous in the world, Bangladesh.

During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union developed a whole set of rules to avoid direct confrontation, and despite having several wars through third countries, they never directed weapons against each other, a historical exception between superpowers that were separated by everything, overcoming situations as dangerous as Cuba in 1962, showing great responsibility by also avoiding any nuclear proliferation, even surviving that principle to the chaos that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and convincing the US and the United Kingdom, both Ukraine and Belarus, to give up the bombs left in those territories by that disappearance, a situation that is openly lamented today in kyiv.

Although, as regional powers with a history of animosity and war, both Pakistan and India have sought to emulate this behavior, there is no evidence that it has been fully internalized among all their politicians and military personnel, nor among the population. So much so that the principle of not being the first country to use such bombs is not part of the doctrine, at least not in what has been enacted as law in either country.

Even today, where Russia has added to the doctrine it inherited from the USSR that, in addition to traditional Hiroshima-style use, nuclear weapons today exist not only for strategic use but also for tactical use on the battlefield if the war does not go in its favor. This has undoubtedly acted as a successful deterrent against NATO and is now the basis of its military doctrine. In this regard, there is no evidence that Pakistan has such a tactical capability, although India does, according to the prestigious British RUSI, which is currently part of its superiority in resources over Pakistan. However, in the war scenario that could confront both countries, if there were an escalation, there would be no possibility of limiting the use of the arsenal or dividing it into phases. Instead, the danger lies in the fact that it could quickly escalate to the exchange of nuclear missiles, if it is not limited from the beginning to border exchanges, the basis of any possibility of deceleration, as long as one country does not think of occupying the other's territory.

Today, divided as they are, both allies and adversaries regarding Ukraine and the Middle East, only the US appears to be the indispensable power to mediate, given that China has historically supported Pakistan, in addition to having triumphed in a border war against India in 1962, to which must be added border clashes in 1967, 1987, and most recently, in June 2020, also in favor of China. For its part, Russia has a very good relationship with India, a continuation of that enjoyed by the former USSR due to India's commitment to the Non-Aligned Movement. So much so that India buys a lot of Russian oil and has not yielded to Moscow's economic isolation.

For their part, the European Union and former colonial powers like Great Britain are becoming less important, even irrelevant, in conflicts of this nature, allowing them to intervene as a power factor and not just through polite, Group of Seven-style do-gooderism.

Apparently, since the current outbreak, the US is acting through its Secretary of State, a decision conveyed by Vice President Vance, which was incorrectly interpreted as a move away from the current situation. Therefore, we must look with hope at what Marco Rubio is doing, although in the current confusion, it is unclear whether the advantage of "America First" lies in avoiding escalation or avoiding involvement in foreign wars—that is, whether involvement would be part of the duties of a superpower or merely correcting what harms the US in global trade.

The moment is good for the US, given that, during the Cold War, in response to Soviet support for India, Washington supported Pakistan, even with joint diplomatic actions with China. However, recently it has sought a middle ground, so much so that today India is a vital player in confronting China in Asia, which is increasingly seen as an ally. Therefore, there is no other country today that can do what the US claims to have done, and if the ceasefire does not hold, we all know that in international politics and geopolitics, what one power fails to do, another immediately attempts to fill the power vacuum. Thus, what happens on the border between India and Pakistan is of primary importance to China, given that it also has a presence in the Kashmir region, controlling an area of the Karakoram Mountains, known as the Shaksgam Valley, which was ceded to it by Islamabad in 1963, among other reasons for an easy-to-understand one: in addition to India, it did not want to add a conflict with China as an enemy, thereby securing support that still endures.

For all this, the evidence shows what the conflictive history of India and Pakistan proves: that in their agreements, as in the Minsk Protocols between Russia and Ukraine, the devil is in the details. From India's perspective, one of the differences with Pakistan in this conflict is that Delhi does not support the use of its territory for terrorist acts against others. This would differentiate it from Pakistan, whose intelligence services allow attacks against others from within its country, a fact that has historically influenced Islamabad's view of the conflict. Thus, in this century alone, Pakistan has allowed at least two terrorist movements to attack India: in 2008, 2019, and now, in attacks that left innocent victims dead.

In this regard, India holds Pakistan responsible for the terrorist attacks that led to the current conflict, as its territory was used for terrorist attacks, which would violate international law, and therefore should be penalized diplomatically. According to India, being attacked from there would have crossed a red line this time, one that the 2008 and 2019 agreements believed they had avoided. For its part, Islamabad responds by stating that India has not provided any evidence in this regard.

Furthermore, the current government of Prime Minister Modi, in addition to considering itself an expression of the Hindu majority, views the attacks against civilians as something personal, as its spokespersons believe they were a response to the promotion of tourism to demonstrate "normalcy" after the end of the semi-autonomous status of Indian-administered Kashmir. Today, Delhi argues that it does not want the impunity that existed for previous attacks.

Therefore, this demand will figure prominently in the future, given that, although there is parity in atomic weapons, India currently has a superior position not only in population, having become the most populous country on earth, but also in the size of its economy and conventional weapons. Therefore, considering the sustained growth of its power, it would not be in India's interest to continue escalating the war, which has so far demonstrated the full use of drones as well as missiles of a similar level to those seen in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The speed with which Pakistan accepted US mediation also demonstrates that escalation is not in its interest today either. However, the fact remains that it allows the use of its territory to intervene in other countries. And not only now, as it was instrumental in the failure of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan last century, due to its arming of the mujahideen, Islamic fighters who fought it until they were expelled, and also by delivering advanced US weapons.

The reason for Pakistan's prolonged involvement is evident in Pakistani war games. Given its small size, Afghanistan provides the necessary strategic depth in the event of a conventional war against India, an opportunity that Islamabad always has.

The division of imperial India by the British also had a component of that enormous force that political Islam has represented since the 7th century—that is, its expansion, not only under religious banners but also along identity lines, inevitably leading to the confrontation of Islam with other cultures and religions. Not only Christians in the Middle Ages and subsequent European colonialism, but also Jews to this day with Israel, as well as China with the Silk Road and the current repression of the Uighur ethnic group where it ended. It has also been present with Buddhists and the repression suffered by Muslims in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Whether as aggressor or attacked, this force also expressed itself when it achieved the division of India between Hindus and Muslims, using criteria that combined religion, politics, and censuses, with similar results of conflict in Ireland and the Middle East, which also occurred in Africa, with Christians and Muslims facing off in Nigeria and Sudan.

In addition to confronting other religious or secular cultures, as seems to be happening in Europe today, political Islam has also come into conflict with other variants of Islam, be they Kurdish, Druze or Alawite, or between Muslim countries (for example, Iran versus Iraq), or in civil wars such as Lebanon, or directly in the use of terrorism against other Muslims, sometimes its first victims, and worse, when they have united in new countries, fundamentalism with nationalism.

Furthermore, many of today's borders suffer from a terrible evil, as some were the result of simple ceasefires without peace treaties, being respected only by custom and the passage of time. Others are the result of the collapse of empires, where border delimitation followed their administrative divisions. This was the case with the end of the Spanish Empire in Latin America (the uti possidetis juris of 1810), the Ottoman Empire (the satrapies) or the USSR as the form that the Russian Empire acquired under communism (the 15 republics of the constitution, at the time of its dissolution in 1991), but although uti possidetis was also applied in Africa and Asia as the legal principle that new countries inherit the internal borders of the colonial territory to which they belonged, there are cases such as the partition of India where the person who drew them had never been to the place, drawing them in a short time, a fact that occurred before and after in the British Empire as well as in the French, even, as Winston Churchill recognizes in his memoirs, while he was Minister of Colonies in 1921.

Pakistani territory has also been used against other Muslim countries, such as the Iran of the Ayatollahs, as recently as January 2024, where a movement claiming a centuries-old territorial issue, dating back to the Persian Empire of Baluchistan, led to terrorist attacks with many deaths. For domestic purposes, Iran mixed these attacks with another separate claim, that of the Arab minority, adding an ethnic element to the conflict that has existed since the death of the Prophet Muhammad and for his succession between Sunnis and Shiites, since Arabs are Semites and Iranians are Indo-Europeans, at least since the Persian era.

Last year, Iran followed India's example, blaming Islamabad for attacking it with missiles similar to some of those it would use that same year against Israel. As now, Pakistan responded forcefully, causing Tehran to bow its head, as it did not continue to confront a nuclear-armed nation. These conflicts are certainly of some importance, but they are generally not on the radar of other countries, and therefore of the media, which owes itself to the news and cannot fabricate it, when, for lack of conflict, it ceases to be one.

Kashmir also has a peculiarity that is not always present: it is contaminated by emotion, which often overrides reason and makes it difficult to reach agreements. This is a problem because, with pressure groups protesting against any concessions and supporting forceful solutions on both sides, a perception of "weakness" hinders the political survival of the authorities. This occurs because granting a territory sacred status or linking it to a religious or spiritual identity can be positive for internal unity, but it undermines any agreement when political coalitions that use nationalist banners against minorities predominate in power.

In conclusion, I remain convinced that Kashmir is the most dangerous border in the world, because as long as Iran doesn't acquire its atomic bomb, the conflict will remain contained within the Middle East. All available evidence reinforces this, and I have for some time now, something I repeat every chance I get. The last time was not long ago, when, at the end of April, while giving a Teams conference on the Middle East for a Peruvian university, I mentioned it to the students, to the surprise of some.

We also know that cashmere is one of the rarest goat wools and, therefore, highly valued for its softness. It's also expensive, since unlike a sheep, which yields several kilos of wool, a cashmere goat yields only 100 or 200 grams, while also providing durability and protection from the cold.

These qualities have nothing to do with this territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, about which ignorance seems to prevail in other countries, but perhaps this will help it avoid the deplorable spectacle of elite US universities, where masses of students cause chaos while displaying complete ignorance about Israel, Hamas, and Iran. Apparently, nothing similar will happen in Kashmir, so let's hope that, since it has nothing to do with the Middle East, we won't witness universities taken over by those who flaunt their ignorance.

Will the ceasefire survive?

Personally, ever since I learned about the characteristics of Kashmir as a teenager, it has been one of the pending tourist destinations in my life, one that I still hope to reach, and I hope that what has taken place every afternoon for years on one of those borders will continue, the one where the war confrontation was replaced by something very positive, where every day the flags of Pakistan and India are lowered, this time with spectacles of each army competing in martial arts, to win the applause of hundreds of spectators who come to applaud, even with improvised stands.

Demonstration suspended these days, but I hope it will return soon.

@israelzipper

Master and PhD in Political Science (University of Essex), Bachelor of Law (University of Barcelona), Lawyer (University of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013).

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».