The Kashmir crisis is far more pressing than Iraq

The confrontation that is sometimes predicted between India and Pakistan over Kashmir - a confrontation that could easily become nuclear - may not take place this time. India held its hand last autumn, after the suicide-murder attacks on the parliament in New Delhi and the Kashmiri regional assembly in Srinagar.

The latest assault by Pakistani surrogate irregulars, which killed the families of many Indian soldiers, is less grave than the ones which preceded it. However, each time a mobilised hair-trigger army is stood down, the likelihood of an eventual explosion increases. The terrible crisis may well be the one that nobody predicts and that nobody can manage: the one that comes without warning and does not allow for reflection.

It nearly happened about eight years ago, when the Pakistani military decided on a preemptive nuclear strike, only narrowly averted, against Indian tanks and infantry. The factors that produced that nightmare moment have since intensified.

Pakistan, an essentially failed state, hopes to redeem its honour as a Muslim nation by "liberating" majority-Muslim Kashmir from Indian rule. India will never surrender its control: Kashmir was the birthplace of Nehru and is bound by a thousand other ties to the Indian system. The issue has also become a magnet for all the extremists on the Bin Laden periphery, who number Kashmir with Palestine and Chechnya as one of their holy wars. There is no doubt at all that the Pakistani military secret police - the Interservices Intelligence or ISI - helps to direct and organise these "deniable" fanatics in a proxy war.

Last October I was taken by the Pakistani army to a point high in the Kashmiri mountains. A senior officer told me, in effect, that since India had helped Bangladesh break free of Pakistan, Pakistan would have its revenge by separating Kashmir from India. General Musharraf, the current military dictator of Pakistan, made his reputation partly by taking a most militant line on this question, and by using the Pakistani-sponsored Taliban regime in Afghanistan as a resource for training and arming the jihad forces.

Now there is the additional danger of a thermonuclear "exchange". Pakistan is a much smaller country than India and is vastly inferior in terms of tanks, infantry, aircraft, ships and submarines. It also has, geographically, a narrow "waist". The Indian General Staff could in theory punch right across the border and through the middle of Pakistan, bisecting the country and cutting off its capital, Islamabad, from Karachi and the sea. The only Pakistani response to this nightmare would be to detect the massing of Indian forces early enough, and then to hit them with a pre-emptive nuclear strike - perhaps retaining enough warheads to deter an Indian response in kind, and perhaps not. The nearcatastrophic drama that took place under the Clinton administration arose from precisely such a crisis - except that the Pakistani side had mistaken Indian intentions.

There was no such plan in preparation; it was a matter of routine manoeuvres. With such religious and national ill-will on both sides, each would assume the worst in the next confrontation, and act accordingly. Meanwhile, the fight against al Qaeda in Pakistan has been gravely weakened by the diversion of troops to the other frontier. And the internal situation in Kashmir deteriorates with astonishing speed, supplying any number of future pretexts for war.

Assuming that this latest crisis, too, is narrowly averted, the crying need is to use the interval for some intelligent statesmanship. Pending an ultimate settlement, which might involve some new elections or even possibly a reapportioning of the territory, the West should require of General Musharraf that he cease and desist from supplying the Bin Ladenist infiltrators and providing them with training and encouragement. He should also take action against their threatening activities in Pakistan itself. He receives a large enough subsidy to be able to recognise his own interests, and he has no right, in pursuit of sectarian and opportunist goals or cheap local popularity, to threaten an entire sub-continent with misery and ruin.

The restraint that India has shown so far is not inexhaustible. This problem is, actually and potentially, very much more pressing than Iraq, and it would be nice to see our own leaders appreciating the fact.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.