War at the Top of the World : The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet

258 Pages·2001·1.39 MB·English

by  Eric Margolis

WAR at the TOP OF THE WORLD
The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet
WAR at the TOP OF THE
WORLD
The Struggle for Afghanistan,
Kashmir, and Tibet
Eric S.Margolis
ROUTLEDGE
New York
Published in 2001 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
First published in Canada in 1999 by Key Porter Books Limited.
First Routledge hardback edition, 2000
First Routledge paperback edition, 2001
Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 by Eric Margolis
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or
Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Margolis, Eric S.
War at the top of the world: the struggle for Afghanistan,
Kashmir, and Tibet/Eric S.Margolis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-92712-9 (hb) 0-415-93062-6 (pb)
1. Afghanistan—Politics and government–1973–. 2. Jammu and
Kashmir (India)—Politics and government. 3. Tibet (China)—Politics and
government. 4. China—Foreign relations—India. 5. India—Foreign
relations—China. I. Title.
DS371.3 .M37 2000
950–dc21 99–056853
ISBN 0-203-01156-2 Master e-book ISBN
Contents
Introduction vii
Part One The Great Jihad
1 Soldiers of Allah 2
2 The Bravest Men on Earth 10
3 Dodge City Meets the Arabian Nights 26
4 Fadil the Kurd 32
5 The Secret War 38
Part Two Kashmir—War in Paradise
Prologue 53
6 The Kingdom of Sikander 56
7 Revolt in the Mountains 71
8 The Afghani 85
9 Deconstructing South Asia 94
10 The World’s Most Dangerous Border 100
11 Paradise Lost 111
Part Three War in the Death Zone
12 The Road to Siachen 119
13 Musa the Warrior 134
14 The Hatred of Brothers 151
Part Four The Roof of the World
15 The Forbidden Kingdom 176
16 India Awakes 187
v
17 The Clash of Titans 204
18 China Under Siege 212
19 The Fate of Asia 221
Index 236
To Nexhmie Zaimi,
my mother,
to Henry Margolis,
my father,
and to LC
Introduction
In the nineteenth century the British Empire and the expanding
power of Czarist Russia came into conflict as the Russians moved
south toward India. The rivalry was fierce and hard fought. Kipling
called it the “Great Game.”
A new Great Game is afoot at the top of the world. The chain of
mountain ranges, plateaus, and valleys that begins in Afghanistan
and Kashmir, and then sweeps 2,500 miles (4,000 km) across the
Indian subcontinent to Burma (now Myanmar), is fast becoming
one of the globe’s most volatile and dangerous geopolitical fault
zones. Along that line four nuclear-armed powers—China, India,
Pakistan, and Russia—are locked in a long-term rivalry that may
erupt into the first major international conflict of the twenty-first
century.
This assertion may come as a surprise, since most people are
accustomed to regarding South-Central Asia and the Himalayas
as an exotic, remote, backward part of the world, whose unstable
societies and bitter disputes are of little concern to the rest of
mankind.
Such may have been the case a century ago, when the first
Great Game was played out on India’s wild Northwest Frontier and
in Central Asia between the British and Russian Empires. Today,
however, the region known as South Asia, which contains a full
quarter of humanity, is being shaken by a confluence of strategic,
political, and economic tensions that threatens to ignite a series of
interlocking conflicts whose effects may be felt around the globe.
According to a 1993 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
study, the border of disputed Jammu and Kashmir, along which
Indian and Pakistani forces have skirmished almost daily for the
last half-century, is now considered the most likely place for a
nuclear war to begin. Studies conducted by the Rand Corporation
estimate such a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan
would initially kill 2 million people, cause 100 million casualties,
viii
and contaminate South and Central Asia, as well as much of the
globe, with radioactive fallout.
In May 1998, India shocked the world by detonating five nuclear
devices, and testing intermediate-range missiles in an
unmistakable assertion of its new, self-proclaimed status as a
superpower. India’s scimitar-rattling was aimed at cowing old foe
Pakistan, and, even more significantly, as a clear warning to its
new and now principal enemy, China.
Pakistan riposted by testing its own nuclear-capable missiles.
China accelerated its numerous intermediate-missile programs
and warned India against any aggressive actions. Russia, in spite
of ostensible bankruptcy, sharply accelerated delivery of high-tech
arms to India, its old Soviet-era strategic ally, while increasingly
funneling weapons, military advisors, and intelligence agents into
Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Clearly, a new Great Game is under way, but this time one
played for the very highest stakes by nuclear-armed rivals across
a vast region of growing political and social instability, at a time
when Asia’s giants, India and China, haunted by the memory of
the collapsed Soviet Union, are being shaken by deepening
uncertainty over their continued viability as unitary states.
I have covered or explored South Asia as a political journalist,
war correspondent, and old-fashioned adventurer for the past
twenty-five years. My many journeys across the subcontinent have
taken me to the great Holy War in Afghanistan against the
Soviets; to conflicts in Kashmir and atop the Siachen Glacier at
18,000 feet (5,486 m); and to insurgencies in Punjab, Sri Lanka,
and Burma. Frequent contacts with intelligence agencies and
senior military figures in the region have afforded me particular
insight into the tensions and rivalries beneath the surface of Asian
geopolitics.
There is no other region on Earth, in my view—not even the
murderous Balkans or the ever-seething Middle East—that
presents such a toxic stew of boiling religious, ethnic, political,
strategic, and historical animosities, made all the more volatile by
endemic poverty, illiteracy, and the sheer agony of daily existence.
Two powerful and energetic new forces, Islamic and Hindu political
religious fundamentalism, have fanned the already flaring fires of
South Asia. Both movements, a reaction to centuries of
colonialism and backwardness, have released pent-up passions
that are shaking the subcontinent.
The prospect of nuclear-armed states ruled by aggressive
nationalists, religious extremists, or unsteady governments is
extremely disturbing. Old foes Pakistan and India have fought
ix
three major wars in the past 50 years and could blunder into a
fourth at any time. This danger was dramatically illustrated by a
series of violent clashes in the Ladakh Valley of northern Kashmir
that began in May 1999, the heaviest fighting between India and
Pakistan in three decades.
Eight hundred Kashmiri Islamic insurgents, or mujihadin,
crossed the northern sector of the Line of Control in one of its
remotest regions. They seized commanding positions on the 16,
000-ft-high northern flank of Ladakh overlooking the valley below,
the city of Kargil, and the vital Indian military road running from
Srinagar through Ladakh and Leh to the Siachen Glacier.
Caught totally unprepared and badly shaken, India claimed the
intruders were ‘Islamic mercenaries’ or Pakistani army regulars,
not ‘Kashmiri freedom fighters’ as Pakistan maintained. India
threw 30,000 troops into the battle for the towering heights above
Kargil and the town of Drass. Indian warplanes, helicopter
gunships, and heavy artillery launched intensive attacks against
the insurgent positions: two Indian warplanes and a helicopter
were downed.
Heavy fighting raged for two months as Indian mountain troops
fought an uphill battle at extremely high altitudes to dislodge the
Islamic attackers, who were well dug in and amply provisioned.
India suffered at least 1,000 casualties in the fighting. During the
battles in Ladakh, senior Indian commanders put intensive
pressure on the government in New Delhi to launch a major land
offensive in the south against Pakistan—in other words, an all-out
war involving 1.5 million soldiers.
Ominously, in June, U.S. satellites showed two Indian ‘strike
corps,’ armor-heavy, multi-division offensive formations designed
to slice through Pakistan’s narrow waist, were preparing to launch
a major invasion of Pakistan from Rajastan and Punjab. Powerful
units of the Indian Navy took up station within striking range of
Karachi, through which 90 percent of Pakistan’s trade passes,
ready to impose a maritime blockade and attack the smaller
Pakistani fleet.
Intelligence sources in Washington and Islamabad told this
author that in late May and June, 1999, Pakistan and India were
‘within hours’ of a massive war. Both sides put their nuclear strike
forces on the highest alert and, reportedly, began inserting
fissionable cores into their nuclear weapons. This crisis, whose
full gravity was largely concealed from the international public,
was the most dangerous direct confrontation between nuclear
armed powers since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.