Trump’s Kashmir Conundrum

By Clifford Smith

Thursday, August 21, 2025

 

The recent conflagration between India and Pakistan, the latest in a decades-old dispute over the Kashmir region, was drowned out quickly by the joint Israeli-U.S. strike on Iran, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and, most recently, Trump’s trade-related chest-thumping at India’s expense.

 

This is unfortunate. The Kashmir dispute isn’t going away, and India is important to America’s strategic plans, particularly regarding its conflict with China.

 

To most policymakers, Kashmir is a mystery. They vaguely know of the Kashmir Valley as an exotic “paradise on earth” in the Himalayas and as a region contested by India, Pakistan, and China. Few Americans visit. Even diplomats aren’t allowed to travel there except under special circumstances.

 

In 2023, as a result of my work studying influence networks aimed at undermining India’s interests in the region, I visited the heart of Indian-controlled Kashmir and met with leaders of many stripes, Hindu and Muslim, and among the latter, Sunni and Shiite. I came to believe that American policy needs an update.

 

The recent violence is the latest chapter in a drama that started in 1947. The state of Jammu and Kashmir, prior to the end of the British Raj, was majority Muslim, but its maharaja, Hari Singh, was Hindu. When partition occurred, Kashmir was on the border between what is now Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Singh assented to India after Pakistan invaded, creating a controversy that has endured since. Today, India controls about 55 percent of the territory, and Pakistan controls 30 percent. China controls the remaining — almost entirely unpopulated — 15 percent, claimed in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

 

Since then, in 1965 and 1999, Pakistan and India have fought wars over Kashmir. Terrorist activity is not uncommon, with the most destructive being the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, which killed 164 people, including 6 Americans.

 

But to India, no event is more important than the exodus of Pandits, Hindus of the Kashmir Valley, in the early 1990s. Hindus were a minority there, but the remaining 300,000 were driven out in pogroms perpetrated by Pakistani-backed terrorist groups; this ethnic cleansing remains an open wound. I met with a handful of Kashmiri Pandits who returned to the valley, mostly working as teachers, after the political changes to Kashmir’s status in 2019. While many Kashmiri Muslims accept them, Pandits travel carefully, fearing terrorists. Full integration will almost certainly be the work of generations.

 

Last April, a grisly slaughter of 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists but also 1 Christian and 1 Muslim, was perpetrated in the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam, a previously peaceful tourist area. The Resistance Front, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which is linked closely to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, took responsibility. It was the first major terrorist attack since the 2019 Pulwama attack, which killed 40 Indian policemen.

 

After Pulwama, newly reelected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to fulfill a longtime goal of his Bharatiya Janata Party and abrogate Article 370 of the Indian constitution, a provision that gave Kashmir a special status as a semiautonomous region. This allowed the issue to be negotiated with Pakistan. Modi claimed that it encouraged terrorism by casting Kashmir’s future into doubt.

 

India then cut off the internet, flooded Kashmir with security forces, and made numerous arrests, leading to international consternation and handing India’s opponents enough plausibility to claim human rights abuses. India also blocked an attempted visit by U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.). It’s true that Van Hollen has a close relationship with shady Pakistani expat organizations that themselves have ties to Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of then–Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, but it still looked bad.

 

The result, however, was a long period of calm. While there were targeted killings, there wasn’t a major attack between Pulwama and Pahalgam. Investment poured in, including $60 million from the United Arab Emirates, which was Kashmir’s first foreign investment.

 

A source from Indian intelligence whom I met while in India said that “depriving Kashmir of a stable income through tourism and creating a divide between [Indian Kashmir] and the rest of India,” by “reigniting the almost nonexistent seeds of terrorism,” was at the top of Pakistan’s agenda.

 

In a first for India, its response in May to Pahalgam, Operation Sindoor, struck targets deep into Pakistan, significantly damaging terrorist infrastructure. Abhinav Pandya, the director of the Usanas Foundation, an Indian think tank, told me that “India has called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff,” adding that “India shattered their air defenses and exposed the poor quality of Chinese weapons.”

 

Pakistan’s nuclear saber-rattling is a frequent concern of the U.S. But a source from Indian intelligence told me that the “stranglehold” on Pakistan by its military means their leaders are unlikely to pull the trigger. “Pakistan’s so-called act of nuclear irrationality and red lines are a calculated rational move, meant only for the U.S.”

 

One casualty of India’s Operation Sindoor was Abdul Rauf Azhar. A U.S.-designated terrorist, a leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (responsible for the Pulwama attack), and a close associate of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Azhar was also a co-conspirator of the 1999 hijacking that freed Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the al-Qaeda member who later beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

 

That Azhar could travel freely in Pakistan, less than five years after Pakistani officials sent foreign and intelligence officials to recommit to their relationship with the Taliban, more than a decade after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, and nearly a quarter century after 9/11, paints a chilling picture. While Pakistan is a major non-NATO ally that has received tens of billions of dollars from the U.S., it is not a friend.

 

Utsav Chakrabarti, the executive director of the advocacy group HinduACTion, told me that “current U.S. policy is transactional and is based on the misunderstanding that Kashmir is a geopolitical issue. . . . The truth is that Kashmir is an existential cause for Pakistan.”

 

There is certainly room to criticize India’s handling of the Kashmir dispute. India has played fast and loose with traditional legal procedures when dealing with Kashmiri militants and their sympathizers. But these are nothing compared with the acts of Pakistan, which has waged a region-defining proxy war, using violent terrorist groups that commit some of the worst atrocities imaginable. Just one example is that of Girija Tickoo, a Kashmiri Hindu teacher who was gang-raped and sawed in half for the crime of trying to collect her paycheck.

 

Pakistan’s raison d’être makes such crimes all but inevitable. Days before the attack, Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir gave a speech that starkly demonstrates the views of the Pakistani establishment:

 

[Pakistani Muslims] are different from the Hindus in every possible aspect of life. Our religion is different. Our customs are different. Our traditions are different. Our thoughts are different. Our ambitions are different. That is the foundation of the two-nation theory. That we are two nations. We are not one nation. Because of that, our forefathers . . . mounted this incessant struggle to create this country. . . . We will not leave our Kashmiri brethren in their heroic struggle that they are waging against the Indian occupation. We have fought three wars for Kashmir.

 

Indian independence leaders like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru opposed partition until it became politically inevitable. They stressed that the subcontinent had always been pluralistic. When the Kashmir issue heated up in the ’90s, Salman Khurshid, a Muslim member of Parliament who later became the minister of external affairs, said in relation to Kashmir, “If religion is used as a carving knife to redesign politics, virtually the whole world will have to ready itself for the chisel.”

 

But to people like Munir, this is not a simple territorial dispute. It goes back to Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whose “two-nation theory” claimed that Muslims on the Indian subcontinent were a separate nation. Jinnah was a (relatively) benign nationalist. He anchored his theory in religion but was no theocrat, saying that religion had “nothing to do with the business of the state.” His death shortly after Pakistan’s independence was exploited by domestic Islamist movements.

 

Many movements benefited, but perhaps the largest beneficiary was Jamaat-e-Islami, a group ideologically and organizationally similar to the Middle East’s Muslim Brotherhood. Ironically, Sayyid Abbul-Abul A’la Maududi, Jamaat’s founder, initially opposed partition but then sought to Islamize Pakistan, hardening and theologizing the “two-nation” theory.

 

Munir implores the Pakistani diaspora to never forget that they “belong to a superior ideology and a superior culture,” and then quotes a famous Pakistani poet: “Judge not your nation on the criteria of Western nations / Special in composition is the [Prophet Mohammed’s] nation.” Calling on them to think of themselves primarily as part of a Muslim nation is to call the diaspora Pakistanis to partner with other Islamists abroad. That’s exactly what has happened. Jamaat-e-Islami has long had international chapters in both the U.S. and London, which aggressively promote Pakistan’s cause in Kashmir.

 

The abrogation of Article 370 was seen as an existential crisis. Islamist networks went into overdrive. Jamaat’s Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) immediately began a campaign accusing India of “genocide.” Shadowy organizations such as Stand with Kashmir, the backbone of which was made up of far-left and Islamist academics, popped up overnight and aided them. They were joined by more traditional U.S.-based Islamist groups, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations and Students for Justice in Palestine.

 

To reasonable observers, “genocide” was implausible. But this narrative was a long time in the making. Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, was convicted of funneling over $3.5 million from the Pakistani government, including its intelligence services, to organizations that painted a Pakistani-friendly picture of the Kashmir dispute.

 

These ideas worked their way into congressional hearings vis-à-vis Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.). She derided a Kashmiri Pandit witness who challenged this narrative, calling her a “mouthpiece” for the Indian government. Omar has since openly taken Pakistan’s side, traveling to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir on the dime of unknown actors.

 

Turkey, a NATO member, is an ally of Pakistan. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses his office and his country’s influence networks in the service of Pakistan. Turkey’s TRT World media network, a registered foreign agent in the U.S., continually promotes the Pakistani line. Erdoğan has used his platform at the U.N. to attack India’s position on Kashmir, something no other non-Pakistani head of state has done. He openly works with U.S.-based Pakistani Islamist groups like ICNA.

 

Qatar, the bankroller of Sunni Islamists worldwide, has put significant resources into promoting Pakistan’s cause in its media outlets and also promotes Indian Islamists who oppose the government. Pandya, the Indian think-tank director, explains that Qatar’s Eid Charity “funneled $7.82 million to eight Wahhabi-Salafi organizations in India” and also points out that Abd al-Rahmani al-Nu’aymi, one of the Eid Charity’s founders, has been designated a terrorist by the U.S.

 

In short, those who support the Pakistani cause in Kashmir are a collection of overt jihadists and “frenemy” financiers and propagandists, along with, to some degree, the Chinese. If Pakistan’s cause in Kashmir is judged by its friends, America should run away screaming.

 

It doesn’t because Pakistan, like Turkey and Qatar, manages to maintain close relations with the U.S. in spite of undermining its interests in many, if not most, ways. Forget Trump’s Qatari jet: in June, Trump personally lunched with Munir at the White House.

 

China’s 1962 capture of empty portions of Kashmir is likely less important to the dispute than Pakistan’s increasing debt to China, which sits at about $30 billion. The Middle East Forum’s Michael Rubin points out that, as a result, U.S. aid to Pakistan translates indirectly to the United States’ simply paying China.

 

While Shiite-led Iran is no friend of Pakistan, it has its own ambitions. Iran promotes pro-Iranian propaganda in Shiite-heavy areas of Kashmir, something I saw firsthand, and Iranian clerics train Kashmiri Shiite clergy. More important, Iran’s supreme leader has repeatedly compared the Kashmir issue to Gaza.

 

India has a complicated relationship with Iran and has turned a blind eye to Iran’s meddling, believing that Indian Shiites fear Sunni theocracy more than they fear Hindu-led governments. Javed Beigh, a Kashmiri Shiite leader, told me that he fears that Sunni Islamists in Pakistan, and their proxies, want to create something akin to the ISIS caliphate.

 

But Iran’s recent humiliation suffered under the joint Israeli-U.S. bombing of its nuclear program could cause Iran to turn toward softer targets to rally its radical constituencies. Choosing Kashmir, even possibly vis-à-vis Sunni proxies, as it did with Gaza’s Hamas, is plausible. Beigh told me that it is the “Islamization” of Shiites that drives Iran’s regional troublemaking, which he views as an unwelcome development. Not all Indian Shiites approve of Iran’s aims, even in the face of Sunni radicalism.

 

Every U.S. president since Bill Clinton has moved the country closer to India, for obvious reasons: India is a pluralistic democracy, a former British colony concerned about a rising China and radical Islam, and a growing economy with enormous potential. But cultural difficulties between the U.S. and India, and friendly diplomatic stances toward each other’s rivals — India toward Russia and the U.S. toward Pakistan — have made this harder.

 

Trump’s recent singling out of India for high tariffs because it buys Russian oil doesn’t help. He’s right to want to separate India from Russia, but his tactics are misguided. India was slowly moving away from Russia, and Modi’s public humiliation by Trump is creating a backlash in India. Private talks and incentives are more likely to pay dividends. Trump should also recognize that America’s relationship with terrorist-coddling Pakistan is equally galling to India.

 

A more India-friendly policy on Kashmir would involve holding Pakistan accountable for its misdeeds and supporting India’s legitimate claims. The Resistance Front was founded in 2019 in response to the revocation of Kashmir’s special status. India designated it a terrorist organization over two years ago. Yet the State Department designated it a terrorist organization only after Pahalgam. Such designations should generally mirror India’s and happen faster. Perhaps more important: the U.S. should back India’s attempt to re-add Pakistan to the Financial Action Task Force’s terror-finance “gray list.”

 

Rajiv Pandit, a board member of the Hindu American Foundation and a Kashmiri Pandit living in Texas, told me that it’s critically important for the U.S. to recognize the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus. Such a move would help “restore truth, bridge communal divides, and strengthen the foundations of secular democracy in the region.”

 

Finally, the U.S. straddle on Kashmir should end. The State Department still considers Indian-controlled Kashmir as disputed territory, while failing to seriously criticize the Indian government’s move to fully integrate Kashmir and stressing that the Indian parliament had approved the measure. The U.S. should recognize areas on India’s side of the Line of Control as Indian territory.

 

This would not be cost-free, but as Hussain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. who is now at the U.S.-based Hudson Institute, explains in detail in his book Magnificent Delusions, mutual disappointment best describes the Pakistani-U.S. relationship. There is less to be lost than meets the eye. Furthermore, a recent article by two MIT specialists says that, based on U.S. intelligence sources, Pakistan is building an ICBM that could reach the U.S.

 

Pakistan is rapidly going in the wrong direction and paying no price. So long as Munir’s ideology drives Pakistani foreign policy, the values and interests of the United States lie with supporting India’s stance on Kashmir. U.S. policy, in ways big and small, ought to reflect that.