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.
