Violence Hits Both Sides of Kashmir

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Source: WSJ

India and Pakistan both saw surprise violence in the contentious border area of Kashmir Wednesday as Islamic militants engaged in a gun battle with police in Srinagar on the Indian side and a suicide bomber killed three Pakistani soldiers on the Pakistani-controlled side.

The incidents came as a surprise because the Himalayan region has been relatively peaceful of late but they were not expected to mark a return to sustained violence in an area that has become a flashpoint for terrorism and a source of tension between the two neighbors since the partition of India in 1947.

The suicide bomber struck a Pakistani army barracks, killing at least three soldiers and wounding 11 others. Pakistan police said the bomber detonated his explosives when stopped by security guards outside the facility near the border town of Rawalakot. The blast occurred as the soldiers were leaving their barracks in the morning, Javed Iqbal, the chief of the regional police, told reporters in Muzaffarabad.

The western part of Kashmir, controlled by Pakistan, is home to several Islamic militant groups which have been involved in fighting Indian troops across the line of control that divides Kashmir. These groups, once patronized by Pakistani military intelligence, were outlawed in 2002 but have continued to operate under new banners. Some of the splinter groups have also been blamed for the terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126278749239217905.html

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1. Recommend

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2. Seems like they are working on a civil war in Pakistan.

Or "terrorist insurgency", or something along those lines.

[Xithras]

3. Part of the problem in Kashmir is from a serious Pakistani miscalculation.

Pakistan wanted Kashmir but didn't have the resources or popular support to fight it as an ongoing full scale war, so they deliberately marketed it to fundamentalists as a fight to "liberate" the mostly Islamic Kashmir from the non-Islamic Indian government. They funded them, built their training camps, and supplied their weapons, food, and intel.

Now the Pakistani government is willing to negotiate a permanent end to the fighting, and the fundamentalists view it as a betrayal. They had little allegiance to the Pakistani's in the first place, and they have the training, arms, and supplies to fight against them. The Pakistani government did it's job well when they marketed this as a religious war, but they forgot that religious principles are rarely negotiable for the true believers.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Wow, that didn't take them long.

So much for a lasting peace breaking out.