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India and Pakistan Have Massed Some One Million Troops Along Kashmir Region

Aired May 31, 2002 - 13:05   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: We want to turn now to a growing concern about the volatile dispute between India and Pakistan. The State Department is telling Americans and non-essential personnel to leave India. India and Pakistan have massed some one million troops along the disputed region of Kashmir. And now Pakistan is shuffling its forces, too.

CNN's Tom Mintier has returned from a town near the front lines and has more now from Islamabad.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM MINTIER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was a story that almost came out on Thursday, that the Pakistani troops were indeed on the move. The Pakistani president said that that would be looked at, but nothing was happening.

His spokesman, however, said the operation was already under way. On Friday, they backtracked, and said indeed, that Pakistani troops were moving away from the Afghan border and heading toward the Indian border. They won't say how many or how long it will take. In Hajira, a village about eight or nine kilometers from the line of control on the Pakistani side, we were given the opportunity to see the damage from shelling on Wednesday. Many artillery shells rained down on the city on Wednesday that claimed seven lives and injured several others.

We were shown a vehicle that was still sitting along the side of the road when artillery shell went off about 10 feet from it. Four people were killed instantly when this vehicle was hit. Another artillery shell that went off down the road claimed another two lives.

The villagers say that they're not angry, but they're proud, that the villagers died protecting their country, they say. It is but an example of what the shelling has come to. This village not shelled since 1995. Two days ago, it suffered the heaviest shelling it has seen in a long time and the largest number of casualties.

I'm Tom Mintier, for CNN, in Islamabad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LIN: With so much at stake, a lot of detail in terms of how this came about and what really might happen sometimes get lost. So we're going to bring in CNN's Bob Franken here, who's been doing a lot of research on the relations between India and Pakistan and what is at stake.

Bob, we talk about the nuclear threat here. What is that we really mean by that? What is the nuclear threat, the worst-case scenario that could happen?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, let's talk about the numbers. The Pakistanis have 25-50 nuclear warheads, while potentially the Indians have 100-150. But it's an advantage without a lot of meaning. We've all heard about the cataclysmic effects of nuclear weapons. We all know that it's almost unthinkable to use them, except there's a concern that they might be consumed by the passions in this area.

And the Defense Department has estimated that at least 12 million deaths would accompany the exchange, just an initial exchange of nuclear weapons, 12 million at beginning. That does not talk about the ultimate firestorm. It does not talk about the possibility of radioactive poisoning, some of which would be carried by the trade winds around the world.

In other words the stakes are so high there are almost unimaginably high.

LIN: Stakes high over a very, very tiny region that borders both Pakistan and India. What is it about Kashmir that is so much worth this risk?

FRANKEN: Well, it's the -- it's been sort of the battleground between India and Pakistan ever since the partitioning was done in 1947. Even though Kashmir is quite decidedly Muslim in population, when they split up the countries, Kashmir was given to India and the Hindus because an influential maharaja (ph) there wanted it. There have been fight after fight after fight there.

The United Nations has called for years for an election. India has always resisted that. The Pakistan side that given the Muslim predominance there, that is matter of fact Kashmir would probably vote to go to Pakistan. But the Indians say that Kashmir is actually better off than Pakistan in terms of living conditions, and that has to be factored in.

LIN: What does this mean for the U.S. war on terror? We've been -- the United States has been counting on Pakistan to hold the line on the border with Afghanistan?

FRANKEN: Well, as a matter of fact, some of the troops are clearly being pulled from the western part of Pakistan, the part that boarders Afghanistan, and are being taken to the part that confronts India. And of course that means that a border that was already porous is more porous.

As a matter of fact, there is one theory that Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's group, has been involved in some of the efforts to make incursions into India to try and destabilize the area and make it more difficult for the war on terror that the United States is fighting to proceed.

LIN: So what sort of influence should not only the United States, but even the rest of the Western World can have on this situation here?

FRANKEN: Well, there are a couple of things. Number one, we have to know that just about every party that's involved in the diplomatic community is getting involved. The United States is going to have Richard Armitage, an influential member of the State Department, on his way there. The secretary of defense even more influential. The Russians are getting involved. There's going to be a regional summit in Kazakhstan next week. The Russians are going to seek to do everything they can to try and get the leaders of the two countries there. Both are participating, India and Pakistan.

There is a huge variety of effort going on in this. The Russians, the British of course are very much involved, because they were the ones who originally had control over this area of the world. It was all part of British commonwealth. That's only a part of what is going on. The stakes are so high. The stakes are almost, as I said, unimaginable.

LIN: There you go, Bob Franken, thank you very much. Is there anything you don't know, Bob? We always seem to turn to you in times of crisis. Appreciate that work.

All right, for more analysis on the conflict between the nuclear neighbors, we're going to joined by Teresita Schaffer, former U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka.

Good afternoon, madam ambassador, thanks for joining us here.

TERESITA SCHAFFER, FMR. U.S. AMB. TO SRI LANKA: My pleasure.

LIN: I'm hoping that you can give us some perspective on where you think -- how serious are these tensions right now? How critical is this situation?

SCHAFFER: I think it's very serious. You've got a million men on the borders. And I don't think they're bluffing. I don't, on the other hand, think that war inevitable, and that is what you're correspondent was talking about. The accent has to be on trying to remove the conditions that cause a risk of war?

LIN: But isn't there a danger when there's so much posturing on both sides?

SCHAFFER: Of course there is. Now what the Pakistanis -- what the Indians have insisted and the United States has also insisted on is Pakistan stop allowing infiltration from the territory that it controls into the territory controlled by India. And I think this is something Pakistan can do, no perhaps 100 percent, but a very high percentage. If it does that, then the key will be getting India to respond.

But it's important to remember that solving the infiltration problem doesn't completely remove the risk of war because there are already militants who are in India and in Kashmir who would have the capability and the motivation to mount another attack, and it is from those attacks that you get the pressure on India to respond militarily.

LIN: So what's the pressure, or the influence, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has in going to the region next week?

SCHAFFER: The U.S. has now really for the first time in the 30 years that I've been involved in South Asia very good relations with both India and Pakistan, and these are relations that are important for post of those countries. So when...

LIN: But are they important, madam ambassador, are they important, though, to the extremists on both side whose are fomenting the problem at the line of control?

SCHAFFER: They're important to the governments. They're not as important to the extremists. But ultimately, the decision of whether to take military action is going to be taken by the government. And so the message that both Deputy Secretary Armitage and Secretary Rumsfeld will be taking to Pakistan is, there's no alternative, you have to stop infiltration. The message that they will be taking to India, if that message the heard in Pakistan, is now you have got to respond.

LIN: Is there any sort of relationship, personal or otherwise, between the president of Pakistan and the prime minister of India?

SCHAFFER: Unfortunately, there's a bad one. They had a summit last summer, which ended in failure. It ended without a communique, and for those who watch diplomatic meanings, this is really unusual. And the prime minister of India started off very skeptical about the president of Pakistan, because he was the chief of Army's staff three years ago when the Pakistani army sent troop across the line of control in Kashmir in the high Himalayas, sparking the last really serious fighting between Pakistan and India.

Unfortunately, the summit did nothing to repair that personal damage. So they're both carrying some pretty heavy baggage.

LIN: So far, all of our analysts have been saying that the chances of nuclear war breaking out are very, very remote. But from your perspective, what is a realistic, worse-case scenario of how this thing can devolve, since the opinion seems to be that a nuclear war would start with conventional weapons, and India has loaded those medium-range missiles.

SCHAFFER: I share the view that if a war went nuclear, it wouldn't start that way. But the key thing in trying to think about nuclear weapons in South Asia is the uncertainty. You don't know exactly what is going to trigger it. In general, the country that's more likely to ask nuclear questions first is Pakistan. It's smaller, it's let's powerful, and it has always thought of its nuclear weapons as the counter to India's larger size and strength. If Pakistan lost a lot of territory, if it lost a lot of military capacity through an attack on a major military installation. If it saw the prospect of being -- having the north and the south of the country completely cut off in one another, these are the kind of circumstances in which they would ask the question, is this the time to use our ultimate weapon?

I think in the first instance, they'd probably reach for diplomatic weapon and do a certain amount of nuclear posturing. They would talk about nukes. They would try to engage the world in stopping the conflict at whatever point it had reached. But the important thing to remember is that we don't know and India doesn't know exactly at what point they might conclude that all these possibilities weren't doing them any good.

SCHAFFER: All right. Well, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and State Department Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage are going try to change the nature of that conversation next week. Thank you very much, Ambassador Teresita Schaffer on that subject.

SCHAFFER: You're very welcome.

LIN: All right.

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