For Kashmir, there is only one strategy left to try: peace.

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India and Pakistan should ground their warplanes and start talking instead. Intransigence isn’t the answer.

Pakistani residents are evacuated from their Kashmiri border town. Photograph: Sajjad Qayyum/AFP/Getty Images
▼ In the summer of 1999, I was standing outside our ancestral home in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, when I saw fighter jets roar past in the skies above me. The Indian air force was carrying out sorties towards the mountainous district of Kargil to dislodge Pakistani militants and, as we found out later, Pakistani soldiers. The troops had quietly occupied the snow-capped peaks as part of a stealth operation masterminded by the then Pakistani general and future president Pervez Musharraf.
The sight and sound of sophisticated military hardware provided a brief thrill, but it soon turned into panic. What if these bombers dropped their lethal cache on our home? At night, as I lay in bed, I imagined our neighbourhood as rubble from which acrid smoke rose. I imagined dear ones lying dead in homes and on streets, like in war films. I saw friends and myself as bodies in pools of blood. It was terrifying.
I was reminded of those febrile, frightening times, during the Kargil war, which lasted two months, as news came of the latest episode in the 71-year-old military conflict over this disputed region in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Indian fighter jets this week crossed into Pakistani territoryto target – according to Indian officials – a militant camp run by Jaish-e-Mohammed. JeM, a Pakistan-based Islamist group, had claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 44 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir on 14 February. Indian officials said the airstrike killed “a very large number of militants” in the camp, in the forests of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. They said the incident had been a “pre-emptive strike”, as India had intelligence that the group was planning more attacks. Pakistan rejected the claim, insisting that India’s incursion had not caused any damage, and the Pakistani government stated it would respond to the strikes “at the time and place of its choosing”.
In a major tit-for-tat escalation of the conflict, that response came on Tuesday, when Pakistan said its air force had shot down two Indian fighter jets. A spokesperson said that one of the planes had fallen in Pakistani territory and two pilots had been captured. India’s foreign ministry confirmed the loss of a fighter plane and said a pilot was missing. A video purportedly showing the captured pilot appeared on the internet. This came soon after Pakistan said it had carried out airstrikes across the line of control – one of the most heavily militarised borders in the world – that divides part of Kashmir. (China controls another part in the east.) (▪ ▪ ▪)

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