Michael Crowley correctly observes that India’s diplomatic victory in limiting Holbrooke’s official mission, about which India is “exulting” according to the Post, is an illusory one. Crowley thinks that Kashmir will be an inevitable part of Holbrooke’s work. I agree that it probably will be, but not because it has to be. It will be because this is apparently something the administration wants to include on its agenda, and evidently nothing seems to dissuade them. There are no Indian foreign policy analysts that I have seen who think that there is any necessary connection between Kashmir and issues related to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Someone will say that this is a function of Indian nationalism and the taboo against bringing up Kashmir as an international issue, which is partly correct, but that just drives home how misguided it is to try to internationalize the issue, especially when doing so is to give in to a kind of extortion from the Pakistani side.

As a practical matter, it is not clear what good raising the issue would do besides encouraging Kashmiri separatists and providing an incentive to groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba to stir up trouble in the state and inside India to try to pressure India. What few in Washington seem to appreciate is that the status of Jammu & Kashmir is non-negotiable for India, which makes the inclusion of it in any “grand bargain” a prescription for the failure of the other parts of the bargain. Imagine if Calderon tried to enlist China or Russia to have Washington revisit the status of the Southwest, and consider what the American view of that would be, and then you have an idea of what a non-starter this idea is.

It is true that the ISI has promoted both Kashmiri militants and the Taliban as proxies, and just as there are elements withint the ISI that continue to support the Taliban there is an even stronger attachment in the military to the cause of Kashmir, but this does not explain why it should be U.S. policy to intervene in the Kashmir dispute, which is an old legacy of Partition, as part of efforts to address the much more recent and unrelated problem of the Taliban. It is as if you tried to resolve the division of Cyprus by revisiting the status of western Thrace that had been settled at Lausanne. There would certainly be some people in one of the countries involved who would insist that this is vital to resolving the more modern point of contention, but to grant this is to allow hard-liners in one country to make you accept that satisfying one of their long-standing goals or addressing one of their older grievances regarding an issue where they have little, if any, moral and legal standing will make them more interested in giving ground in an entirely different dispute. For the third party, whose connection to the current problem is incidental and indirect, the idea of reopening a territorial issue that they consider closed seems not only unacceaptable but positively dangerous for all parties.

Consider the basic assumption of the “grand bargain” theory: Pakistan has spent decades trying to destabilize Afghanistan and India through armed proxies, and presumably rogue elements of its military and security service continue to do this in Afghanistan partly to strike at India’s influence there just as other rogue elements were likely involved in the Mumbai attacks, so to get the official, non-rogue Pakistani military to do what is already in its interest and what it has already pledged to do (i.e., stabilize Pakistan in the west) the U.S. must get India to reward the rogue elements for their troublemaking by trying to get India to make concessions over something it considers non-negotiable. Because the rogue elements are far more extreme and unaccountable, they have no reason to accept any deal that India makes and have every incentive to pursue maximalist goals, so even if you somehow persuade India to do something it will never do it will have no positive effect on stability in Pakistan.

On the contrary, it will encourage precisely the elements within the Pakistani state that have been fomenting instability, and it will encourage the same sort in Kashmir itself. Meanwhile, having strengthened rogue elements inside the ISI and military, the official military leadership will be even less inclined to assist in combating the Taliban, which will have necessarily grown stronger as its rogue patrons have grown stronger, for fear that the rogue elements will become powerful enough to overthrow them. Including Kashmir as part of the “solution” will not consolidate the Pakistani military’s divided attention and resources, but will exacerbate the very problem it is aimed at solving. For their part, the official leadership would be happy to see outside pressure brought on India, as their attachment to Kashmir is also quite powerful, and the civilian government will faithfully toe that line and argue, as President Zardari did earlier this week, that Kashmir is comparable to Palestine. Zardari’s comparison is clever, as he is using another example where a local conflict has already needlessly been turned into a regional and international question to urge similar treatment of the dispute in Kashmir, which conveniently avoids acknowledging that linking Israel-Palestine to practically every other regional problem (which is done to emphasize the supposed strategic importance of the conflict) has made resolution of all these problems more, not less, difficult.

There is a great desire in U.S. foreign policy thinking, perhaps most pronounced among liberal internationalists who love to demonstrate their understanding of how interrelated everything is, to link issues that do not need to be linked to address any particular question. Attention to complexity is desirable, but the mania for “comprehensive” solutions helps to make all of the individual problems harder to solve because it lends so much more weight to each dispute. Indeed, in the case of Kashmir, it would be attempting to solve something that one of the parties involved–India–does not see as a problem in need of being solved. Simply by having a third party raise the issue in the context of a regional “solution,” Pakistan acquires vastly more leverage than it would or should otherwise have and perversely makes Pakistan less likely to cooperate on the other issues where the U.S. actually needs cooperation. Now that Obama has floated the possibility of mediating in Kashmir, and as it seems likely that Holbrooke will raise the issue, the Pakistani government can claim that its hands are tied on assisting against the Taliban until the Kashmir mediation makes progress, and Washington will be in a position where it has to agree because it has already insisted that the two issues are fundamentally linked.