Fortunately, Joe Klein is not being considered for any senior posts in the next administration. He writes:

Perhaps most important, as President-elect Obama indicated to me a few weeks ago, a high-powered special envoy should be named–someone like Bill Clinton–to try to solve the eternal dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. If India recedes as a threat, the Pakistani military’s imagined need for a guerrilla counterforce in Kashmir and Afghanistan should also recede.

Here is what Obama said to Klein:

Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep n being bogged down with this particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan border? I think there is a moment where potentially we could get their attention. It won’t be easy, but it’s important.

This is madness. Kashmir is perhaps the thorniest case of disputed land claims in the world. If it were to erupt into a new war, the dispute has much greater stakes for South Asia and the world than anything currently happening inside Pakistan, and there is no guarantee that attempted mediation gone wrong would not push the Subcontinent in the direction of war. It is almost certain that no American envoy or administration knows enough about the region and the relevant issues to make an attempt at resolving it.

How would this mediation effort cause India to “recede as a threat” to Pakistan? To put it less one-sidedly, how might the border be largely demilitarized and the two states no longer regard each other as rivals with competing claims over this territory? As near as I can tell, that would happen only when nearly all of Jammu & Kashmir has been ceded to Pakistan, and perhaps not even then. Obviously the Pakistanis are not going to go along with a process in which they gain little or nothing. If this is their pay-off for doing more against the Taliban, they will want significant territorial concessions from India. I can see what Pakistan gets out of this arrangement, but why the Indians would participate is a mystery. One does not need to be an India expert to know that major concessions will never happen, especially when they are being promoted by a foreign power. Were some Indian Congress governmenr cajoled into making any concessions over Kashmir, the nationalists would crucify them come the next election. Even if such a deal could somehow be pushed through, which the recent remarks of the Indian External Affairs Minister show to be essentially impossible, it would be very unpopular and it would be repudiated by the next government.

It’s a terrible idea, it won’t work, and if it became a real policy of the U.S. government it would be fairly dangerous to both parties and to our interests. Have I left anything out? Oh, yes, it will badly harm our relationship with one of the rising powers of Asia, and it will distract us from realistic options in Pakistan.

Update: K. Subrahmanyam writes against U.S. involvement in Kashmir in a Times of India piece from last week:

The president-elect could not have selected a worse moment to air these thoughts. Kashmir is due to go in for elections in the next few weeks. Such a suggestion will come in handy for secessionist elements.

I have not yet found any Indian commentary that supports the proposed mediation. If anyone finds some, I’d be interested to see it.