Barack Obama has rightly recognised the ability of Kashmir to unsettle India and Pakistan, and distract both from fighting terrorism. He has said that he wants to help to resolve it. India’s traditional position is that outside intervention is unjustified and unwelcome; Kashmir, it says, is purely a bilateral dispute.

But at this point, that stance looks myopic. India is right to call for pressure on Pakistan – but that makes sense only if it is done in a way that recognises how fractured that country now is, and how its own urgent need for stability gives it different priorities from the West. One of the few things that India, and other countries, can help do is to move towards agreement over Kashmir. Obama is right that if it is not solved, this will be the cause of wider terrorism. ~Bronwen Maddox

This is an odd thing to conclude. When India is struck by gruesome terrorist attacks in one of their major urban centers, the imperative thing they must do is to yield on an issue many of them consider basically non-negotiable? This would be perceived in India as rewarding the jihadis who attacked Mumbai and their sponsors, whoever they may have been, as well as rewarding the Pakistani military for playing their old double game of sponsoring cross-border terrorism while claiming to oppose extremism at home*. Westerners have an odd habit of identifying the solution to a foreign problem in the one place where at least one of the nations involved is least likely to give any ground. Indo-Pak talks on Kashmir had already stalled, and they are even less likely to be revived now. It is therefore obviously the key to the region’s problems, because some new settlement of the dispute is now completely out of reach.

Maddox has made Obama’s interest in Kashmir seem much more even-handed than it is. The Ahmad Rashid argument for including Kashmir in a grand bargain is that it will provide Pakistan with recognized, secure borders, which he believes will make the Pakistani government more willing to collaborate in the west, and this is essentially the same as Obama’s position. Neither Rashid nor Obama is particularly interested in whether Kashmir distracts from India’s other antiterrorism efforts; they are concerned that the status quo in Kashmir distracts Pakistan from fighting in the west. One reason that Indian reaction to the suggestion of mediation has been so negative is that it is clear that India is being pulled into the “grand bargain” only insofar as it helps to put the Pakistani government at ease; the grand bargain is indeed a bargain for Pakistan, but it is not at all clear what India would get from cooperating.

Indeed, to the extent that India’s antiterrorism is primarily an effort to fight cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and PoK and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, Kashmir is at the center of India’s “war on terror.” The Indians might just as easily reply to any suggestion of American “mediation” of the Kashmir dispute that the U.S. should give up on Afghanistan and forget about Al Qaeda, and even that would not really begin to explain how unrealistic a suggestion it is for India to “move towards agreement over Kashmir.”

* I am assuming for the moment that elements of the Pakistani military were not involved in sponsoring these attacks.