The UK Foriegn and Commonwealth Office’s travel advice for Pakistan is full of complicated pointers and hair raising warnings. It advises against all travel to FATA and the NWFP, including Peshawar, travel to Northern and Western Balouchistan and non-essential travel to Quetta, advices caution in central Punjab and Karachi, keep a low profile and “vary your route” if you make regular journeys (i.e. to avoid kidnapping), avoid using hotels popular with ex-pats, etc etc. And then:

Pakistan Administered Kashmir

This area has remained largely trouble free.

Which is interesting. As a teenager with a knowledge of international relations I could fit on a postage stamp, Kashmir was the place that Pakistan and India were fighting over. In my eyes it was why they decided to make nuclear weapons, why they fought in the Kargil War, why they were enemies despite so many similarities. Kashmir was always synoymous with “flashpoint” – it was ironic that an area that remains a source of tension, terrorism and militancy, was infact OK to visit.

Not that the whole of Kashmir is without trouble. While by FCO advice Pakistani Kashmir is trouble free, the Indian-administered end is not worthy of such praise:

Jammu & Kashmir

We advise against all travel to or through rural areas of Jammu and Kashmir, other than to Ladakh, and against all but essential travel to Srinagar.  If you intend to travel to Srinagar then you should only travel there by air. Despite an overall decline in violence in Jammu and Kashmir in recent years, there remains a high risk of unpredictable violence, including bombings, grenade attacks, shootings and kidnapping, and a substantial security force presence. More than 20 people were reportedly killed in encounters between security forces and militants in January 2009. There was widespread political unrest and violence across rural and urban areas of Jammu and Kashmir in July and August 2008

Just today AFP reported three rebels and an Indian solider were killed in gun battles in Kupwara and Rajouri. Yesterday the same agency said the high-court in J&K ordered the bodies of two young women, believed to be raped and killed by Indian security forces, to be exhumed. The alleged incident ignited protests leaving two people dead and 400 injured. In recognition of the tension in the Indian-administered region the centre has agreed to pull troops out of the state’s towns and cities, and to review a law allowing soldiers to do what they like with impunity. While for Pakistan Kashmir is first and foremost a political issue – Zardari commenting that he no longer even sees India as a military threat – for India it is an alive security problem with regular encounters between Indian security forces and militants.

So a layman might think it would be in India’s interests to get Kashmir sorted, and would be surprised that, as Kuldip Nayar noted in Dawn, India only wants to discuss terrorism at future meetings of the Pak and Indian foreign ministers in Egypt. Nayar lays out some pretty logical reasons for India’s approach to this:

That the Kashmir issue should be resolved needs no repetition. This has beleaguered the two nations for decades and has led to wars. New Delhi realises more than Islamabad that normalcy is not even thinkable without having Kashmir out of the way. 

But that requires a proper atmosphere in India and it cannot be created without bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice. Pakistan has to create confidence in India that it is willing to take into account the thinking in New Delhi which feels that it has been wronged again and again.

India’s persistence on terrorism is understandable the wrath of the Mumbai attacks, and the widely agreed involvement of Kashmiri-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and their desire to have those responsible brought to justice. But while India waits for whatever reassurance it needs from Pak on terrorism, which maybe a long time coming, J&K will continue to be unstable. The idea that problems in Indian-controlled Kashmir can be split off while another country continues to claim the territory as their own appears somewhat naive. It’s sad, considering how close Musharaff came to a deal to normalize the area as recently as 2007, that Kashmir is so far off the table there are discussions about even discussing it.

The situation isn’t helped when parts of the Indian state go off half cock when it is suggested the only way militancy problem can be resolved is if the Kashmir problem is resolved. Back in January UK foreign minister David Miliband wrote in the Guardian that a “resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders”. To which Indian external affairs spokesman Vishnu Prakash said: “We do not need unsolicited advice on the internal issues of India like Jammu and Kashmir”.

But it’s not an internal issue – it’s an international one shared by Pakistan, India and China. And it’s one that looks increasingly ridiculous and antiquated. Several commentators noted Pakistani Aisam ul-Haq Qureshi and Indian Prakash Armitraj’s doubles team and the implications, if only symbolic, for signs of increasing co-operation between the two countries. Faisal.K said he feels India and Pak will never go to war again:

Personally speaking whenever I come across someone from Gujrat anywhere in the world, I feel like they are from across the road rather than across the neelam valley. Infact most of the conversations I have had over this blog and others with our neighbors have all ended with “so why the hell are we fighting”. Its quite stunning that two cultures which basically derive themselves from the same roots have been so actively involved in wars in the past, but then politics is a dirty game.

If Faisal is right, Pak and India are at the beginning of a long road – like in Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s when the war was coming to an end but the parties were not quite at the table – where the desire not to fight anymore is a major first step.