Word: kashmir
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...believable and - more than that - important. Understand Qasab's story and you begin to understand why young men throw in their lot with Islamic extremists, why Pakistan may be the most dangerous country in the world, why the half-century-long dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is not just a local problem, why education reform in the poor world is an issue of national security in the rich one - and why draining the swamps in which terrorism is spawned has been so difficult...
Going Underground In the early 1990s, Pakistan was in a state of euphoria. Islamic holy warriors, many from cities like Rawalpindi, had defeated the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and jihad was on everyone's lips. In 1990, Muslims in Kashmir - the Himalayan territory that India and Pakistan have been arguing and fighting over since 1948 - rose up against Indian rule, and the mujahedin soon found a new cause. The Pakistani military used the jihadi movement, hoping that guerrilla warfare would destabilize its enemy India where conventional warfare failed. Jihadi groups in Pakistan collected donations for Kashmir. Young men signed...
District governor Ghulam Mustafa (who denies that Qasab is from Faridkot) says the area has a long history of sending men to fight in Kashmir. Despite the risks, joining a militant network provides social mobility that is virtually unattainable in Pakistani society, giving the groups' members a sense of purpose and pride and elevating their status, says Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani expert on extremist groups. And indeed, villagers have told journalists that when Qasab went home to see his family just before the Mumbai attacks, he was a changed man - calm, with a sense of purpose and able...
...there's a consensus within the Obama Administration about how to approach the Pakistan part of the problem. The policy might be described as comprehensive diplomacy accompanied by lots of money. The diplomatic task is to nudge India and Pakistan, who nearly came to an agreement in their eternal Kashmir dispute in 2007, toward a lessening of tensions in the hope that the Pakistani army will turn to the struggle against al-Qaeda and the Taliban...
...Washington and London have been hoping that Islamabad will seize the crisis as an opportunity to permanently uproot the training camps that were first used by militant proxies of the Pakistani army to stage raids into Indian-administered Kashmir. Qureshi, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, insists that this has been done. "Absolutely," he said. "Whatever action needed to be taken has been taken." But his counterparts across the border are yet to be convinced...