Word: kashmir
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...Pakistan, on the other hand, is keen to get Holbrooke involved in the Kashmir dispute, which it has traditionally held is central to its differences with India . President Asif Zardari, in an Op-Ed for the Washington Post, wrote that he hoped the Special Envoy would "work with India and Pakistan...to bring a just and reasonable resolution to [the Kashmir issue...
...Indians were alarmed when, during the Presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly said that ending Indo-Pakistani differences over Kashmir was one of the keys to calming tensions in South Asia and winning the war on terror. New Delhi views Kashmir as a bilateral issue, and has long resisted what it regards as third-party interference. In recent years, India has sought to isolate the Kashmir issue even further, by seeking to keep it out of other negotiations (over trade and travel, for instance) with Pakistan. "The Indians are allergic to any indication of outside mediation," says Bruce Riedel, a South Asia...
...Despite the fact that India's behind-the-scenes lobbying may have helped ensure that the country was left out of Holbrooke's official mandate, the Obama Administration is unlikely to ease up efforts to pressure India to come to terms with Pakistan over their long, bitter dispute over Kashmir...
...subject, said the campaign to keep Holbrooke out was "not personal...we just objected to being lumped into a category with two of the world's most dangerous countries." Besides, he added, "there was no way we were going to allow Holbrooke, or anybody else, become a broker on Kashmir...
...Holbrooke's unenviable task, then, will be to persuade Pakistan's security establishment to abandon such accommodations with Taliban militants operating on their territory and to reorient itself away from preparing for war with India and toward counterinsurgency at home. Tackling the Kashmir issue would be a start, but that's more easily said than done. India has long rebuffed the principle of international mediation on what it insists is an internal issue. As long as the question of where Pakistan's and India's borders are drawn remains a point of potentially hostile contention, Pakistan's ambiguous relationship with...