Word: siachen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...summer in the high Himalayas, but photographer Robert Nickelsberg borrowed a heavy-duty arctic snowsuit to cover this week's story on war on the Siachen Glacier between India and Pakistan. Just as well: he was stranded by a blizzard at a military camp 17,400 ft. up. Later, during an artillery exchange, Nickelsberg tried to dash to a better position only to discover that the thin air made it "nearly impossible to run." The rigors behind him, Nickelsberg sent back the first combat pictures seen in the West of this little-known conflict...
...howitzer and fire again. They are Pakistanis, serving at an outpost 17,200 ft. up on the Baltoro Glacier, just short of a sweeping ridgeline called the Conway Saddle. Their fire is aimed over the ridge at similar positions manned by Indian troops seven miles away on the Siachen Glacier, the longest in the Karakoram mountains. When the weather is clear, the big guns sometimes boom round the clock...
...paradox is that India and Pakistan are supposedly at peace and that Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto are trying to move from a chilly standoff into a friendlier era. Both say they want to erase what Bhutto calls the "irritant" of the Siachen Glacier problem, and both instructed their negotiators to do so in the most recent round of talks that began last month in Pakistan. When Gandhi and Bhutto met face to face in Islamabad last week, however, they failed to come close to devising a practical solution. Progress has been as thin as the atmosphere...
...extend the line because there had been no fighting in Kashmir's northernmost reaches, but merely mentioned that the line should continue "thence north to the glaciers." Despite minor adjustments after the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, the official boundary still ends at NJ 9842, leaving the Siachen ownership question unresolved...
India was the first to deploy troops on the Siachen Glacier. In April 1984 the Indian army launched Operation Meghdoot (Cloud Messenger), placing forces at two key passes of the Saltoro Range, which runs along the Siachen Glacier's western edge toward the Chinese border. India says it was pre-empting a planned Pakistani move -- a contention Islamabad denies. The Indian advance captured nearly 1,000 sq. mi. of territory claimed by Pakistan; ever since then New Delhi has wanted to establish a formal boundary along that natural divide. The conflict escalated slowly as each side deployed more men, established...