Might a domestic crisis in either country make them play the Kashmir card again?
Kashmir may flare up again because of a domestic crisis or because of the passage of time. Both countries have huge military programs and they need Kashmir to justify them. It’s a successful tool for political reasons and will recur. But Kashmir is increasingly a problem for India as much as Pakistan when they deal with the rest of the world. India’s economy, for example, is growing at 5-6 percent a year, with lots of foreign and domestic investment. In Pakistan that isn’t the case. In India, high-tech, computer-oriented industries are seen as a strategic sector of the economy. This matters a lot in aspirational terms—it is what India’s elite wants India to be seen as (rather than the desperately poor agricultural country India is for most of its people). For this elite economy, confidence is critical, and there are Indian capitalists who are pressuring Delhi saying, how are we supposed to get software contracts when investors are afraid of nuclear war? What about Pakistan’s other neig
