Howard Schaffer is a veteran US Foreign Service Officer with long experience as a diplomat in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. He has dealt with South Asia most of his career, either in field postings or at the desks dealing with South Asia in the State Department. He has come out with a well-researched book about the limits of US influence in its attempts to mediate on the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan since 1947. He has covered the history of the US efforts in three periods. 1) A deep Washington engagement in efforts to bring about a settlement in 1948-63. 2) A quarter century of American diplomatic quiescence in 1964-89. 3) A focus on crisis management in 1990-present. His last chapter is about a role for the US. He buys the Pakistani argument that to enable Pakistan to shift forces from its eastern borders to the west to deal effectively with the Taliban, it requires a solution to the Kashmir problem. Underlying the book is the sentiment that India has not been entirely reasonable in finding a solution to the dispute. In his view, the Kashmiri people want independence and no political leader in Kashmir, including the elected ones, can credibly speak for the Kashmiris.

The US President, Barack Obama, in his March 27 speech on the Af-Pak strategy, said, “Al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.” It would appear, according to Schaffer, that Pakistanis would rather be killed by the extremist cancer than give up their dispute with India. All the Indo-Pak wars have been started by Pakistan and there is no reason to assume that India will take advantage of their transferring troops to the western border to fight the jihadis since Al Qaeda and its associates are enemies of India. The problem the US has traditionally faced in the Af-Pak region is their basic inability to grasp the nature of the threat they are facing just as they could not understand the nature of the Kashmir dispute. The US establishment is still to understand why the 9/11 plot can be traced to Pakistan, why the CIA operatives were shot at the headquarters at Langley, Virginia, by a Pakistani in 1993, why another Pakistani tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993, why there are plots against the US by Pakistanis and Pakistan-origin people with links to the Lashkar-e-Toiba. The same jihadis have been operating in Kashmir since 1989. The modus operandi during the 1947 raid of Kashmir, the Operation Gibraltar in 1965, in Kargil in 1999 and in the campaign to bleed India through a thousand cuts since 1989 is the same.

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