Upon his arrival in India, President Clinton was greeted by the Islamic terrorists with a massacre of forty innocent Sikhs in Kashmir. Understandably, Shri Clinton interpreted it as a sign of the intractability of the ‘Kashmir Dispute’. This led him to state in the press conference that followed: "There is no military solution to the Kashmir problem." The natural corollary is that the ‘problem’ must be solved politically and diplomatically. This belief, which no doubt represents the thinking of US experts, is wrong on both counts—for there is no such thing as ‘Kashmir problem’, and a political solution is impossible as there is no one on the other side who can ensure that the conditions agreed to are enforced on the ground.

The fundamental problem behind this thinking is the failure to recognize that what India is faced with in Kashmir is not a territorial struggle but fighting an army driven by the ideology of jihad. There are no Kashmiris, but only Pakistani soldiers and Muslim mercenaries pursuing a jihad—the "most glorious word in the vocabulary of Islam" according to General Zia, the true father of Talibanism. So, if a ‘diplomatic solution' is agreed to by India, by transforming the LoC into an international boundary, it will not make the jihadis give up their ideological war. The terrorists will not lay down their arms and go back to their homes. As far as the terrorists are concerned, it will simply be a change of name from the LoC to the ‘International Boundary’. They will continue their jihad as dictated by their ideology.

There is another problem: with Pakistan crumbling as a state, who is going to ensure that the jihadis will abide by the rules, even assuming that the military regime of General Musharraf is willing to accept a diplomatic solution? The next Government in Pakistan can easily repudiate any such agreement just as General Musharraf has ignored the July 4 agreement between Nawaz Sharif and President Clinton. The next Government is likely to be more fundamentalist than the present one. The fact is that Pakistan is begining to disappear to be taken over by Islamic warlords. It would be the height of folly to agree to any kind of a diplomatic deal with any of them.

The problem is neither political nor territorial, but ideological. The jihadis see acts of terrorism in the name of Islam as a fundamental right, just as the Pope sees conversion as a fundamental right. Let us not forget the basic tenet of The Quranic Concept of War, the official manual of Pakistan: "The Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the heart of the enemy,... Terror struck into the hearts of the enemy is not only a means, it is the end in itself. ... Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him."