.. Contrary to the general impression int he West and readily accepted by many of our own media persons, in spite of Pakistan's best efforts, Kashmir has not been before the UN as a dispute for the last 33 years. Consequently, the UN Secretary General tried to remove it from the agenda of disputes in two successive years. Pakistan lobbied hard to retain it and it is kept there to be subjected to review every year. There was also a proposal both in the UN and in the US Senate to do away with the UN military observation group and save the money wasted on it. Pakistan resisted it and has again managed to retain the group ...

The covert war in Kashmir has been going on for the last nine years and it has cost 18,000 lives or more. Since 1987 Pakistan had developed and deployed nuclear weapons. In 1990, Pakistan created a crisis with implied threats of using nuclear weapons. The US sent the Robert Gates mission to warn Pakistan that India's retaliation would be devastating ..

Therefore, both Pakistan and India had been living in a state of mutual deterrence ... Kashmir is not the core issue as Pakistan claims. It is a symptom of a deeper issue - the two-nation theory which is proclaimed as Pakistan's ideology ...

Today reviving the Kashmir problem will have to be looked at against the background of Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Nogorno-Karabakh, Chechenya, Xinjiang, Tibet and Kurdistan issues since secessionist insurgencies are taking place in all these places. It is not in the interest of Russia and China to have Kashmir debated in the UN. In the fifties, neither Russia nor China faced the possibilities of Chechenya, Xinjiang and Tibet being brought up before the UN but now they do ...

... Pakistan holds out a nuclear blackmail threat on the Kashmir issue implying that if the Kashmir issue is not solved to its satisfaction there may be war which may result in escalation to the nuclear level. This threat, as the events of the last eight years of mutual deterrence highlights, has not worked. Surely Pakistan's stake in Kashmir is not so high as to make it put Pakistani cities at risk of nuclear retaliation ...

(Source: The Times of India, 26 June, 1998)