EVERY time India and Pakistan inch towards ending their ancient enmity, something bad seems to happen. On January 2nd it was an attack by armed infiltrators on an Indian air-force base near the border with Pakistan that left seven servicemen dead. On January 20th Pakistan suffered a crueller blow when terrorists invaded Bacha Khan University, a co-ed establishment near Peshawar. Four gunmen killed at least 20 people, most of them students, before being shot dead themselves. It was a ghastly echo of a massacre of 141 people, mainly students, at a school in the same region just over a year ago. With more imagination than evidence, Pakistani conspiracy theorists saw India behind both acts of violence on their soil.
The attack on the Indian air base at Pathankot followed a surprise visit by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif—the first by an Indian prime minister since 2004. They promised to resume long-suspended high-level talks over such vexed questions as disputed Kashmir. When Indian intelligence tied the air-base attackers to Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), a Pakistani group with known links to the...Continue reading
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