[sacw] Indians & Pakistanis Surreal war on Siachen

[Harsh Kapoor]

FYI
South Asia Citizens Web
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[From: Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, March 9, 1999 / COLUMN ONE]

The Highest Battlefield on Earth
India and Pakistan both have thousands of troops fighting for control of
an immense glacier where thin air kills more soldiers than bullets do.
Their surreal war seems part Ice Age, part Flash Gordon.

By DEXTER FILKINS, Times Staff Writer

SIACHEN GLACIER, Indo-Pakistani Border--In this frozen
wasteland, the historic rivalry between India and Pakistan
seems as enduring as the glacial ice.

On the Siachen Glacier, where nearby peaks reach 23,000 feet
and temperatures drop to 50 below zero, the frostbitten armies of two
implacable foes have faced each other for 15 years in a conflict both
bloody and surreal.

Cold and crevasses kill more troops than opposing armies. In the
high, frigid air, skin bonds with metal, sweat turns to ice, and there's
not enough oxygen to light a match. Artillery shells, freed from the
normal laws of ballistics, sail for miles. On Siachen's lifeless crags,
a soldier's only solace is the pity of his god.

"We are closer to God here, and if I die for my country, he will
take me," said Sgt. Rashid Abul, stationed at a 17,000-foot-high
Pakistani border post.

The war on the world's highest battlefield has survived every
thaw in Indo-Pakistani relations. The fight for Siachen alone has cost
two of the world's poorest countries a combined 3,500 dead and
10,000 injured, and an estimated $1 million a day.

Now, after a meeting last month between the prime ministers of
India and Pakistan, both governments are signaling that they may be
willing to pull back from their high-altitude fight. They have agreed to
negotiate the future of Siachen and say they would quit fighting there
if the terms were right. A growing number of voices say neither
nation should sacrifice another life to hold on to a block of
prehistoric ice.

"Siachen is worthless to both countries," said A. G. Noorani, an
Indian lawyer and columnist who has called for a settlement. "Both
armies should vacate the glacier."
The fight over the Siachen is one of the strangest conflicts of
modern times, combining the usual stuff of history and politics with
mountain climbing, high-altitude survival and a phrase unique to this
part of the world: "cartographic aggression."

Siachen, the world's largest glacier outside the polar regions,
straddles the Himalayan territory where India, China and Pakistan
collide. A spectacular river of congealed snow, the 48-mile-long
Siachen forms the eastern edge of the Karakoram Mountains, where
five peaks--including K-2, the famed destination of climbers--reach
higher than 26,000 feet.

An Indian Cry of Plunder by Map
For most of the nearly 52 years since India and Pakistan broke
from the British Empire, Siachen was considered unfit for human
habitation. In 1949, the year after India and Pakistan ended their first
war over adjoining Kashmir, the two nations agreed to a cease-fire line
that cut north through the region--and stopped near the foot of the
uninhabited Siachen. The point where the cease-fire line ended is still
known by its map coordinates--NJ9842.

NJ9842 forms the point of an inverted triangle that spreads
northward to the Chinese border.
"It was the Empty Quarter," said Varun Sahni, a professor at
Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "There was absolutely no
expectation that anyone would go up there."

For decades, the only people who ventured to Siachen were
tourists--mountain climbers and trekkers scaling its peaks. Because many
of the climbing teams came through Pakistan, some Western
maps began to show Siachen as part of Pakistan. In India, this
prompted calls for cartographic aggression--meaning, roughly, seizing
territory by redrawing a map.

"We decided that we had no alternative but to protect what was
ours," said K. C. Singh, spokesman for the Indian government.
In 1984, the Indian army sent several hundred troops to seize
Siachen. The Indians took most of the glacier and the high mountain
passes along its western edge. So remote was Siachen that Pakistani
officials say they learned of the Indian move only after a group of
trekkers returning from a climb reported spotting troops there. The
Pakistani army rushed north and seized a handful of peaks, and the
battle lines froze in place.

Today, the war on the Siachen Glacier seems part Ice Age and part Flash
Gordon. The Indians installed the world's highest phone
booth here, at 15,000 feet, so their soldiers could call home.

Village-born troops on both sides roam the gelid wastes with the most
modern equipment, darting through mile-deep gorges in $1-million
helicopters and firing at enemies they cannot see.

"We can hear the Indians--we know they are on the next
mountain," said Pakistani Col. Javed Hassan Khattak, who
commands an artillery unit near the glacier. "We can't see them, but
we start firing."

For all the futility of the struggle, the Indians don't want to
withdraw because they command the heights and the glacier. The
Pakistanis don't want to leave, in part because the conflict is costing
India more, in both money and dead soldiers. Each nation deploys about
3,000 soldiers in the area.

"If Mexico occupied a desert in the United States--a worthless
desert--do you think the U.S. would let them keep it?" queried Maj.
Mohammed Suhail, a Pakistani stationed on the glacier. "I don't think
so."

High Altitude the Real Menace

At a Pakistani base dubbed the International Himalayan
Expedition Camp--it was once used by mountain climbers--30 soldiers
stand watch atop a snowbound 17,000-foot peak. IHEC is a desolate
place: The temperature on a clear morning in late February was 30
degrees below zero. The nearest village is 10 days away by foot.
There are no trees, no grass and no wildlife--only an unending desert
of snowy white.

Just over the next peak lies the Indian army, though no one here
claims ever to have seen it. Occasionally, an artillery shell flies
over, and the men scramble for their shelters.

"The hardest thing here is not the fighting--it's walking," said Tariq
Mahmood, a 35-year-old captain. "Walk for 15 minutes, and you are
dizzy."

The most common killers are cerebral and pulmonary
edema--conditions, caused by high altitude, in which fluid invades the
brain and lungs. One man died at the camp last month from cerebral
edema. On Feb. 25, a dozen Pakistani soldiers patrolling near Siachen
died in an avalanche.

"If we bring someone up who is not properly acclimatized to the
altitude," said Dr. Jamail Ashlam, a Pakistani army physician, "after
three days, he will be dead."

Guns freeze at IHEC; so do cameras. Pick up a rifle without a pair of
gloves, and the skin peels from the fingers. If he strays from one
of the designated footpaths, a soldier risks being swallowed by a
hidden, snow-covered crevasse. One ravine cuts straight through
IHEC, bridged only by three wobbly switches of bamboo.

"Fall into there, and you go to God," said Mahmood, pointing into
the abyss.

Water at the camp comes from melting blocks of ice, but that's
not always possible, the soldiers say: The portable heaters sometimes
melt the snow beneath them and sink into the glacier. Baths are out
of the question. For the soldier, home is a squat fiberglass shell,
tall enough to stand in, that stinks of men's bodies and kerosene.
The igloos lie buried in a snowdrift, marked only by the fluttering
green and white of a Pakistani flag.

Most of the soldiers fighting on Siachen come from the plains and
have never experienced extreme cold or high altitudes.
"The most frightening thing was the shooting stars," said
Mohammed Ofzal, a 35-year-old sergeant from a village in the
Pakistani province of Punjab. "I thought the Indians were shelling us."

When India and Pakistan first rushed troops to the glacier, the
soldiers were not prepared for the conditions--and they suffered
horrendous casualties. According to one report, of the first 52 Indian
soldiers who went to the glacier, 30 either died or had to be
evacuated due to exposure. And an account by an Indian professor
and a Pakistani journalist said that snow, avalanches and high altitude
inflict 97% of the Indian casualties.

Today, the two armies say they have developed sophisticated
methods that allow their soldiers to survive atop Siachen. The soldiers
wear puffy white high-tech snowsuits--which make a platoon on the
glacier look like Pillsbury Doughboys. Soldiers, tethered together, walk
only on footpaths tested for ravines.

Even the equipment gets special treatment on Siachen. Artillery is
flown up piece by piece--the helicopters can't carry a whole gun--and
assembled on the spot.

"Once the artillery is up here, it is here for good, it is never coming
down again," said Khattak, the artillery colonel. "Maybe a million years
from now, people will come up here and see these things and wonder what
on earth we were doing."

The rules of war are different here too. To the south, along the
disputed border of Kashmir, both armies have developed a largely
unspoken language to keep their border war from getting out of
control. Along the poorly defined border on Siachen, there are no
such limits: Helicopters are often shot out of the sky, missiles streak
across the horizon, and troops regularly try to overrun the other side's
posts.

Mountain-climbing tourists cannot come to Siachen, but they do
flock to the nearby Karakorams. Sometimes, they come dangerously
close to the action.

In 1989, India and Pakistan reached a tentative deal to pull their
troops off Siachen, but the Indian side backed out. Last November,
when the two nations began talking about Siachen for the first time in
years, the meeting ended in a stalemate.

Even the most hardened warriors wonder how long the glacial
war can go on. Pakistani Brig. Nusrat Khan Sial, who commands a
force on the glacier, stood at the base of Siachen and scanned the
magnificent horizon.

"It is so beautiful," Sial said. "I wish humans were not at war
here."

* * *

Frozen Prize
India and Pakistan have been fighting over Siachen, the world's
largest glacier outside the polar regions, since 1984, when the Indian
army sent several hundred troops to seize it. Each nation now deploys
about 3,000 soldiers in the remote and high-altitude area.

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