India, Pakistan Trade Fire After Envoy's Expulsion

NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD, (Reuters) - Indian and Pakistani soldiers pounded each other with heavy mortar fire Sunday, a day after India expelled Pakistan's chief envoy to protest against a militant raid that killed families of Indian soldiers.

The raid last week in Kashmir (news - web sites) that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based separatist rebels has reignited tensions between the neighbors, locked in a five-month standoff over India's accusations Pakistan sponsors militant attacks against India.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf denies the charges and pledged in January to curb militants on its soil fighting Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan region, long a flashpoint in Indian-Pakistan relations.

India's cabinet security committee was due to meet late on Sunday for a second day to review its response to last Tuesday's army camp raid in which wives and children of soldiers were among 34 people killed, including the attackers.

Saturday, India gave Pakistan's high commissioner (ambassador) a week to leave in protest against the raid.

The envoy, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, told Star Television News Sunday the raid "which Pakistan has condemned in no uncertain terms cannot realistically be associated with Pakistan."

Some analysts have drawn a link between the army camp raid -- the deadliest in eight months in the region -- and a blast in the Pakistani port city of Karachi two weeks ago that killed 11 Fernch engineers and three Pakistanis.

They blame them on Islamic extremists intent both on attacking India and undermining Musharraf for supporting the U.S.-led war on terrorism and his announcement in January of a crackdown on Islamic extremists.

"The incident in Jammu is related to the Karachi bomb blast coming as it did just six days after Karachi," Indian defense analyst Uday Bhaskar told Reuters.

"The Karachi incident...displayed the sense of limited writ of the Musharraf regime and throws up questions of how much he can deliver on his January promise (to crack down on militants)."

Indian newspapers said the expulsion was a diplomatic slap and gave another chance to the United States, for whom Pakistan is a key ally in its war on terror, to use high-powered diplomacy to settle the row between the two nuclear-capable powers.

Some Indian politicians had called for New Delhi to sever diplomatic ties and launch military strikes against Pakistan.

"This (the expulsion) was not a positive step...but I understand the Indians felt they had to do something and this was the easiest step," Qazi said.

India had already recalled its own envoy from Islamabad following a attack on the Indian parliament last December that it also blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

Besides fearing the potentially devastating results of a war, Washington is also concerned it would upset its drive to root out the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Sunday, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee (news - web sites) briefed Sonia Gandhi, head of the main opposition Congress party, on the situation after his Hindu nationalist-led government won all-party support Friday for any action it wanted to take in response to the raid in Jammu and Kashmir.

Close to a million men have been mobilized on the border after the December 13 raid on India's parliament.

Musharraf's spokesman Rashid Qureshi was quoted by Dawn newspaper Sunday as saying he did not believe India would launch a full-scale war, but there was a danger of an Indian attack on what is Pakistani Kashmir.

The conservative newspaper The Hindu said the expulsion showed India was "prepared to wait for some more time to enable Washington to prevail upon Pakistan so infiltrations into Jammu and Kashmir decrease." It quoted government sources as saying India might wait through June to see some progress.

Newspapers in Pakistan took a stronger line. "(India) ...betrays an interest in brinkmanship to let the situation simmer at boiling point. But the danger in such a policy is the situation could also one day go much beyond boiling point with terrible consequences," said The News, regarded as independent.

Kashmir has been the trigger of two of three wars between India and Pakistan in 55 years of independence from Britain. India views the mainly Muslim territory as an integral part of the country while Musharraf says Kashmir "runs in our blood" and should be free from Indian control.

In the latest round of fighting both sides reported machine gun and mortar fire for a third straight day on the Line of Control -- a military cease-fire line dividing Kashmir.

An Indian defense spokesman said shells were landing on civilian areas on the Indian side in the southern Kashmir but there were no reports of casualties. Pakistan police also said there was no word on casualties on their side.

In other violence, four Indian soldiers were killed and seven wounded when separatist militants using rocket-propelled grenades attacked a security post in Kashmir Sunday. The separatists regularly attack security posts and patrols in Kashmir.

Agreed. But the incursions and attacks need to stop. Pakistan is such a failed nation that the government may be impotent to halt the provocations. This may bring about a fatal nation-ending response from India.

It has already lost its eastern half; East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It may join other failed nation-states like Somalia.

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