‘Kashmir to be an issue till Pak sees LoC as border’

The Kashmir issue will go on for a ‘‘very long time’’ unless and until Pakistan reconciles itself to accepting the LoC a...

The Kashmir issue will go on for a ‘‘very long time’’ unless and until Pakistan reconciles itself to accepting the LoC as the border, former US ambassador to India Robert D. Blackwill has said.

‘‘Unless and until Pakistan reconciles itself to accepting the LoC as the border, the Kashmir dispute will go on for a very long time and cross-border terrorist violence from Pakistan against India would resume,’’ Blackwill, former strategic adviser to US President George W. Bush said.

‘‘Pakistan will not succeed in Kashmir,’’ he said, writing in The National Interest, a leading American quarterly.

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The former envoy said that for more than 50 years, young cadets, including Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf himself, have been taught in Pakistan’s military academies that their ‘‘holy mission’’ was the ‘‘liberation’’ of all of Kashmir and that the central purpose of Pakistan itself was to further this task.

‘‘Beginning in 1947, Pakistan’s attempts to accomplish this directly by military force have failed. Thus thwarted, in the past decade and a half, Pakistan has used terror as an instrument of attempted change in Jammu and Kashmir. This too has not succeeded,’’ Blackwill wrote.

When faced with such a fruitless strategy, a government has three choices: It can stick with the losing strategy, develop a new strategy or change objectives. ‘‘In my judgement, Pakistan has not yet made a strategic shift away from its long-time policies of territorial acquisition and cross-border terrorism,’’ he said. —PTI