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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 9 2002 02.43 BST
The idea was to bus a few dozen journalists from Islamabad up to the LoC to inspect the damage done to villages by Indian shelling. I remember doing exactly the same thing in 1998, in 1999 and in 2000. Then too India and Pakistan faced off, like a pair angry pub drunks spouting obscenities at each other, and then too, in jeeps and helicopters and green military busses, hacks trooped up to the frontline to see what they could of what was going on.
Some trips were more eventful than others. Once Indian machine guns opened up on the clearly civilian car I was driving in. The bullets missed us but shot out the front tyres of the gaily-painted decorated bus in front, which promptly slumped onto its axles like an elephant hit by a tranquilising dart. On another occasion a traumatised child - a victim of shelling in the stunningly beautiful Neelam valley - lay on a bed in a military hospital and gripped my hand and would not let it go. On the other side of the mountains there were, no doubt, journalists in Indian villages too, also trying to calm small shattered children.
At the beginning of that July I flew in a Pakistani army helicopter up to the northern town of Skardu, about 55 miles from the LoC and high in the Himalayas. Skardu sits on a gravel flood plain at 7,000 ft where the young Indus river is joined by the torrents carrying meltwater from the Baltoro - the biggest glacier in the world. This is high, rough country. On the flight up we clung to the Indus gorge as huge peaks hemmed us in. As we passed Nanga Parbat, one of only fourteen mountains higher than 8,000m, the shadow of our 30 man Mi-18 was a tiny speeding dot on its massive snowy flanks.
A day and a jeep ride later I was walking up a track with a Pakistani Army sergeant. It was early morning and the switchback climb up the dusty ridge was very pleasant. Twenty odd miles to the south several thousand Indian troops were engaging a mixed force of Pakistani troops and Islamic militant irregulars on the mountains above Kargil. The Pakistanis had seized several tactically critical heights across the LoC over the winter, breaking a long-held tradition that during the months when weather is the main enemy humans keep to their warm boltholes in the valleys, and now the Indians were trying to force them out. By 11 oclock I was in a bunker on the Pakistani frontline watching as an artillery piece shelled a road a few miles below us whenever an Indian vehicle appeared. The officer in charge, an educated and articulate man, pointed out the Indian positions on the crags opposite. We were at 11,000 ft and it was hard to breathe let alone fight. His men lived in caves. The Indian bunkers were made of large rocks.
'There they are, the bastards,' the officer told me. He said he hated the enemy. I asked if he had ever been to India or met an Indian. He hadn't, of course. And nor have 90 percent of Pakistanis. Very few Indians have ever visited Pakistan either.
There's the rub. Without knowledge, there can be no trust. Without trust, there can be no peace. Most Pakistanis think that the heavily Hindu government in New Delhi can't wait to send the tanks racing across the Thar desert to reverse the partition of 1947. For the Indians the Pakistanis sponsor violent attacks throughout their country and are implacably opposed to allowing their country to stabilise and develop. New Delhi sees Musharaf as a warmongering closet Islamic fundamentalist. Both sides are wrong of course. But that doesn't stop the fighting.
This is now the fifth year running I have covered this conflict. They were at it again in 2001 and have been doing it since the beginning of this year too.
Usually the face off comes in June as the snow on high passes that separate the two chunks of Kashmir - writing about the former kingdom is a semiotic nightmare, every phrase fraught with political connotations and hidden meanings - melts, allowing the militants assisting local insurgents in their guerilla war against the Indian army and security forces to cross from the Pakistani side into India.
If war is averted this time, is there anyway to stop the same thing next year? Possibly. Pakistan has pledged to end the inflitrations, though its ability to stop all attacks on Indian security forces, given that many are by local Kashmiris, may well be limited. The Indians need to give some ground too. Perhaps simply a reduction in security forces and the hideous human rights abuses they perpetrate would be enough.
There are local elections in Kashmir in September. If they are allowed by Delhi to be genuinely free and fair then some progess could be made towards defusing resentment in the state. Then Musharaf would have something to sell domestically and we could start looking for another step towards peace. In the longer term the international community needs to think more broadly than just about nukes and LoCs and insurgents.
The key obstacle to peace is a lack of trust, such as that manifested by my officer in his bunker. A start can be made by pressuring both states to open up more to each other, even on just a cultural level to start with. Economic agreements, possibly subsided by the international community, could follow.
Five years ago, covering this conflict was interesting. For a reporter, there were plenty of moments of excitement and intrigue. There were flights into combat zones on helicopters, clandestine meetings with militant Jihadis in safe houses in Pakistan and ridiculous meals on regimental silver served as shells clattered around the mess tent and shrapnel thumped on the canvas. Of course, there were also the terrible tales of civilian suffering that needed to be told. Now I am getting tired of it. Five face-offs in five years is surely enough. The world needs to care more about what is happening, again, in Kashmir. If every onlooker gets as jaundiced as I feel then we really are in trouble.
· Jason Burke is The Observer's Chief Reporter and has covered the Kashmir conflict. You can read a selection of his reporting on the terrorism crisis, including his regular online dispatches, on Observer Worldview's best of Jason Burke page.
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