Summary: As South Asia reels from its gravest military crisis in decades, reducing Kashmir to an “unfixable” problem, as argued by Lisa Curtis in Foreign Affairs, is both factually incorrect and strategically dangerous. This article challenges the notion that crisis management can substitute for dispute resolution. It highlights the legal, historical, and geopolitical urgency of addressing Kashmir’s unresolved status, warns against the weaponization of water, and critiques selective international silence on Indian adventurism. For enduring peace, diplomacy must tackle causes, not just consequences. Kashmir isn’t unresolvable; it is simply uncomfortable for those unwilling to confront inconvenient truths.
The Illusion of Strategic Stability
As South Asia emerges from its gravest military escalation in decades, the external mediation that contributed to fragile calm is being misconstrued in some Western quarters as good enough. Crisis management is being projected as evidence of enduring strategic stability. That is a dangerous misreading. The latest crisis, triggered by a deadly incident in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IIOJK) and escalated through missile exchanges and cross-border strikes, was not a case study in achieving strategic stability through crisis management. Pakistan called it a false flag operation, asking for an impartial international investigation in to the incident and condemned the act. The unidentified perpetrators are still at large. The latest crisis was a vivid illustration of how brittle deterrence becomes in the absence of underlying dispute resolution. Political theatre is being mistaken for policy, and legality is being replaced by narrative control.
In Foreign Affairs, former U.S. official Lisa Curtis asserts that the Kashmir dispute is “unfixable,” and that U.S. diplomacy should focus on crisis management rather than dispute resolution. Such thinking reflects not realism but resignation and risks hardening a cycle of provocation, impunity, and denial that imperils long-term peace.
When Convenience Replaces Law
To argue that Kashmir is beyond resolution is to deny both precedent and principle. From Bosnia to Northern Ireland, the United States has previously demonstrated that sustained diplomacy, not fatalism, unlocks intractable conflicts. The problem in Kashmir is not impossibility; it is discomfort. It requires confronting uncomfortable truths: that Kashmir is internationally recognized as a disputed territory; that its people have the right to self-determination under multiple UN Security Council resolutions; and that attempts to subsume the issue under a counterterrorism lens erase its legal and political dimensions.
Selective memory also obscures the real arc of the crisis. Curtis invokes familiar tropes of Pakistan-based militancy but ignores India’s recent pattern of doctrinal adventurism: launching standoff strikes without international verification, targeting civilian infrastructure, and using crises to advance revisionist narratives. These are not hypotheticals. India’s support to groups like the Balochistan Liberation Army has been publicly referenced. Likewise, key political figures, such as former U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have acknowledged that India has at times sought to create instability inside Pakistan. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also admitted that “the people we are fighting today, we funded them,” referring broadly to the U.S.-backed militant networks during the Cold War. The roots of terrorism in the region are complex and externally seeded. While Pakistan has waged an extensive campaign to combat terrorism, India has tactfully sought to run with the hare, waging terrorism within Pakistan, while hunting with the hounds by leveraging global counterterrorism narratives. It has used post 9/11 sentiment to equate indigenous freedom struggle in IIOJK with terrorism
Terrorism Cannot Be a One-Sided Lens
Curtis’s analysis reduces a multidimensional dispute to a one-sided moral ledger. It is strategically myopic to assume that all acts of terrorism in the region emanate from Pakistan, and that India remains a passive, perpetually aggrieved party. The logic is circular: Pakistan is blamed for escalation, India is affirmed in retaliating unilaterally, and when that retaliation risks war, Washington steps in, not to interrogate the logic, but to contain the consequences.
But what is left unaddressed returns stronger. Narratives of restraint must not be selective. Pakistan’s response in the recent crisis — under Operation Bunyanum Marsoos — was demonstrably calibrated. Military targets were engaged, escalation thresholds were carefully managed, and diplomatic outreach was launched across global capitals.
The Weaponization of Water
One of the most dangerous developments in this crisis — largely overlooked in Curtis’s piece — is India’s illegal suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). Brokered by the World Bank and functional since 1960, the IWT is one of the world’s most successful conflict-avoidance frameworks. That India has unilaterally placed it “in abeyance” marks a direct threat to international legal order.
World Bank President Ajay Banga recently affirmed that no side can unilaterally alter or exit the treaty without mutual consent. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister asserted that India’s move constitutes a violation of international obligation. Former World Bank official and Harvard professor John Briscoe had long warned that India’s upstream infrastructure and dam-filling practices gave it coercive capacity to manipulate water timing during Pakistan’s sowing seasons, an existential vulnerability for a downstream state.
Weaponizing water as part of strategic statecraft not only breaches the treaty’s spirit; it risks normalizing hybrid coercion in a region already sitting atop nuclear fault lines. It also sets a dangerous precedent. India is not an upper riparian in all its water basins and is vulnerable to the uppermost riparian that holds the cards on rivers feeding northeastern India. By undermining IWT norms today, India risks inviting the same logic from others tomorrow.
Legal Principles Matter — Even in South Asia
International law is not a menu. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions affirms the right of peoples under foreign occupation to resist, a principle squarely applicable to Kashmir. The notion that counterterrorism claims can nullify these provisions is not just dangerous; it is an open invitation for global disorder. If we seek a rules-based order across the globe, selectively ignoring it in Kashmir is unpardonable.
The Moral Cost of Strategic Myopia
The assumption that U.S. credibility in South Asia rests solely on its ties with India is misleading. Stability cannot emerge from imbalance. By normalizing Indian escalation and insulating it from scrutiny, Washington becomes complicit in a narrative that undermines its own principles. Strategic partnerships should not come at the cost of strategic honesty.
Fixing What’s Been Denied
The recent crisis was defused, inter alia, because deterrence worked, as witnessed in Pakistan’s conventional discipline, calibrated signaling, and diplomatic maturity. But this model may not hold indefinitely. Each managed crisis buys less time and breeds more uncertainty. Denying space for resolution, as Curtis’s argument does, means denying the world the chance to break this loop. Kashmir is not unfixable. It is simply uncomfortable for those unwilling to challenge selective narratives.
Diplomacy, Not Denial
Crises may pass. But unless root causes are addressed, consequences will return. If Washington wants to lead in Asia, it must lead by principle, not preferences suggested by old schools of thought. Managing crises while ignoring their causes is not strategy; it is abdication.
South Asia deserves a future not trapped in reaction, but built on resolution. That future requires courage, not just to talk about peace, but to fix what has long been denied. Pakistan has the strategic patience to cut or untie the Gordian Knot of Kashmir.
Author
The author is Arms Control Advisor at SPD. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at:
