On April 22nd, in a scenic valley in the Western Himalayan mountains known for its breathtaking beauty, five armed men in military uniforms emerged from the pine forest, rounded up a group of tourists, forced the men to sit or kneel, asked each man his religion, and if the answer wasn’t Islam, killed him at point blank range, executing 26 unbelievers in all.
Then a group called Kashmir Resistance went on Telegram to take credit for the massacre.
According to Indian intelligence experts, Kashmir Resistance is a proxy, a sock puppet, for a Pakistani militant Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. And Lashkar-e-Taiba has been supported for thirty years by the government of, guess who? Pakistan.
In the early morning hours of May 7, India responded to the slaughter by attacking nine Pakistani border areas, killing 26 and injuring 46. Now Pakistan has authorized its military to counter-attack. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have been attacking each other with drones. And this military tit for tat could easily lead to nuclear war. Why?
The trigger for this mayhem was the territory in which it occurred, a 22-thousand-square-mile patch of land that both India and Pakistan claim: Jammu and Kashmir. A region bigger than the entire state of Maryland.
Why the dispute? When Pakistan split from India in 1947, both India and Pakistan claimed Jammu and Kashmir. In fact, back in the 1990s I corresponded several times with the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. He was Indian. India controls a whopping 55% of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan a more modest 35%, and China a wedge of 10%. And that has led to problems.
There have been three wars between Pakistan and India over Jammu and Kashmir since 1947. The current fight could become the fourth. But the Jammu and Kashmir problem is just one in a domino stack of bigger conflicts, conflicts that could plunge us into a nuclear war.
Both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. India has had the bomb since 1974 and now has roughly 160 nuclear weapons. Pakistan went nuclear in 1998 and has 170 nukes. Escalation could force India and Pakistan to use their nuclear arms.
Why could this lead to a nuclear war that goes global? Major wars happen when the leading power is weak and when the control seat at the center of the world order is up for grabs.
Ever since at least February, our current president has been removing us from our position of world leadership and creating a power vacuum. China is trying to slide into that power seat.
China’s closest sidekick in its attempt to become the world’s one indispensable nation is Russia. And Vladimir Putin on May 4th, announced that if he can’t convince the Ukrainians to stop defending themselves any other way, he might be forced to resort to nukes.
That might force France, Germany and the other NATO nations to use nuclear weapons to defend Eastern Europe from a Russian takeover.
Meanwhile, China is slowly but surely moving to invade Taiwan. Every week it ramps up its military exercises around Taiwan, deploying as many as 27 warships and 111 planes a day.
China is also the main supplier of weapons to guess who? Pakistan. On the other hand, the news media tells us that India is our ally. But that’s not exactly true. Yes, India’s leader Narendra Modi visited the White House on February 13th and even took a side trip to meet Elon Musk. But one of India’s allies is our enemy, Russia.
When India attacked the Pakistani sites where it said the Islamic militants were based, it used Russian and French jets, not jets from the United States.
As for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group whose proxy started this potential chain reaction with its slaughter of 26 Hindu tourists in Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani government claims that it had nothing to do with it.
But, according to 30 years of Indian intelligence, that’s not true. To repeat, the Pakistani military, the force that really runs Pakistan, has been supporting the Lashkar-e-Taiba for over thirty years.
But no matter who is to blame for that first slaughter in a West Himalayan valley, the growing war between Pakistan and India must stop.
References:
https://www.newsweek.com/pakistan-authorizes-military-avenge-india-strikes-2068978
https://time.com/7283585/pakistan-india-crisis-airstrikes
https://time.com/7283585/pakistan-india-crisis-airstrikes
https://www.trackingterrorism.org/group/resistance-front-trf
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/01/menace-that-is-lashkar-e-taiba-pub-47209
https://fas.org/publication/nuclear-notebook-india-2024/
https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-09/pakistan-nuclear-weapons-2023/
https://apnews.com/article/868bda4fc666ec3b05a1e512eca91b3c
https://hongkongfp.com/2025/04/01/china-holds-large-scale-military-drills-around-taiwan/
https://www.mei.edu/publications/pakistans-military-and-foreign-policy-under-gen-asim-munir
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2020/01/24/civil-military-relations-in-pakistan/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/05/pakistan-elections-military-nawaz-sharif-imran-khan/
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s next book, coming out any week now, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net orhttp://howardbloom.institute
