Transcript
STEPHEN COHEN: For many years, Kashmir was characterized as an insoluble, knotty problem, and I think it was Clinton who called it the flash point of World War III. That was the characterization during the Clinton Administration and earlier administrations because many of the India-Pakistan disputes revolved around Kashmir and in many cases people simply resolve the India-Pakistan rivalry into Kashmir. So Kashmir was seen as the center of all problems. As India and Pakistan went nuclear, that increased the stakes.
Dr. Behera Chadha has really taken another look at Kashmir, and I think has gone beneath the surface understanding of Kashmir in the way in which you peel away an onion and has discovered, as most of us have known in fact, that Kashmir is a many layered problem. It is not a simple problem, single problem. Therefore, the basis of this kind of analysis, solving Kashmir or even managing Kashmir requires many different approaches Kashmir.
I think one of the great contributions of this book, Demystifying Kashmir, this by the way is the Indian edition that has just been published. One of the great contributions of this book is the chapters on policy where she systematically goes through the alternatives and options for many of the participants in the dispute or players in the dispute -- the Kashmiris themselves of different sorts, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the United States, China and other countries. I think it is a tour de force, not only of analyzing Kashmir itself but also looking at the policy implications of this complex analysis of a very difficult problem.
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