Obama must try seal a Kashmir deal during India visit: Former CIA official

When US President Barack Obama visits India in November he must secure a deal on Kashmir, which has the potential to spark off another Indo-Pak confrontation, a former top CIA official has said.

Bruce Riedel, senior fellow, foreign policy at the Brookings Institute wrote in an article that Obama's challenge would be to quietly help Islamabad and New Delhi work behind the scenes to get back to the deal negotiated between former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"Just as the war in Afghanistan is getting bloodier and Pakistan is drowning in floods, a new (yet old) battlefield is heating up in Kashmir. President Obama's strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan always needed a Kashmir component to succeed, that need is becoming more urgent and obvious now. His trip to India in November will be a key to addressing it," he wrote.

Posted on the website of Brookings Institute - a Washington-based think-tank - Riedel's article, however, said that an independent Kashmir is not in the offing as neither India nor Pakistan would ever accept that outcome.

For the US, Riedel said, reducing and resolving the India-Pakistan Cold War before it goes hot is critical to stability in South Asia, isolating the jihadi extremists and preventing a war in South Asia that could go nuclear.

The recent unrest in Kashmir "makes it imperative to get back to the back channel and finish the talks," he said.

"Pakistan has been trying to annex Kashmir since the hour it was born in 1947 and has long and established ties to many terrorist groups operating in the province like Lashkar-e -Tayyiba, the group that attacked Mumbai in 2008. India is determined to hold on to the part of Kashmir it won in the 1947-48 war at all costs," he said.

Referring to the recent unrest in the Kashmir Valley and the widescale protests witnessed there since June, he suggested that the reported solution reached between Musharraf and Singh after four years of back channel diplomacy could be the most viable one.

Riedel wrote accepting the "ceasefire line" or the LoC as the international border, and make it a "permeable" or porous border for Kashmiris, could be the viable solution.

"(Kashmiris) could move back and forth easily. Both countries' currencies would be valid on both sides of the line. The two parts of Kashmir... would handle local issues like tourism, sports, and the environment in joint shared institutions along the lines of how Ireland and Ulster work together now on all Northern Ireland issues," he said.

Riedel, however, noted that it was not yet clear whether the Pakistan government would be able to bring the powerful military chief on oboard for a deal, and noted that President Asif Zardari probably "is too weak to go alone".