Of Stanley Wolpert's India And Pakistan Continued Conflict And Cooperation?

Stanley Wolpert is an American academic, Indologist and author who is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan. Wolpert has written many fiction and nonfiction books on the topic and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1959-2002.

In his book “India and Pakistan – Continued Conflict and Cooperation?”, Wolpert gives his latest analysis by briefly tracing the history of the conflict and by emphasizing on the issue of Kashmir for which, after more than six decades, there is no solution in sight. He also mentions the various national and international initiatives to solve this conflict and explains why these initiatives have always failed. The most realistic and pragmatic solution to the problem, according to Wolpert, is for Pakistan and India to agree on the current Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir as International border, because he believes that no attempt to hand over

until recent days. The author says that “when the Soviet tanks and troops moved into Kabul” (Wolpert 2010) and placed their puppet Amir Babrak Karmal as a ruler it was an act that alarmed the U.S. and Islamabad. But India, on the other hand, was ambivalent because of a signed “treaty of friendship with Moscow” (Wolpert 2010). After the Soviet invasion, Pakistan’s Zia, who was a fundamentalist Muslim, welcomed the four million Afghan refugees that came to Pakistan and procured them with food, shelter and arms from Islamabad’s leaders with the massive U.S. military aid and money. India knew that all these arms were aimed “to do as much damage as they possibly could to Indian Kashmir.” (Wolpert 2010) This action was of course considered as part of the Cold War that was ongoing between the U.S. and the