Procreation implies optimism. Mothers and fathers must believe that
society will provide a haven, an environment in which their children
will thrive. What does it say, then, if parents no longer have that
faith? If rather than raise their children themselves, parents would
send their beloved to far-flung corners of the world, anywhere,
really, to escape the carnage of Kashmir?

Dilshada and Zahoor Ahmed Sheikh faced that bleak reality when their
son Khalid was 16. Khalid was looking up to some dangerous role
models: a few older friends who had gone across the border to
Pakistan to join up with the anti-India insurgency raging in Kashmir.
He developed a schoolboy enthusiasm for AK-47s. Then Khalid announced
there was no point studying because, in his words, "Everyone is going
to die anyway." The couple had to make a decision. "We summoned up
our courage," says mother Dilshada, "and sent him away."

It was the best thing that could have happened to a young Kashmiri in
the 1990s. Ten years later, Khalid has a master's in business
administration from Ohio University and is planning to go back to the
U.S. for an additional degree, this one in finance. His friends who
stayed behind to study medicine or law don't have a hope of
practicing their professions: there are no jobs in Kashmir. Of his
ten closest schoolmates, four joined the militancy-at least one died
in action-and others left town. When Khalid returns for holidays, he
finds Kashmir stiflingly oppressive. Last month, he and his
49-year-old father were ordered out of their car by Indian soldiers
for a security check. "They were so rude, I couldn't believe my
father was being all soft and pleading, giving them explanations. But
he told me later: 'This is the way things are here.'"

To call Kashmir the subcontinent's West Bank or Gaza Strip would be a
stretch. The Kashmir Valley, the heart and soul of the territory, is
one of the earth's lovelier places. Many Kashmiris are poor, but no
one lives in 50-year-old refugee settlements. Unlike the
Palestinians, they have a homeland.

But it's a homeland more and more are abandoning because Kashmir is
where the tension between India and Pakistan always surfaces. Kashmir
is the biggest bit of unfinished business from the partition of the
subcontinent 53 years ago. Pakistan still believes it shouldn't have
gone to India, the Indians will probably never let it go, and both
sides are more than willing to fight over it-potentially with atomic
warheads. Two of the three wars fought between the two countries
started off in Kashmir. Since the beginning of the year, both have
mobilized their armies along their common border and kept them at
high alert, a state of war readiness prompted by a December terrorist
attack intended to blow up the Parliament building in New Delhi. And
last week, 30 people were killed by some fidayeen, a suicide squad
that sneaked in from Pakistan, setting off a fresh round of
accusations, the possible expulsion of Pakistan's ambassador from New
Delhi, and some heavy shelling at the Line of Control, the de facto
border that splits Kashmir.

Stuck in the middle, Kashmiris have either stolidly borne up, joined
the separatist militants, or been forced to find a decent life far
away from family, the mother tongue and the mountains, orchards and
idyllic lakes. "The militancy turned out to be a blessing for me,"
says Khalid. "If there had been no violence, I would have studied at
home and joined the family business." Khalid's family has a
substantial textile and carpet business. They could afford to buy
their son freedom.

Most other Kashmiris have no such luck. Their home is the disputed
prize in what may be the most dangerous conflict on earth. In the
early months of 1999, Pakistani soldiers took control of a mountain
ridge on the Indian side of the Line of Control. In the spring, when
they were discovered, that sparked the Kargil War, named for the
region where it was fought. Both sides had tested nukes a few months
earlier; last week in Washington, Bruce Riedel, senior director at
the National Security Council, revealed that the Pakistani army,
without informing its own government, had mobilized its nuclear
arsenal at the height of the conflict. Former U.S. President Clinton
persuaded then-Pakistani Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif to withdraw
his forces, ending what appears to be one of the closest brushes with
nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Last week, the countries went back to the brink. Shortly before dawn
on Tuesday, three men in army uniforms, who were later identified as
Pakistani citizens, boarded a Himachal Roadways passenger bus on its
way to Jammu, winter capital of India's Jammu and Kashmir state. On
board for 15 minutes, the men asked to be dropped off near an army
barracks. After the bus had stopped, the men ordered the sleepy
passengers to the back of the vehicle and opened fire. They tossed a
grenade into the bus full of screaming passengers, killing three
women, two children, one man and the bus driver.

Meanwhile, on the barracks grounds, parents were getting their
children ready for school, wrapping chapatis, polishing shoes and
knotting ties. The three men strolled into the compound and started
shooting and lobbing hand grenades. They trotted from house to house,
murdering mothers and their children. Indian troops arrived within
minutes but it would take over three hours to hunt the terrorists
down. By the time the army had finished the intruders off, 23 people
were dead, including 11 children.

Some hitherto unknown militant group claimed responsibility and India
immediately blamed its neighbor, announcing that a chocolate bar
carried by one of the terrorists was made in Pakistan. Islamabad, as
usual, denounced the carnage, denied complicity and added that India
had no real proof. It's a familiar pattern. Gruesome attacks against
Indian targets-frequently suicidal-have been a regular feature of the
Kashmir imbroglio for the past decade.

But the attack in Jammu was no ordinary strike at India. It occurred
the very day that a senior U.S. diplomat, Assistant Secretary of
State Christina Rocca, was in New Delhi trying to arm-twist some
peace. After the attack on Parliament in December, India went to war
footing, demanding that Pakistan crack down on its anti-India
terrorists-almost all of them working to stir trouble in Kashmir-and
demanded the extradition to India of 20 named terrorist suspects.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf ordered some militants
arrested-many of whom have been subsequently released-and refused to
extradite any of those on India's list. That's why the troops are
still eyeballing each other on a searingly hot border. India has
signaled for months it might launch its own strike on Pakistan,
probably in Kashmir. The most likely impetus: another outrageous,
high profile terrorist strike.

In fact, India probably won't be goaded into military action by a
well-timed terrorist attack. State elections are due by October in
Kashmir, and New Delhi has hopes that they will take some steam out
of the indigenous militancy. Many of the candidates are former
insurgents won over by the government. (India's time-honored method
of defusing insurgencies is to woo tired separatists to run for
election, after which they can get their hands on loosely-watched
government coffers.)

Once the elections are over, however, all bets are off as to whether
the peace will hold. Pakistani-based separatists will filter across
the Line of Control all through the summer. Then the attacks,
ambushes and suicide missions will start. The talk in New Delhi these
days is of some kind of war in September or October. It's pretty
clear where it will start: Kashmir.

After 13 years of such violent tides, Kashmir's children are all over
the map-some literally, others in the myriad ways they view their
home and the possible futures it holds for them. Moulvi Imran Mushtaq
decided to stay. He was ambitious, with dreams of becoming a doctor,
and worked hard to win admission to Srinagar's Government Medical
College. Violence, however, shut down his school for long periods;
Moulvi's four and a half year curriculum took seven years to
complete. "It was full of risk sending him to college," says his
father Moulvi Mushtaq Ahmed. Avoiding an ambush was one challenge. He
also had to be wary of being picked up by Indian troops as a
suspected militant and tossed in one of the valley's
detention/torture centers. Imran, 27, avoided both fates and actually
got a job at the state health department.

Muhammed Amin Butt, a Srinagar lawyer, says he could barely afford to
send his son Omar away for education. However, the worried attorney
believes he really had no choice. "Kashmir was politically too hot
and everybody's life was at peril. Secondly, the educational system
had been cast to the dogs." Omar went to Kolhapur and earned an
engineering degree and then came home to Srinagar, but has failed to
find work. (Virtually the only employers in Kashmir are the state
government, the despised police force and the carpet weavers and
handicraft factories.) Omar is wondering whether to leave home
again-the U.S.? the Middle East?-and his mother Hafiza is encouraging
him, still frightened at tales of revenge killings and boys being
tossed into Indian jails. "Kashmir is still not a place worth
living," she says, "particularly for boys of his age."

Kashmiris are a people in-between, stuck in the vise of a vicious,
intractable geopolitical mess, and even when they leave, their fate
sometimes follows. Syed Shahnaaz Qadiri decided to move out of
Kashmir four years ago. His choice was to go to another state, where
the school years start and end on time and students aren't afraid to
walk to class. But Qadiri is a Kashmiri Muslim. He chose a college
near Ahmadabad, the main city in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
Two months ago, a mob of Muslims torched a train carriage near
Ahmadabad, killing 58 Hindus. In the aftermath, nearly a thousand
Muslims have been killed in reprisals that fail to simmer down.
Qadiri's parents are spending a fortune trying to keep in touch with
their son by phone, hoping he won't be the next victim. Qadiri had
the luck of the Kashmiris: he found the only other place on the
subcontinent as dangerous as his own hometown.