WASHINGTON: While Americans are understandably preoccupied with events in Afghanistan, tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan have rapidly escalated. Should war break out, the conflict in Afghanistan could quickly become little more than an afterthought.

The immediate cause for the current crisis is the Dec 13 attack by terrorists on India’s parliament building that left 14 dead.

This outrage followed on the heels of an October suicide bombing of the Kashmir legislative assembly that took 38 lives. In both instances, India has blamed groups based in Pakistan, and accused Islamabad of clandestinely encouraging the attacks. President Pervez Musharraf condemned the attacks, but denied any involvement.

Since the attack on Parliament House, pressure in India has sharply risen for a forceful response - which could include air strikes or even action by ground forces - against training camps in Azad Kashmir. India has demanded that Pakistan shut down the terrorist groups.

Over the past week, the crisis has escalated. Both India and Pakistan have expelled the other’s diplomats. Plane, train, and bus service between the two countries has been stopped. Both armed forces are on heightened alert and have taken up positions along the border. Artillery duels across the line of control occur nearly every day.

Washington has denounced the attack on Parliament as a “brutal assault on Indian democracy” and has put the two key groups on its foreign terrorist list - a step India has long urged. New Delhi’s anguish raises difficult questions for the United States. President Bush has called for an all-out war on terrorism and the states that harbour terrorists.

Another war between India and Pakistan would be a disaster, especially for the people of South Asia. Such a conflict risks escalating into the nightmare scenario of the first use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Apart from this, Islamabad would hardly be able to continue to deploy large forces against Al Qaeda remnants fleeing from Afghanistan.

Other crucial US interests in regional stability, secure energy supplies, and maintaining good relations with India and Pakistan would also be badly impaired.

The dangers associated with lurching from crisis to crisis in South Asia are such that the Bush administration should intensify its preventive diplomacy.

Washington should counsel restraint on both India and Pakistan, without giving the impression of an evenhandedness that equates the victim and the perpetrator of terrorism.

The US should also encourage India to release the evidence it claims to possess linking the latest outrage to Pakistan-based groups.

It should also press India to give Musharraf time to put the lid on the Kashmiri groups, a politically more difficult task than ending his support for the Taliban.

America should also recognize that it no longer can pursue the passive approach to Kashmir we have followed for many years. After the present crisis is surmounted, the administration should use its better relations with both protagonists to encourage each to deal more seriously with the festering sore that is Kashmir.

Clearly, finding a solution to the Kashmir problem will be neither easy nor without costs. But it is a task we cannot avoid. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor