The Historical Background of the 1965 Kashmir War: 1961-1964

Abstract

This working paper updates a research project focused on the incompatible objectives of the dyadic adversaries of the Second Kashmir War. The emphasis on actor goals has been compartmentalized into temporal phases in the research design. Identification of conflict phases proceeds from the point in time at which one of the protagonists overtly manifests a threat, unanticipated by the decision-makers of the dyadic adversary, that compromises the fundamental objectives of the latter and allows only a short time for a response. This unanticipated overt manifestation of a threat to basic objectives is taken as the conflict’s critical point. With regard to this project’s evaluation and analysis of the India-Pakistan conflict of 1965, the stipulated critical event has been identified as the crossing of the cease-fire line by Pakistani irregulars on 5 August of that year. Although primary attention is paid to actor objectives in the encompassing project, three intervening variables form constituent parts of the model: distance, polarization, and capabilities. Stipulated distance measures are: the geographical context; political and military distance, defined in terms of shared membership in regional institutions; economic distance, defined as the pattern of intra-dyad trade; cultural distance, defined in terms of the relative similarities with regard to the ethnic, religious, and linguistic compositions of their populations; and, historical distance, defined in terms of the nature of the political relationship between Pakistan and India since Partition. The text that follows provides an introduction to the 1965 Kashmir War via an application of the concept of distance to the India-Pakistan relationship during the years prior to the war. Analyses of polarization patterns and capabilities prior to, during, and following the war are the subject of other working papers. In a larger theoretical perspective these working papers on the Second Kashmir War can be situated within the systemism framework of conflict analysis, although with clear structural realist emphases when arriving at and articulating explanatory conclusions.