Islamabad, Pakistan

Denial won"t do. in terms of global security, the Indo-Pak subcontinent is probably the most dangerous place on earth.

With a sixth of the world"s population living in an area roughly a third of the size of the United States, the region, dominated by a mostly Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India, is heating up under their adversarial shadow. The next war between these two rival states, estranged successors to the British Raj, looms under the ongoing tensions over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Forbiddingly, it could be nuclear.

What is the opposite of faith, asks Salman Rushdie. Not disbelief. That"s too absolute, too final. Itself a kind of belief. Something more. Doubt.

Such is the state of affairs here. The cultures of affinity between these two countries could hardly produce a more ironic reality. Millions of Indians and Pakistanis share family ties across the border. They"re passionate about the same cricket batsmen and movie stars, the same rock bands and wedding rituals. Homogeneity has no place in the subcontinent, contrary to what all the war-mongers may sell. Even military units, more than a million of whose soldiers are currently poised at the borders for war, have the same regimental slogans and tie-colors which they inherited from colonization.

Ideology is the basis of the conflict. Pakistan, founded a day before India on Aug. 14, 1947 as a homeland for the subcontinent"s Muslims, was built on the foundation of a million lives claimed by a bloody partition. Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja at the time, was given a choice to accede to either India or Pakistan, and opted for the former under circumstances which are disputed by the latter. Nonetheless, Kashmir is the "k" in Pakistan. The country was founded on the ideals of Muslim sovereignty and nationhood, and claims the state on that principle.

Meanwhile, a Muslim-majority Kashmir (the only such state in the union) is the last bastion of Indian secularity. That country gained independence on the grounds of Indian nationalism, where shared culture and geography matter, not religious affiliation. As The Economist recently put it, India"s "one nation" and Pakistan"s "two nation" ideologies form the core of this issue, and the battle between the two is as fierce and fundamental as that between communism and capitalism.

But what about the here and now. The current tension started escalating last Dec. 13 when armed militants (who India claims were Pakistan-backed) stormed the New Delhi parliament in a suicide attack that could have eliminated the Indian leadership but only claimed a few lives. After exchanging fierce rhetoric, the Indian leadership gave the orders to mobilize the military.

By the time I arrived a few days later, the Indians were mounting the largest troop movement on the international border since 1971, the last time the two countries had gone to war. My stepfather, an airline pilot, was worried about the prospects of his employer, the national flag-carrier PIA, all of whose flights over Indian airspace had been banned, crucially affecting revenue and jobs. My TV, usually brimming with Indian networks, was showing only local and Arab channels, for the Pakistani government had banned all cable service for Indian stations to stop the "propaganda": a claim, I have observed, that is not without merit.

In Islamabad and New Delhi, another sort of service was being disconnected. Embassy personnel were being recalled by the respective foreign ministries of the two countries. Rumors such as that the Indians were burning classified documents in their embassy entered my chat-rooms. That"s when it really started to seep in. Embassy personnel usually are withdrawn and documents are burned when countries go to war.

Thus, geo-political precedents set by Sept. 11 are being played out in a strange political snake dance in the subcontinent. The cause of Kashmiri liberation relies heavily on violence, some of which could probably be termed as terrorist. Pakistan, though a claimant of "moral and diplomatic" support to the struggle, has probably provided financing, training and refuge to active militant groups involved. Using Dec. 13 as its own Sept. 11, along with its own conventional force advantage, India"s government is now trying to coerce Pakistan into banning such groups, but not without the overarching aim of shutting down the uprising in Kashmir, whose intensity, death-toll and other logistics make it worthy of being called a revolution of sorts.

But there is already a revolution brewing in Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf, the self-appointed yet highly popular and praised Pakistani president, has responded to Indian guns and Western diplomacy by further clamping down on extremist-groups, a process he had started even before Sept. 11, but has had to accelerate the process due to current realities.