ABSTRACT
The India-Pakistan conflict in the South Asian region stands out as one of the world’s most intractable conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The conflict, which began in 1947, survived the cold war and continues to be intractable. While most regional protracted conflicts of the cold war period are still alive – such as the India-China conflict, the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict, conflict in the Korean Peninsula, or the China-Taiwan conflict – and none of them are likely to be terminated soon, the intractability of the India-Pakistan conflict received tremendous attention from the international community as a result of the introduction of nuclear weapons into the conflict region in the 1970s and India’s nuclear tests, followed by Pakistan’s in 1998, making the conflict intense and dangerous (as discussed in the next chapter). This chapter aims to present the India-Pakistan conflict, highlight its attributes to demonstrate its intractability, lay out the primary and subsidiary issues in contention, and show the phases of the conflict with a view to portraying its present state and why it seems to be at the stage of indefinite protraction.
