Journalist Myra MacDonald joins Milan this week to discuss here new book, "White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir."
The contested borders between India, China, and Pakistan render the Himalayas one of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical flashpoints in the year 2021. A new book by the journalist Myra MacDonald, White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir, takes readers inside the long-simmering conflict over the Siachen glacier—one of the most obscure and forbidding battlegrounds in the world.
Myra joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk about her new book and its larger implications for regional and global politics. The two discuss Myra’s lifelong passion for India/South Asia, the origins of India and Pakistan’s decades-long battle for Siachen, and the toll war at 20,000 feet takes on soldiers from both sides. Plus, Myra reflects on how the Modi government’s August 2019 abrogation of Article 370in Jammu and Kashmir has impacted relations with both China and Pakistan.
Episode notes:
Milan 00:11
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. The contested borders between India, China, and Pakistan have rendered the Himalayas one of the world's most dangerous geopolitical flashpoints in the year 2021. The ongoing dispute between China and India and between India and Pakistan have complicated historical and geographic roots. A new book by the journalist Myra MacDonald, White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan, and the War on the Frontiers of Kashmir, takes readers inside the long-simmering conflict over the Siachen Glacier, one of the most obscure and forbidding battlegrounds in the world. To talk about the book and its larger implications for global politics, Myra joins me on the podcast today from her home in Scotland. Myra, welcome to the show.
Myra 00:56
Good morning.
Milan 00:57
So, Myra, you were a journalist with Reuters for decades. I think many of our listeners are familiar with your journalism and reportage – you've covered Europe, you've covered the Middle East, and of course you've covered South Asia. Judging by your passion, by your multiple books out, Asia clearly has kind of captured your imagination. I'm wondering, before we kind of get into the book itself, could you reflect for a second on what it is about that region that has grabbed you and resulted now in multiple books?
Myra 01:26
Yeah, it's an interesting question, because anyone who does get the India bug tends to just look at you and say, “Okay, it happened to you, too.” And nobody ever really articulates why – it's just simply the India bug. I guess if I were trying to articulate it, I would say the sheer energy and diversity of its politics. I mean, there is always something new to argue about, sometimes trivial and sometimes quite, quite deep. Also, the sheer diversity of the landscape – I was lucky enough to travel a lot in India, both in rural hinterland and the mountains. And I suppose the final thing that grips me is, I've always tended to be interested in the periphery of wherever I've worked – I think that comes from being Scottish – so I'm interested in how countries look as seen from the periphery rather than the capital city. So, clearly, that drew me toward India's borders generally, but then particularly Kashmir: erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir and the princely state. That kind of matched both my fascination with South Asia and my interest in borders and peripheries.
Milan 02:48
Back in 2007, you published a book called Heights of Madness: One Woman's Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War, and in that book, you delved into this conflict between India and Pakistan over this Siachen Glacier. We're going to talk a bit more about the geography in a second, but I'm wondering, what led you to revisit this question of this conflict with your new book, White as the Shroud?
Myra 03:11
I mean, part of it was that when I first started researching that book, I was relatively new to India, and I felt that my original version was a bit tail-waggingly enthusiastic and doesn't necessarily reflect me as I am now having spent nearly two decades reporting and writing about India and Pakistan. So, I wanted to kind of get the tone a bit better in terms of how I expressed myself. But I also wanted to take it a bit further: rather than merely narrowly focusing on the Siachen War, I wanted to look at it much more broadly in terms of both the Line of Control between India and Pakistan and the contested frontier between India and China. Because I think Siachen as a standalone is in itself already fascinating, but I do think it carries a lot of important lessons for the nature of high-altitude conflict in those mountains.
Milan 04:22
So, before we get into the nature of the conflict, one of the great things about the book is that you recount in great detail your travels both to the Indian and Pakistani sides of the glacier. And you are one of the very few international observers to have visited both sides of that very remote conflict zone. I'm wondering, given that most of our listeners have probably never been there, could you paint a picture of the terrain that we're talking about? What is it that you experienced when you were on both sides of that glacier?
Myra 04:55
I guess the first thing I would say is that these are the highest mountains in the world. You have to imagine it as being an incredibly vast and crumpled, jagged landscape, most of it covered with vast seas of sheer white snow and ice. And then, of course, you get glaciers' scarring down the valleys on either side of the mountain ridge. I guess what's very important in terms of the Siachen War is that, in my mind's eye – and I still do this as a shortcut – I refer to it as the world's coldest, highest battlefield, but I think that's actually a bit misleading, because you tend to think of a battlefield in the conventional sense of two armies kind of matched up against each other, whereas [here,] you're looking at just hours and hours' or even days' journey on foot between one isolated post and another. You'll have one little mountain ridge with a little post with just eight soldiers on it, and they may be days' walk away, given that it takes – something that you could do in three hours in the plains would take you three days to walk in that landscape. So, what you're looking at is this huge expanse of land, and if you fly over it by helicopter, it's extraordinary to see how tiny the posts are – just absolutely dwarfed by the landscape. And very often, since there was a ceasefire when I was there, everything is kind of blanketed in snow to the point where they look as so they're actually sinking into the snow. And I could go on about this at length, but perhaps one last image worth considering – it's very striking – is that you get these pillars because, if you've got a hut over snow and the snow underneath doesn't melt so much, gradually that gets higher and higher until you end up with huts sort of stuck atop a snow pillar, marooned there, still dwarfed by the landscape.
Milan 07:25
You describe your persistent efforts to persuade the militaries on both sides to give you access to this very obscure battleground. I think any researcher has to appreciate your doggedness. In the Indian case, you recall how the army would regularly say, “Yes, no problem,” only to repeatedly fail to deliver on its promise of allowing you to travel there. In the end, I'm wondering, how did you convince these two governments to give you access to a site that very few people have been allowed to see?
Myra 07:59
Well, you know, I'd like to claim that entirely came down to my persistence, and I was persistent, but I have to say, probably more had to do with having both very good friends and staff in the office – I was bureau chief at the time – who were able to help me. I mean, a foreigner is not going to be able to do that without Indians who've got their own friends in the army, who are able to pull strings to get you into the right office. So, I guess the only thing is that, ultimately, everybody always knows someone who can help you. And then, obviously, on the Pakistan side, once I'd been on the Indian side, then obviously Pakistan was far more willing to take me on their side as well.
Milan 08:52
Because they wanted their narrative to be heard if you'd already heard the Indian narrative? Is that what you think their calculation was?
Myra 08:59
Yes. And I think Pakistan generally tends to be a bit better about foreign journalists. I mean, they have a rather slicker PR operation. And so they're more comfortable with taking you on army trips than the Indian Army is. I mean, it's important to stress that these are army-organized trips. You don't do independent reporting – you're shepherded around. But it is definitely something that Pakistan does far more frequently than the Indian Army. So, I think the harder one to crack was the Indian side.
Milan 09:41
You write in the book that even after India and Pakistan fought their first war in Kashmir in 1947 to 1948, Siachen had “been ignored for decades,” and that for a long time, it was sort of considered too hostile to be really of any use to anyone. I know this is sort of a big question, but in a nutshell, what changed over the years to turn this glacier into such a flashpoint? It went from obscurity to almost ground zero.
Myra 10:12
Well, to my mind, one of the most important lessons of the Siachen War is that it was all a bit of an accident. I mean, it really started when Pakistan started in the seventies authorizing foreign mountaineers to explore – it opened up the mountains generally to foreign mountaineers. I don't believe that it had any malicious intent; I think that it made good foreign exchange by selling climate permits. India then decided – or the Indian Army decided – that since Pakistan was sending people in, the Indian military engineers wanted to go and have a look themselves about what was going on. I've recounted in my books the story of the first Indian expedition to Siachen in 1978 – there was nothing there that suggests that they intended this to become a flashpoint.
And so what really happened was a kind of drift: India sent its military mountaineers in just to explore, and Pakistan then got worried about India being there, so it sent military patrols in to check what the Indians were doing. India then sends its own military patrols, and it really escalated. Well, actually, escalated is too strong a word because it [didn’t drift that much] until 1984, when India then decided to send troops in the summer of April 1984 – just, in a way, a show of force – to occupy the mountain passes overlooking the glacier there. And then Pakistan sent its own troops up. And then they both started digging in and spreading out. But, I mean, I have not found anything in any of my interviews in either India or Pakistan that suggests that either country, if you go right back to the beginning in the late seventies and early eighties, ever envisaged this turning into a long-running war – and indeed a place where there is no ceasefire, as you know, a place where they still have to post troops, and not only in the summer, but through the winter. So, I guess my broader point, and a point I do stress frequently in the book, is that one of the great values of Siachen is to understand how easily things escalate in these mountains to become far bigger than was ever intended in the first place.
Milan 13:06
I mean, it's a pretty ominous warning in light of what's happening on the other border along the Line of Actual Control between India and China. And we'll come back to that. But, speaking of the accidental nature of the conflict, there was one particular anecdote I thought was totally fascinating in your book where you point out, almost in passing, that there was an erroneous US military map – produced, I think, by the Defense Mapping Agency – which may have played a role in allowing these two countries to sort of drift into fighting a war. Can you tell us a bit more about the role that this map may have played?
Myra 13:38
So, there's a lot of stories about this map, and my best understanding of it is that it originated with the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency and was then copied by other foreign maps and Pakistani maps. But just to kind of take a step back – when the Line of Control dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan was first agreed to, it stopped in the middle of nowhere, map grid reference NJ9842, because beyond that, you really are into uninhabitable terrain. And their view was, right up until the seventies, that the Line of Control would stop there. And then according to a treaty in 1949, the wording had said the Line of Control would continue “thence north to the glaciers.”
Now, nobody ever really thought there was a need to have of any kind of clear definition of that because nobody intended to occupy that land. But you can interpret that “thence north to the glaciers” in two ways. One, you can carry on roughly in the same direction that it's going in, and then you carry on northeast to the Karakoram Pass, which is the main landmark on that segment of the mountains. And if you were to do that, that would put most of the Siachen Glacier in Pakistani hands. The other way to do it – and this is the way that India says it should have been done – is that you follow the topography. So, the Line of Control would then have bent around northwest along the watershed of the Saltoro Ridge, which is what forms the one flank of the Siachen Glacier.
Now, as far as I can tell, you could probably make arguments both ways. Neither is directly north – one is northwest, one is northeast. But, again, that would never really have mattered, except that those maps started floating around in the seventies at the same time as Pakistan had opened up the mountains, including the mountains around Siachen, to foreign mountaineers. So, you've suddenly got this, again, I would say very unfortunate coincidence that these maps start floating around and the foreign mountaineers are coming in, which makes it look like Pakistan is trying to stake a claim on the Siachen Glacier.
At the same time, because Siachen lies at the point where India, Pakistan and China meet, it's important not to forget that one reason why India was worried about Siachen was because of the scars of the 1962 War, and the notion that it hadn't really been alert quickly enough in the run-up to the '62 War meant that it remained worried about not being alert in what was happening in Siachen. And it probably led India to overreact to the maps and the mountaineers.
Milan 17:25
You know, one of the things that comes through so clearly in your book is the toll that this conflict takes on the people who are on the front lines. At one point, you speak with a former Indian Army officer who says of the glacier, “I've seen lots of men go up and down. It's a living hell. Anybody who goes there is not sure he's going to come back.” And in addition to, of course, the harsh weather conditions, you highlight throughout the book the mental and psychological strain on soldiers who are stationed at these very remote posts in these high altitudes, and you make the case that the altitude really attacks you psychologically as much as it did physically. Tell us a little bit about those psychological impacts. What impacts does battle at 20,000 feet have on the mental conditions of soldiers who are fighting the fight?
Myra 18:17
Well, I think I would separate it into two things, because on the one hand, there's the actual fighting of battles, and then on the other is the sheer survival of being posted there. As you will hear, in many conflicts, what the soldiers most complain about is actually the monotony between the battles because you're basically stuck on a post with very little to do. You see the same eight faces day in and day out. You have no distractions, it's all white – people complain about the sensory deprivation because there's not even a tree there. The only color you see is white.
So, there's the kind of monotony and boredom and sensory deprivation that then goes along with the physical effects of altitude. It's hard to eat at high altitude, so the soldiers waste away, and the body ends up starting to feed on itself in order to survive. If you're not eating enough, you get dehydrated. Even the smallest of things – I've heard of someone who died of a toothache that went wrong. So, you'll get the very big illnesses like high altitude sickness and frostbite, but just about anything that you can imagine – a small nick on a finger might end up causing huge amounts of grief at that kind of altitude. So, you're suffering from the combination of mental monotony, really, and something that's very grueling physically.
Now, I'd like to come onto the fighting, which is rather different. It's perhaps important to remember that in any kind of fighting in those mountains, it's generally driven by artillery fire. Our stories of those battles in the popular image tend to focus on the hand-to-hand fighting, but the thing that really does drive it is artillery directed from below. For the men up on top, it is certainly grueling because there's a very big risk that some of them, especially if they've been brought in too quickly, will get altitude sickness. And they'll often end up vomiting if they've been brought in too quickly. There may be one particular battle at 21,000 feet where you're getting to the point where it is so cold that the rifles are jamming in the cold and so high that you're lumbering – you can't run, you're lumbering.
I suppose it's more common for soldiers to know this, but for me, as a civilian, I was kind of shocked that they use bayonets at 21,000 feet, because the idea of getting so close to someone – but you can't actually run at that height anyway – and killing each other with bayonets? As a civilian, it seems to me very shocking. Although I would have to say that from a soldier's perspective, their real risk of wounds and injuries will come from artillery. That’s actually the real danger to them.
Milan 22:10
One of the most remarkable things of the recent flare-up over the past one year or so between the Chinese and Indian forces is that the initial dust-up which took place was fist-to-fist combat. There were allegations that the Indian side made that the Chinese soldiers had batons with nails attached to the end of them. I mean, it was really sort of medieval, primitive stuff, because the protocol has been not to use combat weapons, guns and other things, to fight one another.
Myra 22:45
I mean, obviously, the protocol is different on the India-China frontier than in Siachen, where they do use guns. But, yes, the one thing that is in common that you're picking up on is the primitive nature of that final hand-to-hand combat, which is still extraordinary when you're thinking of the fact that you are dealing with, in the case of India, Pakistan, and China, modern nuclear-armed powers that are either fighting each other with sticks and stones or with knives and bayonets. I think it's also worth pointing out that among the Indian soldiers who died, some of them had fallen into the river and died of exposure, probably because help did not reach them in time. So, that really shows you the extent to which it's the landscape and the terrain and the remoteness that is killing soldiers in that part of the world rather than actual fighting.
Milan 23:55
Before coming back to the present moment, I want to ask you one more question about the past, which is about the 1990s. In the wake of the twin nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, you write, both countries actually appeared to be – and this has now been pretty well-documented – on the verge of pretty serious peace talks. That hope was derailed by Pakistan's decision to attack Indian supply lines to Siachen, prompting what's now known as the Kargil War in which Pakistan, I think it's fair to say, suffered a pretty humiliating defeat. What transpired during that time to turn a potential pivot for good, for peace, into a further cycle of violence and recrimination between these two countries?
Myra 24:41
Probably a first point that's important to make is that the peace talks were between the Pakistani civilian government, then led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Indian government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Pervez Musharraf was the Army Chief at the time and was not enthusiastic about the peace talks in the first place, and there's a kind of theory in India that Musharraf, who was the architect of the Kargil War, deliberately launched the Kargil War to sabotage the peace talks. I'm not entirely convinced of that, myself. Musharraf famously has said that he thinks the Indians would negotiate better under pressure, and that was very misguided of him, but I don't think – if his intention was to put pressure on India to negotiate better, then it wasn't to sabotage the peace process but actually to get more concessions out of it there.
Now, the final thing I would say, and I have a slightly controversial view on this, is – I'm very critical of Pakistan on a lot of things, but the one area where I think it gets a little bit too much flak is over Kargil. I mean, yes, I think it was overreach. Yes, I think its timing was terrible – it was less than a year after the nuclear tests. But I would say some kind of mitigation of the Pakistani action is that India had gone into Siachen in April '84 and basically caught everybody by surprise. The Siachen front line had then expanded and expanded all the way to nearly touch the Line of Control. At that point, by the time the Kargil War started, there wasn't really such a clear distinction between the Siachen War and the Line of Control around the Kargil Area. So, there was an element in which I would not have been shocked by a certain amount of tactical maneuvering by Pakistan around that segment of the Line of Control.
What then happened is, there seems to have been a certain amount of mission creep – again, a lot of overreach – and their troops went far too far across the Line of Control. And obviously, the outside world, not knowing that part of the world at all, was clearly horrified, but I don't think it was ever quite such a thought-through strategic step taken by Pakistan – I think it was more a rather muddled tactical move that kind of matched a lot of the rather muddled tactical stuff that was happening in Siachen as well.
The difference, of course, it has to be said, is that in Siachen no line had ever been agreed to. Pakistan crossed the officially agreed and bilaterally agreed Line of Control. But so did India, occasionally, as well. I mean, we shouldn't be naive and think that either side doesn't see where they can get tactical advantages in those mountains. And no side is completely innocent. So, I see Kargil more as a mixture of, on the Pakistan side, a sort of blunder, tactical overreach, and not even really much of a strategy. And I'm sure they did get very taken aback at the strength of the international reaction.
Milan 29:13
Now, one of the things you touch upon toward the end of the book – and it's really one of the big takeaways for me – is about the nature of borders and the evolution of borders. You have this line, I just want to read it out, where you say, “It's become more important than ever to question the very idea of seeking fixed linear and militarized borders in the region. These are, after all, a relatively recent development.” Is there any chance that the two countries will ever acknowledge this reality that, in fact, perfect demarcation in the modern sense of mapmaking and border-making is not fit for this circumstance?
Myra 30:07
Well, let's take a step back. I think that the British get blamed for a lot in South Asia, and often with good cause, but one thing I thought they were actually quite smart about – or some of them were being quite pragmatic and ruthless about – was borders there. They never tried to defend every inch of land. It was actually considered in the interests of the defense of British India that those mountains should be left alone and as undeveloped as they were. The British never bothered to build really good roads up to the frontier because the mountains themselves would slow down any invasion for us. And then it's only really since the wild departure of the British and the end of British hegemony that you saw this idea develop of the need to defend every inch of land.
Now, I'm not meaning to be all sort of idealistic and persnickety about this here, but what I'm trying to say is, if you were absolutely ruthless about your own defense, you would not choose to have an aim of defending every inch of land because that territory is far too vast to be able to do so. So, your only option is to have men in isolated posts strung out for miles, and inevitably that will expand, because for every post you set up, you need to set up another post that can protect its flanks, or one that's higher up that can over overlook it. You are never ever going to succeed if your ultimate aim is to defend every inch of land. So, I guess what I'm trying to argue is that your ultimate aim should be – and I guess here I'm looking at it more from the Indian perspective, but it does apply a little bit to Pakistan and China – your aim should be, how do I best achieve the defense of my frontiers?
And to my mind, you don't best achieve your defense of your frontiers by constantly pushing out and trying to kind of cover every inch. You assure the defense of your frontiers by actually pulling back a bit and leaving yourself enough of a buffer zone to not only give yourself a buffer zone, but actually make sure that you've identified defensible positions. The clash last year between India and China was over a mountain ledge that was never ever defensible in the Indian terms. I mean, you can look – I haven't been there, sadly – but if you try Google Images or Google Earth and try and look at that terrain, you can see quite clearly that in the event of a war, India would not have been able to defend it. So, I guess what I'm saying is you really need to take a big step back and say, “Not what we care about in terms of nationalism, in terms of national pride, but what most ruthlessly and pragmatically provides the best security.”
And then, just to kind of expand from there – I mean, we all know the nature of warfare is changing all the time quite rapidly. Certainly, compared to when I first started covering Siachen, or when that war first started, you're now seeing the importance of far more mobility – you're not looking at defending fixed positions, you're looking at mobile forces. You have drones, you have surveillance satellites to see where troops are, you've got precision munitions to target those troops. Every single rule of high-altitude warfare, the whole rulebook has been torn up and rewritten because the idea that you have to occupy the heights so that you can see what's going on doesn't really make sense when the other side can send a satellite over and see what's going on and then target you with precision munitions. So, I think my view is not one of idealism, but it's one of saying, how do we ruthlessly and pragmatically achieve security? And how do you do that in the context of a vastly different nature of modern warfare from the one that existed when these kind of maneuvers in the mountains first started?
Milan 35:29
Myra, in a previous episode of the podcast – and maybe this is a good place to conclude – my Carnegie colleague Ashley Tellis drew a link between India's August 2019 decision to abrogate Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir and Chinese aggression along the Line of Actual Control. And Ashley's argument is that the Chinese fundamentally misinterpreted what was a purely domestic decision by the Modi government as a sign of some newfound Indian border revisionism. I'm wondering if you could maybe reflect on what impact the events of August 2019 have had both on India's relationships with China as well as Pakistan. How do things look different post-August 2019?
Myra 36:29
I mean, I absolutely agree it had an impact on the India-China side. [On the] India-Pakistan [side], it had less of a short-term impact than you might have imagined. Pakistan's reaction has been quite muted. I think, however, the decision to eventually essentially bifurcate the state by separating out Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir essentially put paid to any kind of long-term project to achieve some kind of peace settlement within the context of the entirety of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
But the point that I think is crucial – I thought, right back then, that the one to watch was China, the one to watch was always Ladakh. It was never entirely clear to me what the Indian government achieved by separating Ladakh from the rest of Jammu and Kashmir. It undermined its longstanding position that the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir, both the Indian and Pakistani side, should belong to India, and rightfully belonged to India following the Accession in 1947. So, to explain why they separated out Ladakh, you would have to at least consider the possibility that India wanted to build up Ladakh, and you're primarily building up Ladakh against China. That's where it's got the really sensitive, contested frontiers.
So, I'm not entirely surprised that China [thought that] – I mean, I had the same thought myself, and I'm not sort of leaning toward China in any way there. I thought that independently. By far the most sensitive part of that area is the Line of Actual Control, [which is] why we saw that fighting last year, I think. On top of that, you saw ministers at the time from the government reasserting India's claim to Gilgit-Baltistan – that's on the other side of the Line of Control – and one minister going as far as to say – I think it was in September, so just a month after the abrogation of Article 370 – that India was going to reclaim Gilgit-Baltistan. Now, Gilgit-Baltistan is the main land bridge between China and Pakistan. The Karakoram Highway linking Pakistan to China goes through Gilgit, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs through there. So, on both fronts: you had been appearing to build up Ladakh against China and you had the Indian government appearing to threaten Pakistan's grip on Gilgit-Baltistan. It sort of struck me as reasonably likely that China would react in some way.
The other thing, of course, you need to remember is that it roughly coincided with the completion of a new road on the Indian side that runs right up to the Daulat Beg Oldie, which is right up near the Karakoram Pass. Now, the only aim of that road is for India to get troops faster to the contested frontier with China. And while I absolutely recognize that India has the right to build roads on its own territory wherever it wants to add, there is a certain signal that you have to be aware of: if you make a point of building a road up to a frontier where nobody really lives, you are really only doing that to prepare for the event of conflict.
Milan 41:10
The Indian response to that, of course, would be, “Well, our road-building is essentially a response to aggressive Chinese infrastructure build-up on their side,” right? So, it's a sort of tit-for-tat response.
Myra 41:24
Yes, and I was about to go on and say that.
Milan 41:26
Sorry.
Myra 41:27
No, you're right to add that. I mean, that's absolutely fair: China was definitely the first to build a road in that part of the world, and it continues to build roads both linking and reinforcing its grip on Xinjiang and Tibet. So, I'm not trying to attribute blame here in any way. I'm just saying, if you were to sit back and think in a very cold and calculated way, “Here I am as India facing a rival that's got an economy nearly five times the size of India's, and if I then choose to build a road right up to the frontier, and if I then also choose to bifurcate Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir, indicating a plan to build it up against China...” I would have thought one should build in the likelihood of the stronger power taking some kind of action to hit back. I
'm not talking about the rights and wrongs here. I'm just saying, in sheer kind of terms of military and economic might, you would normally expect a stronger power to at least indicate a certain amount of annoyance. They might be wrong, and I know India believes absolutely that China's in the wrong here. And I'm trying to step back from any kind of moral judgment and look at it purely in pragmatic terms.
I mean, I should add – one problem with building that Indian road is that you then have to defend it. So, it's the same as the same problem as you have in mountain warfare. You set up a post; you need another post to defend that original post. If you build a road, you then need other army posts to defend that road. There's also now an airstrip at Daulat Beg Oldie – you have to defend the airstrip. At a certain point, you have to say, “Well, how much of this can you actually defend?” Military overstretch is no use to anybody, really.
Milan 43:51
My guest on the show today is Myra MacDonald. Her new book is called White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan, and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir. Our colleague, Vipin Narang, had this to say about the book: “This region is one of the world's most volatile flashpoints, where three nuclear powers persistently confront each other. MacDonald has penned a definitive tour de force, helping us to better understand the terrain and the region – and why it's so dangerous.” Myra, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Congratulations on the book, and thanks for taking the time.
Myra 44:20
Thank you.