PRASHANT PANJIAR / LIVEWIRE IMAGES FOR TIME

REMEMBRANCE: A memorial lists the names of India's Siachen war dead

War at the Top of the World
	Thawing relations between India and Pakistan have brought a cease-fire to the strife-torn Siachen Glacier. Will hostilities remain on ice?
	By Tim McGirk with Aravind Adiga | Siachen Glacier

Posted Monday, May 4, 2005; 20:00 HKT
Up at 5,653 m, Pakistani army Captain Ali Nazir watches the crows as they soar down from the spires of rock, gliding over the blue glacier. "I like the crows," Nazir says. He points to his soldiers clustered around a fiberglass igloo. "Aside from us, they are the only living creatures we ever see." And when the crows leave during the fierce, three-week-long winter blizzards? Then, says Nazir, "I cannot describe the absolute desolation I feel." He gestures grandly, like an orchestra conductor, at the view: snow clouds roiling down from the crags, avalanche tracks, man-eating crevasses ribbing the glacier. Soldiers see strange things at such altitudes—genies flitting across the glacier, phantom troops along a ridge. Men go mad and wander off to die in blizzards. "This is a terrible place. It is a battle just to survive," says Nazir, 27, his face darkened by high-altitude exposure.

Across a rampart of rock and ice stretching the length of the 75-km Siachen Glacier, an Indian soldier, Amarjeet Singh, is preparing to take up his battle position against the Pakistanis. Singh had served on the glacier before, in 1989, at the height of the fighting with Pakistan, but he thinks his second tour of duty will go easier. Indian and Pakistani troops are no longer shooting at one another. They are mainly worried about avalanches and deadly high-altitude sickness instead. "It was much worse before," recalls Singh, who says he now has warmer boots to protect him against frostbite, and better ice axes. Once he gets to his mountaintop bunker, entombed under layers of snow, Singh, like the other soldiers there, can call home by satellite phone from their soot-blackened igloo, while waiting out the hour that it takes to boil rice at these altitudes.

Even with improvements in military equipment, Siachen is still an awful place to wage a war. Both countries refuse to disclose their casualties in the 21 years that they have been fighting up here, but some military analysts put the combined death toll at anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 lives. Temperatures can fall below -55°C; and more soldiers are killed in avalanches than by gunfire. To mount an assault on an enemy-held mountaintop is often suicidal. Because of the lack of oxygen, attacking soldiers can climb only about five meters before they have to stop to catch their breath. If you let bare skin touch steel for more than 15 seconds—a finger on a trigger, for example—you risk severe frostbite. Says Rifaat Hussain, who teaches political science at Islamabad's National Defence College: "It's totally insane to be fighting a war at these altitudes."

Recently, TIME was able to visit both sides on the glacier and talk to soldiers involved in something that, if not the world's most insane war, is surely the war fought in the most insanely impractical place. But the Siachen Glacier is worth visiting for more than the spectacular scenery. It is both a potential flash point between two nuclear powers—and potentially evidence of a new spirit of cooperation between them. The two neighbors nearly waged a full-scale war in 1999 when 800 Pakistani soldiers disguised as militants scaled a 5,100-m-high ridge near Kargil in Indian-held Kashmir and began shelling a major road used by the Indians to supply their Siachen outposts. India recaptured Kargil after suffering many casualties, but the Indians remain wary of the peace-making vows of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who, as army chief, had planned the Kargil offensive. Today, Siachen is more important as a test of diplomacy than of high-altitude battle skills. If India and Pakistan cannot solve a dispute over a chunk of ice that is of little strategic value, asks Jalil Abbas Jilani, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman and one of the key diplomats in talks with India, "then how can we fix more complex issues like Kashmir?"

Continued...

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