Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 193
maintained that Kashmir’s accession to the Indian union in 1947 was final
and settled the matter. Since independence and partition in 1947, Kashmir
has been divided between Pakistani and Indian control.
In 1964, Beijing came down squarely behind Pakistan’s position
on the Kashmir issue: the people of Kashmir were entitled to exercise
self-determination regarding their future as a people. The same year, Pakistan’s
leaders devised a plan to bring Kashmir into Pakistan. Kashmiris from
Pakistani Kashmir were to be given military training and arms by Pakistan’s
military, and infiltrated into Indian Kashmir to conduct guerrilla warfare
demanding a plebiscite. Soldiers from the Pakistan army would also be infil-
trated, in mufti, into Indian Kashmir to strengthen insurgent forces. Once
the insurgency grew strong, a revolutionary Kashmiri government would be
formed and become the center of an international campaign forcing India
to consent to a plebiscite. That election would then lead Indian-controlled
Kashmir to join Pakistan.^55
China’s relation to this pseudo-insurgency is unclear. Pakistan’s strategy
of pseudo-insurgency closely resembles Hanoi’s China-supported strategy
then being successfully employed in South Vietnam. Throughout 1963 and
1964, the US-supported government in Saigon tottered toward collapse before
an insurgency much strengthened by infiltration of men and weapons from
North Vietnam. Karachi (then Pakistan’s capital) was a close US ally and
member of SEATO, and thus not in a position to itself inquire of Hanoi about
its strategy. Beijing, on the other hand, was well placed to inform Karachi
about Hanoi’s clever and apparently successful strategy. But it is also pos-
sible that Pakistani strategists independently developed this approach. Indian
intelligence sources reported that Chinese personnel were involved training
insurgents at camps in Pakistan, and that substantial amounts of Chinese
materials were taken from insurgents: matches, flashlights, and such.^56 One
critical assumption of the Pakistani plan was that India would not respond
to the insurgency with a conventional attack on Pakistan. Alignment with
China may have been seen as a key factor preventing this. China’s ability to
punish India had been demonstrated in 1962. In any event, Pakistani calcula-
tions proved wrong. India moved toward a full-scale assault on Pakistan in
September. As it did, China weighed in in an effort to deter India from esca-
lating to the level of conventional war.
In March 1965, as Karachi’s pseudo-insurgency was getting under way,
Pakistan leader General Ayub Khan visited Beijing to strengthen the new
entente. Ayub Khan explained to Chinese leaders that Pakistan would not
go along with US efforts “to make India into a counterforce to China, both
economically and militarily.” Khan condemned US and Soviet military aid to
India, and promised that Pakistan would resist US pressure to oppose China.
Khan’s meeting with Mao was extremely cordial. “China and Pakistan could
trust each other as neither has the intention of pulling the rug under the feet