The point is not to restrain Indian "aggression," but to make the world safer for us all. The situation can only be stabilized if India and Pakistan are both forced to back away, preferably to outside of Kashmir's historic, unpartitioned borders. This "hands off Kashmir" solution will have to be externally imposed on the reluctant principals and will require that a large peacekeeping force be sent to the region to support Kashmir as an autonomous area. But who in the West wants that — it's just the old colonialist-imperialist power trip, isn't it? And who's supposed to pay for all this peacekeeping, anyway?
The answers to those questions are also questions: What's the alternative? Do you have a better idea? Or shall we just stand back and keep our postcolonial, nonimperialist fingers crossed? Will it take mushroom clouds over Delhi and Islamabad to make us give up our ingrained prejudices and try something that might actually work? In the immortal words of the Spice Girls, "Will this déjà vu never end?"
