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Kashmir
A Himalayan region divided among three nuclear-armed states
Few landscapes are as beautiful or as contested as the valley of Kashmir and the mountains that ring it. Three nuclear-armed states hold parts of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir: India administers the most populous portion, Pakistan the western and northern areas, and China a high, thinly settled arc in the east. India claims the entire former state. Pakistan claims the areas India holds and seeks a plebiscite under UN resolutions of 1948 and 1949, and China bases its position on its own boundary claims. The result is a region divided by a Line of Control rather than an agreed border, among the most heavily militarized frontiers anywhere, and a dispute that has outlasted three wars and nearly eight decades of diplomacy.
The region spans roughly 222,000 square kilometers where the Himalayas, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush converge. India's share, organized since 2019 as the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and of Ladakh, includes the fertile Kashmir Valley around Srinagar, the plains of Jammu, and the cold desert of Ladakh. Pakistan administers Azad Jammu and Kashmir, with its capital at Muzaffarabad, and Gilgit-Baltistan, home to K2 and the Karakoram Highway. China holds Aksai Chin and the Shaksgam Valley, the latter ceded by Pakistan in a 1963 boundary agreement that India rejects. The Indus and its tributaries cross all three sectors, which makes water as central to the dispute as land. Roughly 20 million people live across the region.
The dispute began in 1947, when the Hindu ruler of a Muslim-majority princely state acceded to India during an incursion of tribal fighters from Pakistan. The first war ended in a 1949 ceasefire line, renamed the Line of Control in 1972. Wars followed in 1965 and 1971, then the 1999 Kargil conflict and a long insurgency in the valley. In 2019 India revoked the special status granted by Article 370 of its constitution, a step its Supreme Court upheld and Pakistan condemned. After a militant attack killed 26 people near Pahalgam in April 2025, which India blamed on Pakistan and Pakistan denied, the two exchanged military strikes for four days in May before a ceasefire. India has since held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, which a Hague arbitration panel, whose jurisdiction India rejects, ruled impermissible in 2026.