Indian and Pakistan have been separate states for more than 50 years. But the fact that they are the same people divided by a border created in 1947 is continuously underscored when one examines the modalities of a number of policies that they have adopted throughout their existence as independent nations. These include their views of the superpower competition during the Cold War years, their decisions to become nuclear powers, their views of the United States' global war on terrorism, and, most important of all, implications of the war on terror for their respective positions on the obdurate Kashmir conflict.

When India signed that friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, it hoped to use it as a restraint against the United States and China, both of whom were viewed as friends of Pakistan Indian premier Indira Gandhi might have been stunned at the so-called American "tilt" toward Pakistan when President Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise to the waters of the Bay of Bengal as a show of support for Pakistan during the East Pakistan crisis in 1971 that led to the formation of Bangladesh. A former Indian Military Officer narrated to me how scared the Indian top leadership became at the sight of that show of force. Within only three years of that incident, in 1974, India conducted its so-called "peaceful" nuclear explosion.

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