This is something i could never make out. Is Pakistan's Kashmir policy amputative or is it to flux its state with Kashmir ?.
I can understand the former. But it will take nothing short of a War for the later ... that i guess is the hard reality. How else would you do it ? ..... with all the distrust between generals and PMO, you see all this operations failing for them!
A very complex question.
For some reason, rooted in multiple factors, Kashmir has become an emotional issue on both sides, as Niaz pointed out.
Put simply, Pakistanis feel India keeps cheating Pakistan, and working in a systematic, organised way to make their state fail. To cease to exist as they are today, after having caused enormous and fundamental damage already. They trace it to Indian disagreement with the original idea of Muslim-majority homelands, and to an ideological-theological opposition to such homelands, that being itself rooted in the alleged antipathy of the Hindu majority to Muslims.
Kashmir is a typical examples to them of this innate hatred, and they see India bent on preventing Pakistan from taking its natural contours at least in the western homeland.
This idea may have died a natural death, but the deep state has used this as a principal factor to justify hatred of India at a country level, as a tenet of their foreign policy, their defence policy, even, according to some observers, including Pakistani observers, their education policy.
The deep state invested in this idea. It spent money, quality time and resources to promote this institutionalised dislike of India, and seems to have got a consensus among the administrative echelons, the military leadership in particular, to continue this idea. The deep state also invested in extra-institutional processes and groups to deliver the country's counter-attacking intentions in realized form. It succeeded, but the country has had to pay a dreadful price for the development and deployment of this apparatus.
The Indian view is in some respects a mirror. Not entirely, but in some ways.
The Indian view seems to be that Pakistan was unnecessary. The actions of the political leadership baffled the Indian leadership; they considered these actions wholly unfounded in reality. But they were taken, their memories exist today in lurid, highly coloured form. These actions are stated to be the basis for a series of internal actions and steps which amount to appeasement of what the national leadership thought to be the leadership of the Muslim community in India, the religious leadership. Such a deluded response can only have been due to the original flawed injection of religion as a leit-motiv into the political discourse. It provoked an intensification of a bigoted streak which existed already, but got refreshed sanction from the apparent and fairly bizarre pandering to a conservative and regressive section of society.
All this was internal. There was not much attention paid to Pakistan, except for the knee-jerk reactions to the wilder Pakistani diplomacy, until 1971. Events at that time seemed to be a point of closure for most Indians, leading to appalling shocks in later years on realizing that these events had rejuvenated Pakistani hostility to India, and had commenced a sharp, new phase of covert action.
Since then, Indian opinion - and to some extent, policy as well - has fluctuated between saccharine sentimentality and the worst excesses of jingoism, this fluctuation pivotting on a deep-rooted fear of unpredictable violent attacks.
Pakistan cannot give up the demand for Kashmir because it is now part of their national life. It is like the wallpaper. Any 'solution' has to work its way around that. Very strange, because it is increasingly clear that Pakistan's dream outcome of a total merger of the erstwhile princely state with Pakistan is not going to happen. The cries and slogans persist, one suspects, out of sheer habit.
India will not give up Kashmir because it has become part of its policy of appeasement. This policy is intended to deliver the message that the entire ideological basis for the demand for homelands was unnecessary in the first place. This can be proved by proving that Muslims are as well off as they might have been in Pakistan - or Bangladesh. There is therefore no question of admitting that some sections of present-day political opinion in the Vale want a status for their region outside the Indian polity. Admitting this demand makes nonsense of the claim that Muslims are all happy. Strangely, India has allowed its policy in Kashmir to be guided by the precise parochial model that it professes to reject.
To summarize, one side asks for Kashmir because not asking for it is to play into the hands of those crafty Indians. Not asking for it is to deny the roots of Pakistan. Not asking for it is to declare the past decades of the military diffusion into Pakistani society illegitimate, and based on no concrete threat. Not asking for it is to encourage further India efforts to dismantle Pakistan.
The other side holds on to Kashmir because it cannot do anything else without apparently legitimizing the separation out of the homelands, admitting that some Muslims in India are unhappy, and holding up to question state policy towards the Muslim through the last sixty-five years.
There is really no clean solution.