It is a toss-up today to determine which region is the most dangerous, the Middle East or India and Pakistan. Militant factions from Pakistan have been attacking military and police posts on the India-Pakistan frontier, pushing both nuclear armed nations toward their fourth armed conflict since 1947. India has massed nearly one million troops on the border. Diplomatic efforts to avert war have been intense. A constant parade of officials has been making their way to the region. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a trip to both sides in late May. Russia's Vladimir Putin has also offered to mediate the conflict. The great fear in this conflict is the exchange of nuclear missiles. In the event of one miscalculation on either side, millions would die and large regions of the subcontinent would be rendered uninhabitable for decades. Both the United States and Britain have drawn up plans to evacuate their citizens from the region in the event of war. Officials from the U.S. State Department and the military's Pacific Command have begun drawing up evacuation plans for 50,000 to 60,000 U.S. civilians, virtually all of them in India, a Pentagon official with access to the plans said. The State Department has already warned U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to Pakistan and India and said Americans in those countries should consider leaving. An airlift of that magnitude would dwarf the evacuations of Americans from Vietnam, which Washington and U.S. forces abandoned in early 1975, said a military official familiar with U.S. airlift capabilities. Many reports state that al Qaeda forces are provoking the Pakistan attacks in an effort to undermine the regime of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Should this happen and should Pakistan fall apart, there is the fear of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists, something no one wants to think about. India's big fear is a future threat from an armed Islamic front on its northwest frontier. This they cannot allow and will go to whatever lengths to prevent. At stake is more than the disputed region of Kashmir. A May 28, 2002, Stratfor analysis had this to say: "From India's viewpoint, Pakistan represents the only serious national security challenge. "On a deeper level, the Pakistani-Indian frontier represents the borderland between the Islamic and Hindu worlds. Whatever the current condition of India, the broad historical threat is that the Islamic world one day might unite. In that case, the manageable threat posed by Pakistan would become a potentially unmanageable situation, in which the weight of reemergent Islamic power would thrust up against an India that might not be able to resist. These are hypothetical fears, far in the future, but they are not trivial." America, well into its war on terrorism, cannot afford to see Pakistan fall into chaos. Al Qaeda would then be able to operate at will from remote mountainous regions. Since inserting itself into Afghanistan, America has established a new doctrine of intervention where sovereign countries are unable to deal with elements hostile to American interests. Israel has followed the same principle in its incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas. William Safire pointed out in The New York Times of May 31, 2002: "The Indians point to the new global antiterrorist principle enunciated by George W. Bush and practiced by Ariel Sharon, and say, with unassailable logic, they have been patient enough. But India, which could win another conventional war with Pakistan, surely wants no nuclear exchange. What can it expect from the world in return for more restraint? "India demands pressure on Pakistan to exercise its internal sovereignty. Either the government of President Pervez Musharraf controls Pakistan's portion of Kashmir or it invites policing from outside. "But there's this complication: The U.S. needs Musharraf to help root out Al Qaeda, which has gone underground in Muslim Pakistan and is trying to provoke nuclear war with Hindu India. And too many Pakistanis fail to realize that the terrorists railing about the 'occupation' of Kashmir by India hope to call down millions of casualties on both countries." Kipling's "Great Game" continues to be played in this critical region (see December 2001 issue, p. 16).