Last I looked, the two sides were busily disagreeing: the Indians say the ceasefire starts at midnight New Delhi time, the Pakistanis say it starts at midnight Karachi time.

Typical. If we're lucky it won't matter, but the past 56 years of history don't leave me terribly optimistic about the mid-term prospects for peace on the subcontinent.

The general political pressure from what appears to be a majority of Islamist fanatics in Pakistan, and a significant and politically powerful segment of Indian citizenry that are Hindu militants -- I don't know how familiar you are with the RSS, but they're basically, yes, Hindu fascists with direct Nazi antecedents, and they're the basis of the party that's been in power for some years now -- seems to make significant mid-term peace prospects unlikely.

I'd love to think I'm overly pessimistic about this. Given that this conflict has the potential to cause the largest mass death in world history, quite possibly. (A little mutual nuking between these two countries, and more than a few people go away.)

I'm concerned about the situation as well, obviously, which is why I think we'd do well to throw a little more diplomatic muscle into the fray. I believe that both sides, to their credit, are looking to avoid a nuclear war, but each government has to worry about how their more extreme elements will react to any perceived weakness on the issue. Some U.S. carrots and sticks might help each government overcome those issues, or at least reduce them.

My worry is that we would make things worse. Not because we are incompetent, but because both the Indians and the Pakistanis might try to play the which one of us do you like more card. Or even worse, we could come off as less than neutral, which would lessen our standing in the eyes of the other.

I'm not so sure that staying removed isn't the best thing. India and Pakistan are probably learning the Cuba Missile Crisis lesson that we and the Soviets at one time also needed to learn. On our own.

That's a good point, and it may well be the best course of action for us. My one worry is that India and Pakistan have somewhat more rabid constituencies than we did during our missile crisis. I don't think there was the same level of emotion over Cuba that there is over Kashmir, and that scares me. Rationally, Kashmir isn't worth a nuclear war. But if people get their blood up, reason tends to go out the window. And a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent is about the worst thing I can imagine reasonably happening in the next year.