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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 28 July 2006 |
This is K2, the highest mountain in the world next to
Everest, at 28,250 feet. It is so
inaccessibly remote in the Karakorum mountains behind the Himalayas on the
border between Pakistan and China, that very few human beings have ever seen
it.
Last week I was privileged to take a small group of
Americans to the base of K2 by helicopter.
It was the first helicopter expedition ever to K2, which otherwise takes
10 days of very high-altitude trekking to reach.
An enormous glacier flows from the south face of K2 called
the Godwen-Austen glacier, which meets another huge glacier flowing from a
mountain called Baltoro Tengri. The
confluence of these glaciers is known to mountaineers as "Concordia."
It is the consensus of the world's professional
mountaineering community that at Concordia is the single spot of greatest
scenery on planet earth.
At Concordia, one can see four of the highest mountains in
the world, all over 26,000 feet or 8,000 meters high. One of them is K2.
Another is Gasherbrum I:
We flew in a Pakistani military helicopter. The chopper is used to supply the soldiers
fighting an endless war with India just a few miles from Concordia, the world's
highest war over control of the Siachen Glacier.
Here is a picture I took of a map in a tiny Pak military
encampment:
I hope you can make it out.
The solid red line is the border with China. The dash-dot line snaking down perpendicular from the red line is
the Line of Control (LOC), the de facto border to the left of which is
Pakistan, to the right India.
The dashed red line on the Pak side is the flight path of
the helicopter pilots to resupply the troops.
It follows the Baltoro Glacier up to Concordia (marked on the map at
15,900 feet) then turns right and heads for Siachen.
Note on the Indian side the position closest to the LOC is
the Kumar Post. This is named for the
legendary Indian Army mountaineer who first explored this entire region in the
1950s, Col. Narinder "Bull" Kumar.
Seeing this map marking the Kumar Post brought a big smile
to my face, for Col. Kumar has been a good friend of mine for many years. It was Bull who organized my expedition to
raft the Zanskar River in the remote region of Indian Tibet in 1993.
It also brought a smile to my son Jackson's face, for he and
I had lunch with Col. Kumar at the Delhi Golf Club just a week before.
Nothing characterizes the "lunacy of the legacy" of British
India splitting apart than this pointless war 21,000 feet high in a glacial
wasteland, where thousands of soldiers have died of frostbite, exposure, and
altitude sickness, many more than have died in actual fighting.
The whole situation makes China very happy. As long as the armies of Pakistan and India
are obsessed with hating and fighting each other, China gets to be Asia's only
superpower and push everyone around.
China's greatest fear is peace between Pakistan and
India. Should these two countries
decide to "Make Money, Not War," to settle their differences and focus on how
to bring free trade and prosperity to their peoples, the result would be a huge
threat to Chinese hegemony in Asia.
A market bigger than China's (1.4 billion including
Bangladesh vs. 1.3 billion) where all educated people speak English (English is
the official language of both India and Pakistan) would be a magnet for foreign
investment, sucking it out of China.
China would at last have an Asian rival, capable of standing
up to it economically and militarily.
If only the Pak and Indian armies could figure this out, that they could
play significant roles on the entire Asian stage instead of bloodily dicking
around on lost glaciers no one really cares about.
So as our helicopter lifted off from Concordia and we had
our last glimpse of K2 as we started down the Baltoro Glacier, I had a flash of
fantasy.
What if this magical name of Concordia stood not just for
the most magnificent scenery on earth, not just for a gigantic glacial
confluence, but the place where a concordance was finally reached between India
and Pakistan? Where war was abandoned
in place of doing business together?
Where each country saw a vision of how flourishingly successful they
could be through mutual cooperation, rather than how they can annihilate each
other?
Well, it's a nice fantasy, I thought, one with the delicious
side-benefit of really shafting the Red Chinese. Still, our coming here was once a fantasy. And now it had actually happened. About one thing I had no doubt - that I will
be here and do this again next year.
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