Siachen Glacier
The Himalayan glacier where India and Pakistan have garrisoned troops above 20,000 feet since 1984, losing far more men to the cold than to each other.
The world's highest battlefield exists because of a sentence that trailed off. When India and Pakistan drew their ceasefire line through Kashmir in 1949, the surveyors ran it as far as a point on the map labeled NJ9842, where the mountains begin, and then wrote that it continued north to the glaciers. Nobody bothered to be precise, because the terrain beyond was 70 kilometers of ice at altitudes where helicopters struggle to hover. Both countries later discovered they had read that sentence differently.
A war over a map's blank space
Through the 1970s Pakistan issued permits to foreign mountaineering expeditions on the glacier and appeared on maps showing the line running northeast to the Karakoram Pass, which put Siachen on its side. Indian officers noticed, in part because Indian mountaineers kept finding foreign expeditions there with Pakistani approval. Indian intelligence also noticed Pakistani officers buying Arctic-weather gear from European suppliers.
India moved first. On April 13, 1984, in Operation Meghdoot, Indian troops were airlifted onto the glacier and seized the passes on the Saltoro Ridge, the wall that dominates the western approaches, days before a planned Pakistani deployment. That has been the shape of the conflict ever since. India holds the ridge and the glacier; Pakistan holds the lower ground to the west and has never been able to take the heights. The most celebrated action came in 1987, when Indian troops stormed a Pakistani post above 21,000 feet, later renamed for the soldier who led the assault.
Fighting the mountain
The enemy at Siachen is altitude. Posts sit as high as 22,000 feet, where the air holds a third of the oxygen at sea level, temperatures fall to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and winds run over 100 miles an hour. Soldiers deploy for months and come back with permanent damage: pulmonary and cerebral edema, frostbite, memory loss, weight loss of 10 to 15 kilos. Everything has to be flown or portered in, including kerosene and drinking water, at costs commonly estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for India.
The casualty figures make the point better than any argument. Between 1984 and 2012, India recorded 846 dead on the glacier; Pakistan lost well over 1,000 in a comparable period. The great majority on both sides died of avalanches, crevasses, altitude sickness, and cold rather than enemy fire. The worst single event was not a battle: on April 7, 2012, an avalanche buried a Pakistani battalion headquarters at Gayari and killed 140 people. A ceasefire has held on the glacier since late 2003, and the soldiers keep dying anyway.
Why nobody leaves
Both sides know the position is close to pointless and neither will move. Pakistan wants a mutual withdrawal to positions held before 1984. India insists that current positions first be authenticated on a map and signed, having learned from Kargil in 1999, when Pakistani forces occupied heights that Indian troops had vacated for the winter. That single demand, an agreed line on paper, has blocked every round of talks for thirty years.
Siachen has since become something more than a stalemate. The glacier is retreating, contaminated by decades of waste and fuel from the posts, and it feeds the Nubra and then the Indus, the river system on which Pakistan's agriculture depends. Two nuclear-armed states are keeping thousands of soldiers alive at extraordinary cost on top of a melting water tower, for control of a place with no population, no resources, and no road.