INDIA: India's searing summer heat matched the rising temperature on the frontier with Pakistan yesterday. Government ministers, military commanders and security advisers in New Delhi opted to give diplomacy one last chance to resolve bilateral differences before resorting to war.
And as India readied for battle - streamlining its military command by placing all paramilitary units along the border under army control, the coast guard under the navy and reshuffling its forces - it launched an "exhaustive" diplomatic offensive to persuade Pakistan to end cross-border terrorism in disputed Kashmir state and across the country.
The Indian Foreign Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, said placing the paramilitary under the army was "standard operating procedure" when preparing for war.
"There is no point in restricting our options indefinitely. We need to chalk out a strategy and strike at a time and place of our choosing," said retired Maj-Gen Afsir Karim, a member of the National Security Council Advisory Board which has been meeting regularly. "We have neither economic nor diplomatic clout against Pakistan and the only instrument left against it is the military one," added Gen Karim, a Muslim who has fought in two of the three wars against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971.
Normally tense relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours intensified after last week's suicide attack by three gunmen on an army base near Jammu in which 31 people, including 11 women and 11 children, died.
India blamed the attack on a Pakistan-sponsored insurgent group fighting Kashmir's 13-year civil war for an independent Muslim homeland that has claimed 35,000 lives. Islamabad denied the charge as "baseless".
Military officers concede that fighting a war in the Punjab plains and western Rajasthan's desert region, where temperatures averaging 46 degrees have claimed scores of lives, would be impracticable, if not impossible. They said temperatures inside the Indian army's Russian-built T-72 tanks reached 70 degrees during the day, making it "suicidal" to operate them.
"There will be war, but in all likelihood it will take place after the summer and the monsoon rains," a senior army officer said.
"We will try to exhaust other options first and if they don't work we will think of war," Kashmir's chief minister, Mr Farooq Abdullah, said on a visit to the Jammu region, where the two armies traded artillery and mortar fire for the fourth consecutive day.
