Barely a week into the new year and we've already reached a benchmark of sorts for bizarre, unexpected, and very good news. And no, I'm not referring to several inches of snow falling here in Seattle--though it is in the same general category of something I thought would happen only when an unexpected place freezes over.

Here in the US, the agreement Wednesday by the governments of India and Pakistan to sit down next month and begin negotiations on comprehensive peace between the two avowed enemies hasn't even been the biggest story of the week from that part of the world. That would be the new constitution and subsequent Taliban bombings in Afghanistan--about which, more shortly.

But let us not forget, in an era where one Bush year seems to equal several normal ones for war and other scourges of the human condition, that only 18 months ago India and Pakistan were on the verge of what senior US diplomats called, at the time, a threat of nuclear war at least as credible as the Cuban Missile Crisis. An article from the June 2, 2002 London Observer laid out what was at stake:

The US Defense Intelligence Agency calculates that the first hour of a full scale nuclear exchange could kill as many as 12 million people and leave up to seven million injured. Millions more would die in other fighting or from starvation and disease. In Britain, government experts calculate that all Pakistan's water and food would be contaminated by even a limited exchange, with large areas of India rendered practically uninhabitable. ... And it is not simply the fate of the combatant nations that frightens the planners. 'In a worst-case scenario,' said a senior Foreign Office source, 'we would be looking at contamination affecting Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, even China.'"

For nearly two weeks, the two newly nuclear powers strutted troops along the Line of Control splitting the disputed province of Kashmir, seemingly oblivious to the threat that was alarming much of the rest of the world. Now, after unexpected face-to-face talks between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf during a regional conference at Islamabad, the two countries have agreed in principle to forge a solution not only to Kashmir, but the broad range of issues that have separated the countries for over a half-century, dating back to the creation of the two nations through the partition of one British colony in 1948.

For many reasons, this is hopeful and wonderful news--not simply because it eases what remains the world's highest risk (outside Dick Cheney's fever dreams) of the battlefield use of nuclear weapons, but because it reaffirms that even in seemingly intractable conflicts, sometimes the biggest impediment to peace is simply the will to make it happen. That's a message sufferers of any long-running conflict can take to heart. (Israel and Palestine, to pick a not-at-all-random example.)

But before we consign the latest cycle of near-war on the subcontinent to the historical dustbin, it's worth remembering how the two countries got there--because the sequence of events has important ramifications for what is now unfolding next door, in US-controlled Afghanistan.

Pakistan's Musharraf calls himself President. He gave himself the title in May 2001, so as to give himself more legitimacy two years after he led a military coup that unseated a democratically elected government. He then followed with a farcical election to ratify his rule--one with no international observers and widespread, credible allegations of mass fraud.

At the time, Pakistan was already an object of US economic sanctions after it and India announced their previously secret nuclear programs and conducted nuclear tests in the late T90s. And the same military and intelligence ranks that spawned Musharraf provided the training and logistical support not only for Afghanistan's Taliban movement, but Muslim extremists who regularly ranged across the border into India as part of the long simmering battle for Kashmir.

All of it--the illegal weapons of mass destruction, the military coup and dictatorship, and the sponsorship of not one but two terrorist fronts--was forgiven by the Bush Administration after 9/11. Pakistan, as a necessary ally for the US to mount a land invasion of landlocked Afghanistan, was suddenly in favor. The sanctions were dropped, international loans and credits freed up, and new military weapons and training rushed to Musharraf's thugs. Pakistan became the latest in a long, ugly history of repressive regimes Washington supports out of self-interest--and yet another focal point for Islamic anger at America.

Two months after 9/11, terrorists believed sponsored by Pakistan attacked and shot up India's Parliament building, a provocation that helped set the stage for 2002Us nuclear-armed confrontation. Still, Bush has stuck by the Pakistani dictator. This may, ironically, have paid some dividends; while British and European pressure and the subcontinent's own political dynamics were the primary factors leading to the new talks, undoubtedly Washington has been encouraging peace as well. At this point, what Washington asks carries a lot of weight in Musharraf's government.

As a consequence, the general is just as repressive as ever, but has taken a number of steps to renounce Pakistan's former sponsorship of extremist groups. Such a renunciation was one of the concessions that led to talks with India; it's also believed related to two recent assassination attempts on the dictator.

Meanwhile, as last weekend's tape referencing Saddam's capture suggests, Osama bin Laden is very much alive--as is Taliban leader Mullah Omar--and both are believed based somewhere in the hinterlands of the Afghan/Pakistani frontier, in rugged terrain poorly controlled by either country. The Taliban--as I noted in my year-end column, a week before the recent bombing in Kandahar--have been steadily gaining in strength in recent months. At US insistence, there are, outside the capital of Kabul, only about 400 international peacekeepers in all of Afghanistan, a mountainous country the size of Texas. It is one of the poorest countries in the world. Most of the country is now controlled by warlords. The misery of most Afghans--women and men--is little changed from what it was under the Taliban. Loya Jurga and constitutional headlines notwithstanding, Afghanistan's US-backed provisional government has no power outside Kabul itself; the idea that a smoothly functioning democracy, with a leadership elected by secret ballot, will be in place later this year is preposterous.

What all this suggests is twofold. First, the marriage between Washington and Musharraf is very much one of convenience; his human rights depredations are of no concern to the Bush Administration so long as his cooperation is militarily useful, yielding still more ideologically fertile recruiting grounds for anti-American terror groups. Second, Musharraf's crackdown on an Islamist movement that still has substantial support in Pakistan's military and intelligence ranks, and a substantial amount of autonomy in Afghan border regions, could very easily dovetail across the border with a resurgent Taliban and/or with various warlord attacks on Afghanistan's (US-supported) central government.

One of the major public reasons for Washington's stated distress during the Indo-Pakistani nuclear confrontation of 2002 was that it was drawing much of PakistanUs military strength away from the Afghan frontier to Kashmir, on the other end of the country. Now, the reverse could take place: without support for a religious war to reclaim Kashmir, Muslim extremists could flow back to Afghanistan--while US troops are heavily engaged in Iraq.

The upshot: talks next month may well lead to a long-dreamed-of peace on the Indian subcontinent. But at the same time, the Bush Administration's near-complete abandonment of Afghanistan in only two years may yield a bitter new harvest in 2004. When the Taliban retreated to the mountains before advancing US/Northern Alliance forces in late 2001, it was with proclamations that the Americans would soon wander away, but, just as the mujahadeen did with the Russians, the Taliban would persevere.

They were right.