In “Confidence-building Measures in South Asia,” Samina Yasmeen and Aabha Dixit argue that the current emphasis on the military dimension of CBM’s is far too narrow to lessen Indo-Pakistani friction.
This approach is unlikely to alleviate the “enemy images” that create adversarial relations between the people of the two countries. The authors call for increased people-to-people contacts and joint social programs to battle the animosity fostered by enemy images in media coverage and text books. Without these contacts the authors warn that “any confidence-building exercise will have little chance of success.”