evidence: Then came the maps. They appeared in the 1970s, brought to India by tourists and travelers and showing the unclaimed Siachen glacier as Pakistani territory. India accused Pakistan of "cartographic aggression." [...] However, India’s strategy had already gone awry. The original Indian intention was to put on a show of force, stake a claim, and withdraw before the winter. Nobody had ever spent the winter months in Siachen. But India had underestimated the Pakistani reaction. The very bizarreness of the Indian plan — to march its men to the top of the hill and march them down again — totally confused the Pakistan Army, or so its officers told me. To a military mind, the operation should have a clear objective, maybe to continue beyond the passes and occupy parts of Pakistani-held territory, or to reach the Karakoram Highway, the only road link between Pakistan and China. The simplest explanation — that India occupied Siachen not because it needed to but because it did not want Pakistan to have it — seemed too straightforward to be true. Yet in all the interviews I had with men involved on the Indian side, I found nothing to suggest there had ever been a bigger game plan.