India's Pointless War that Costs 50 Million Per Day

Siachen standoff is also taking a heavy environmental toll. Environmental experts have said that the heavy military presence is speeding up the melting of the glacier, one of the world’s largest outside the Polar Regions, and leaching poisonous materials into the Indus river system, affecting drinking and irrigation water that millions of people downstream from the Siachen, both Indian and Pakistani, depend upon.

US expert Neal Kemkar said in an article for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal "Indian army officials have described the Siachen as 'the world's biggest and highest garbage dump'," as reported by Emmanuel Duparcq for AFP.

He said that 40 percent of the military waste was plastics and metal, and as there are no natural biodegrading agents present, "metals and plastics simply merge with the glacier as permanent pollutants, leaching toxins like cobalt, cadmium, and chromium into the ice."

Pakistani hydrologist and Siachen specialist Arshad Abbasi gave an even more startling assessment of the glacier's decline, and said that non-militarised areas had not suffered so badly.

Abbasi further said "India and Pakistan are not fighting each other in Siachen, they are both fighting the glacier, and nature takes its revenge by killing soldiers."