Eyeball to eyeball at the top of the world

After all, you don't hear Canada's Foreign Minister denying tension on his country's American frontier, because the truth of that proposition is self-evident. The claim by Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on a June visit to Beijing that the Sino-Indian border is tension-free has prompted cynical observers to assume the opposite.

They are right to do so. The last six months have witnessed a proliferation of incidents along the 2,520-mile (4,057-kilometer) Sino-Indian frontier. Nearly a hundred have been recorded, including no fewer than 65 incursions by China's People's Liberation Army in just one sector - the evocatively-named Finger Area, a 2.1-square-kilometer salient in the Indian state of Sikkim, which shares a 206-kilometer border with Tibet.