The Pakistan army then decided to up the ante and take greater risks in esca-lating the conflict. There was a sense in Islamabad that “the freedom to pursue unconventional warfare against India could be expanded into a limited conven-tional war with a specific political objective.”62In early 1999, troops of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry, in the garb of Kashmiri militants, crossed the Line of Control and occupied strategic mountain peaks in Mushkoh Valley, Dras, Kargil, and Batalik sectors of Ladakh. Pakistan’s master plan was apparently to block the Dras-Kargil highway, cut Leh off from Srinagar, trap the Indian forces on the Siachin glacier, raise the militants’ banner of revolt in the Valley, ques-tion the sanctity of the Line of Control (possibly alter it), and bring the Kashmir issue firmly back to the forefront of the international agenda.
Tactically, the Pakistan army’s military operation was brilliant. The selection of the area, the timing of the intrusion, the extent of area taken, and the pre-paredness of the intruding groups indicated detailed planning.63Kargil is the only sector on the Line of Control where the Pakistan army has the advantage of higher positions. Its military planners had exposed the Achilles’ heel of the
Indian army by catching it napping in a strategically important area. They had struck when India’s political leadership was in a state of suspended animation and the country was being led by a prime minister who had lost the support of Parliament.
However, the military operation had no strategic game plan and was based on faulty assumptions. To begin with, the Pakistan army believed that with the capture of the high ridges, the Indian army would find it impossible to dislodge the Pakistanis and would acquiesce, just as Pakistan had done when the Indi-ans seized Siachin glacier in 1984. The onus would be on India to prevent escalation, and Pakistan would lose no territory or strategically advantageous positions. The United States and other Western powers would adopt an “even-handed approach” and refrain from passing judgment on the rights and wrongs of the conflict. Pakistan could, of course, claim, as its foreign minister Sartaj Aziz argued, that it was primarily the “Kashmiri freedom fighters’ strug-gle” and that the Line of Control was not actually demarcated. Invoking the mantra of plausible deniability, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told foreign cor-respondents that the “Kashmiri mujahideen did not start the freedom movement on my orders and they will not stop on my instructions.”64Another mistaken belief was that Pakistan’s nuclear capability would deter a significant Indian response. In other words, if India shifted to an all-out conventional war, the possibility existed that it could turn nuclear and that world powers would then intervene to force a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, thereby internationalizing it.
What General Pervez Musharraf—the military mind behind Kargil—and his team did not anticipate was the ferocity of India’s response.65Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government unleashed India’s artillery and air force to bombard the enemy posts in Kargil. By mobilizing its armed forces into a high state of alert and concentrating its naval power in the Arabian Sea, India signaled that it was fully prepared for a full-scale war.66The Indian victories also demonstrated that Pakistan’s positions were not at all impregnable. In six weeks of warfare, nearly 700 Pakistanis died. Autopsies of dead Pakistani soldiers revealed the presence of grass in their stomachs, indicating that they had run out of food supplies.67Pakistan’s nuclear card—a veiled threat that it would “not hesitate to use any weapon in our arsenal to defend our territorial integrity”—back-fired. India called its bluff. When Pakistan chose to withdraw under American pressure, “without using any strategic weapons, or even the vaunted Pakistan Air Force, India felt emboldened.”68
For the first time, Pakistan could no longer deny its involvement in Kashmir, as it had strenuously maintained throughout the 1990s.69India strategically
released the transcript of an alleged cell-phone call between Pakistan’s chief of army staff (COAS), General Pervez Musharraf, and the chief of general staff, Lieutenant General Mohammed Aziz, in which the latter said that the Pakistani army was holding the mujahideen “by the scruff of their neck,” and that they could be withdrawn whenever the COAS wanted.70Pakistan failed to convince the international community that Kargil was the handiwork of Kashmiri mili-tants. To the United States, it was clear that “the scope and planning of this operation, as well as the equipment, logistics, artillery and communication sup-port necessary to carry it out, all point to the direct involvement of the government of Pakistan, its army and intelligence services.”71Pakistan’s even-tual withdrawal confirmed that it was controlling the mujahideen. Moreover, the agreement on modalities of disengagement was backed by a formal appeal to the mujahideen from the Defense Committee of the cabinet—Pakistan’s highest decisionmaking body on security matters—to withdraw from Kargil.72 Kargil was a diplomatic disaster for Pakistan. The Vajpayee government’s position won overwhelming international approval. The world’s leading indus-trial nations, the Group of Eight (G-8), held Pakistan, without naming it, responsible for “the military confrontation in Kashmir,” describing “the mili-tary action to change the status quo as irresponsible” and asked Pakistan to withdraw its forces north of the Line of Control. They called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff by refusing either to intervene in the Kashmir—as distinct from Kargil—
dispute or to put any pressure on India to stop the fighting. The European Union publicly called for “the immediate withdrawal of infiltrators.”73The United States also depicted Pakistan as the “instigator” and insisted that the sta-tus quo ante be unconditionally and unambiguously restored. “No progress was possible,” emphasized President Bill Clinton, “until Pakistan pulled out its forces from the Indian zone of Kashmir.”74For its part, China suggested guarded neutrality, urging both Islamabad and New Delhi to defuse the situ-ation. Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation was complete. That and the veiled threat of a cutoff of International Monertary Fund (IMF) aid—the lifeline of Pak-istan’s economy—forced Sharif to back down.75
Even Pakistani analysts have argued that, politically and strategically, Kargil was an ill-conceived and fundamentally flawed strategy whose political objec-tives were not clearly thought through. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s current ambassador to the United Kingdom, called the Kargil decisions “impulsive, chaotic, erratic and overly secretive,” arguing that “playing holy warriors this week and men of peace the next betrays an infirmity and insincerity of purpose that leaves the country leaderless and directionless.”76Kargil revealed not only systemic flaws but also a reluctance to learn from previous mistakes. Just as in
1965 and 1971, the generals did not think through the consequences of their actions. High levels of distrust between the political and military elites also hampered planning. Afraid of leaks, the military went overboard with its secrecy, to the detriment of the decisionmaking process.77
Even now the Pakistan army steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that Kargil was a defeat or that Kargil-like operations are unacceptable and a danger to sta-bility in the subcontinent. The issue remains “off-limits” in military circles.78 Perhaps Pakistan saw Kargil as “yet another tactical operational exchange sim-ilar to others along the LOC [Line of Control] . . . where the ante was raised incrementally.”79Many officers, in fact, believe that they were denied a victory and that “Sharif lost a war in Washington that had already been won in Kargil.”80As some observers have pointed out, this rationalization of Kargil implies the possibility that Pakistan might be tempted to carry out Kargil-like operations in the future.”81
More important, the military establishment did not believe real constraints had been put in place against any use of violence in Kashmir and India: “The Kargil fiasco does not appear to have extinguished Pakistan’s belief that vio-lence, especially as represented by low-intensity conflict, remains the best policy for pressuring India on Kashmir and other outstanding disputes.”82 Pakistan therefore seems to think its diplomatic and military options for resolving the Kashmir issue are quite limited. Given these constraints, Pakistan argues that one of its few remaining successful strategies is “to ‘calibrate’ the heat of the insurgency in Kashmir and possibly pressure India through expan-sion of violence in other portions of India’s territory.”83