“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner once said. And that is why Kargil matters because it could happen again.
Sometime in the early summer of 1999, the news broke that Pakistan had launched an incursion in Kargil and achieved tactical surprise. Just as abruptly, the news came one day that Pakistan was withdrawing from Kargil.
I asked a retired American officer who had served in the region what was going on. He said Pakistan had hoped to sever India’s lines of communications with the Siachen glacier, which it had occupied since 1984. But things did not go as planned.
The international opprobrium unleashed on Pakistan due to the operation was overwhelming. I wrote a piece, “The Price of Strategic Myopia,” in The News on Sunday. Four years later, I published “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan.” I argued that it was time for Pakistan to change three flawed premises in its security calculus: fear of India, optimism about allied cooperation, and optimism about its military capabilities.
Nasim Zehra’s just-released book, “From Kargil to the Coup,” comes to similar conclusions. Her 532-page opus is based on scores of interviews with generals, diplomats and policymakers. It meticulously chronicles the events and analyses what went wrong. The fast-moving narrative is copiously supplemented with maps and reads like a Tom Clancy thriller.
Operation KP (Koh Paima), she tells us, began in October 1998, when Musharraf took over as army chief. He believed that the only way to resolve the festering Kashmir dispute was through force. He also felt that now was the time to act before India became too big for Pakistan. In August 1965, when India was not quite so big, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had said the same thing to Field Marshal Ayub, precipitating Operation Gibraltar and then Operation Grand Slam in Indian Kashmir.
The operation did not include a defence plan and was mounted without artillery and logistical support.
As with those operations, Operation KP was planned in complete secrecy. Maj Gen Javed Hassan, KP’s commander, considered himself a geopolitical strategist. He assumed that Pakistan’s bomb would guarantee it a military and diplomatic success in Kargil. There would be no repetition of India’s attack on Lahore. But he forgot that Pakistan had failed even to take Akhnur.
Operation KP’s objective indeed was to cut off India’s lifeline to its troops in Leh, NH1, resulting in its withdrawal from Siachen. Furthermore, Musharraf, a professed disciple of Napoleon, believed that luck favoured the brave.
The operation did not include a defence plan and was mounted without artillery and logistical support. The going-in assumptions were that, first, Pakistan’s posts were impregnable; second, Indians would not fight back; and third, there would be no international pressure on Pakistan. All three assumptions would be shattered in a few months.
As the operation progressed, Musharraf flew with the prime minister to the battlements near Kargil and showed him the plan. His Chief of the General Staff told Nawaz that he was about to enter the history books as the only PM who was able to solve the Kashmir imbroglio. Later, another officer told Nawaz that he would rank second to Jinnah. At some point, the air and naval chiefs were brought into confidence. Perplexed, both asked, “What would be achieved?” They were also concerned that KP would lead to an all-out war with India.
They were told that war with India was unlikely, courtesy of the nuclear assets. Instead, KP would force India to the negotiating table. One general said there was no choice since “our animosity with India is eternal.”
The euphoria ended in May 1999 when India detected the intrusion. It responded with an intense and sustained artillery barrage with 30-kilometre Bofors guns. A total of 250,000 shells, bombs and rockets were fired at Pakistani positions in a three-week period.
Pakistan was forced to deploy its artillery. But it ran out of shells in just two days, not the two months that they were supposed to last. The operations commander lost his nerve and began to ask for God’s forgiveness, admitted that he had made a mistake, and asked everyone to pray.
Around that time, India released the transcript of a phone conversation between Musharraf and his CGS which shattered Musharraf’s contention that Pakistan was not involved in the operation.
It was all downhill from there. The world came crashing down on Pakistan. The G-8 called on Pakistan to withdraw unconditionally as did the US and the all-weather friend, the Chinese. France forbade Pakistani submarines, most of which were of French origin, from entering French waters. And India turned off the back-channel diplomacy with Pakistan. Of course, that was expected. But world condemnation had been ruled out.
On Independence Day in Washington, Nawaz met with an angry President Clinton and agreed to an unconditional withdrawal.
The GHQ’s spin-doctors got to work immediately, hoping to convince the gullible public that the politicians had squandered the military’s hard-won victory. That is what they had done in 1971, putting all the blame on Bhutto.
A frustrated Musharraf, showing scant regard for the constitution, seized power months after he had launched KP. In his maiden speech, he told the nation that “your armed forces have never let you down.” Within days, he was bragging to an English reporter: “It’s a good feeling to be in charge.”
Zehra closes her book by noting that the army never learns anything from history, echoing the title of a book by Air Marshal Asghar Khan. Her book makes it amply clear that KP was criticised by several generals.
Maj Gen Shahid Aziz said it was an “unsound military plan based on invalid assumptions, launched with little preparation and in total disregard to the regional and international environment, and was bound to fail.” Lt-Gen Durrani said that the Kargil incursion had “brought home the realities of international politics” and exposed the dangers of getting carried away by “self-serving hopes and hypes.” Lt-Gen Gulzar called KP a “blunder of Himalayan proportions.” Lt-Gen Ali Quli termed the attack on Kargil “the worst debacle in Pakistan’s history.”
Were similar objections raised within GHQ prior to launching KP? Were they ignored? Is dissent suppressed in the army? Why is there no coordination between the services? And how is it that when disaster strikes, the military is able to feed its version of history to a gullible public successfully? Zehra’s book should cause these issues to be discussed at GHQ. Pakistan cannot afford another Kargil or another Musharraf.
The writer has authored, Musharraf’s Pakistan, Bush’s America, and the Middle East. [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, May 31st 2018.