Daily Times

General (retired) Shahid Aziz has opened a can of worms, which his parent outfit — the Pakistan army — and his former boss, General (retired) Pervez Musharraf rather had remained closed. February marks the 14th anniversary of the Pakistani misadventure into Kargil. While it hit the fan in May 1999, the Kargil operation had started in February that year. Mr Shuja Nawaz chronicles in his army-friendly authoritative volume Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within: “The ingress began under Operation Badr (named after the site of the early battle of Prophet Muhammad [PBUH] against heavy odds) in February 1999…”

What followed that ingress has been a subject of scholarship and speculation until this day. The general consensus appears to be that the Pakistani army sent in regulars mixed with a handful of irregulars across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kargil sector and established a series of posts ostensibly to ratchet up things where the Kashmir issue could be ‘internationalised’ and a ‘stubborn’ India forced to negotiate. According to another pro-army writer, Dr Shirin Mazari, “It was a limited tactical defensive operation, which incrementally escalated as a result of India raising the military, political and diplomatic ante.” Musharraf was to use later the euphemisms ‘offensive defence’ and ‘aggressive patrolling’.

The lament that India ‘overreacted’ is perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of the debacle. And while the objective was an eventual political victory, the political leadership of the time, i.e. Mian Nawaz Sharif and his government were either not consulted until things got out of hand or given partial information. The jury is still out if Mian Sahib actually knew, and more importantly, grasped what was going on. The civilian chronicler of the era, the then foreign minister Mr Sartaj Aziz writes in his book Between Dreams and Realities that General (retired) Majid Malik (then minister for Kashmir Affairs) asked him after a top-level briefing by General Musharraf and the brass to the political leadership on May 17, 1999:

“Do you think the prime minister knew about this operation already? I said I am not sure but I think he was not aware of the entire plan…in the earlier meeting on 12-13 March there was no mention of the involvement of troops under the Force Commander Northern Areas (FCNA). I am not aware of any other briefing…from a political standpoint I can understand why the prime minister accorded what amounted to ex-post facto approval even if he was not informed earlier. Regaining a slice of the Indian-occupied Kashmir is something no prime minister of Pakistan can object to in public.”

Aziz, while writing later that Nawaz Sharif extricated the military from the mess it got itself in, does not appear to clearly vouch for him and adds: “But one thing is certain. As Pakistan’s foreign minister, I was not aware of this operation until this morning, nor was I consulted about the possible diplomatic fallout of this dangerous operation. This is a very sad reflection on Pakistan’s governing structure, the civil-military relationship and the total absence of an infrastructure for decision making on national security issues.” Elsewhere Aziz records that Sharif even asked, “Will this lead to Srinagar?” ‘Inshallah’, many participants said simultaneously.”

General Musharraf says General Aziz has become ‘unhinged and religious’. Ironically, Musharraf has been called a ‘volatile’ man, specifically in the context of Kargil by BBC’s Owen Bennett Jones while Shuja Nawaz defines two of his associates at the time, Generals Aziz Khan and Mahmud Ahmed as devout religious men. These generals wanted to arm the irregulars in Kargil with Stinger missiles and backed off only when confronted by Majid Malik. And what should be sufficient to scare the living daylights out of anyone is that this combination of volatile and religious minds may actually have been moving towards ‘deployment of nuclear weaponry’, which according to Aziz was Bill Clinton’s concern at the July 4,1999 Blair House meeting with Sharif.

The brass, however, does not become ‘unhinged and orthodox’ automatically after leaving the service. In the chapter on Musharraf and Kargil, Shuja Nawaz notes that a ‘dedicated Islamist’ FCNA commander, Major General Zaheer-ul-Islami Abbasi, was previously removed from that post for his failed and unauthorised attempt to gain advantage in Kargil in 1990. Abbasi was later involved in a plot to kill his military superiors and overthrow the elected government of Benazir Bhutto.

Shuja Nawaz notes: “The effect of Ziaist Islamic teachings had taken hold by that time and continued to influence the military behaviour into the next decade, according to a former FCNA commander, Major General Irshadullah Tarar. ‘Cold military logic, he said, had been replaced by Islamic slogans and prayers. Rather than subjecting plans to military critiques and precision, they were often prefaced with phrases as: ‘By the Grace of God we will put 10,000 rounds over there and Inshallah the enemy will be routed!’”

Nawaz Sharif may have extricated the army from disaster in 1999 and in all likelihood averted an all-out war but he, like Z A Bhutto before him after the 1971 Bangladesh surrender, failed to make those responsible for the disaster answerable. He went on appeasing Musharraf, dined him at his ranch and took him along for pilgrimage to Makkah, only to be booted out by the general later. Sharif’s owning the Kargil operation after the fact did not keep Musharraf from going on a tour of garrisons and riling the rank and file up against the political leadership and blaming them for squandering a grand opportunity when he ‘got India by the neck’.

The only lesson of Kargil should have been to put those on the spot who calculated that somehow India would take it on the chin without upping the military and diplomatic ante. Not anticipating the response when bringing two nations to the brink of nuclear disaster would have been considered criminal elsewhere, but like Operation Gibraltar 1965 and Operation Searchlight 1971, the Kargil fiasco too was consigned to the ‘national security’ vault. Interestingly, India’s Kargil Commission completed its report in 2000.

The effective outcome of the Kargil disaster was perhaps what the loose cannons at the time had set out to do: interdiction of the road to peace with India, not the Dras-Kargil-Leh road. After 14 years, the region still remains mired in nightmares that resulted from the daydreaming, nay hallucinating Pakistani generals, who misread ground realities and perhaps started believing in the dogma they indoctrinated their irregulars with.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and tweets @mazdaki