Right Word | Stop Asking India For Restraint: The Lessons Of Kargil War

A power asked to underwrite the commons cannot simultaneously be lectured into absorbing terrorism at home.

In February 1999, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee boarded a bus to Lahore. This was a significant political risk for an Indian prime minister, of a kind they rarely took. Barely nine months after the nuclear tests at Pokhran and Chagai had provoked sanctions and condemnation from every Western capital, Vajpayee defied the instincts of many within his party and crossed the Wagah border.

He signed the Lahore Declaration, committing both countries to resolving their disputes peacefully, reducing the risk of accidental nuclear use and intensifying peace efforts in Jammu and Kashmir. India, in essence, demonstrated its commitment to peace by testing its weapons, declaring its doctrine and then extending a hand.

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What Vajpayee did not know, as he was being received with ceremony in Lahore, was that the plan to occupy the winter-vacated heights above Dras and Kargil had already been approved in Rawalpindi months earlier, and that soldiers of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry were moving onto them even as the two prime ministers spoke of peace. The handshake and the intrusion belonged to the same season. Any honest account of Indian strategic behaviour since 1999 has to begin with that juxtaposition because everything India did afterwards — the restraint it showed then and the restraint it has progressively abandoned since — flows from it.

The Pakistani Accounts

It is one of the ironies of the episode that the two most revealing accounts of Kargil both come from Pakistan. The first is Shireen Mazari’s The Kargil Conflict 1999: Separating Fact from Fiction (Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad, 2003), written with President Musharraf’s explicit support and unprecedented access to military data, and taken apart by A.G. Noorani in December 2003. Mazari, then director-general of the institute and one of Pakistan’s most prominent strategic commentators, set out to convince her country’s sceptical intelligentsia of three things: that Nawaz Sharif was very much in the loop on Kargil, that the operation was necessary and legitimate, and that it was not a military failure but was botched by Sharif’s panicky dash to Washington on 4 July 1999. As Noorani observed, she succeeded on the first count and failed on the rest.

Her success on the first count is devastating, and it is her own evidence that makes it so. The book records that Sharif was briefed at Skardu on 29 January 1999 and at Kel on 5 February, that the ISI briefed him on 12 March, and that the Military Operations Directorate at GHQ briefed him on 17 May, 2 June and 22 June. A meeting of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet heard the three service chiefs in Kargil on 2 July. The later pretence, cultivated by Sharif and his defenders after his ouster, that a rogue army had acted behind the civilian government’s back does not survive the official version published in Islamabad. At the same time, Mazari’s book reveals more than it intends.

Mushahid Hussain, Sharif’s own information minister, disclosed that the Cabinet as a body discussed Kargil only once, on 3 June, weeks after the fighting had begun. The picture that emerges is of a prime minister repeatedly briefed and a Cabinet kept ornamental, which is an indictment of Pakistan’s decision-making rather than an exoneration of anyone involved.

Where Mazari strains hardest is in making the operation itself legitimate, and here Noorani’s demolition is worth recalling in some detail because the method matters. She claimed the Karachi Agreement of July 1949 made it “clear" that Siachen belonged to Pakistan’s Northern Areas; the agreement says only that the ceasefire line runs “thence north to the glaciers", and the line was never demarcated. She claimed that UN mediator Owen Dixon’s 1950 report placed Siachen in the........

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