KARGIL AND KASHMIR
For fifty years Pakistan and India have quarreled over the fate of Kashmir. The
dispute is not a cold confrontation like that between the two superpowers over
Germany in the Cold War. Rather it is a hot confrontation, which has been punctuated
by three wars. Since the early 1990s it has been particularly violent with
almost daily firefights along the Line of Control (LOC) that divides the state and
within the valley between the Indian security forces and the Muslim insurgency.
Both India and Pakistan deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in the area.
In the spring of 1999 the Pakistanis sought to gain a strategic advantage in the
northern front of the LOC in a remote part of the Himalayas called Kargil. Traditionally
the Indian and Pakistani armies had withdrawn each fall from their most
advanced positions in the mountains to avoid the difficulties of manning them during
the winter and then returned to them in the spring. The two armies respected each
other’s deployment pattern and did not try to take advantage of this seasonal change.
In the winter of 1999, however, Pakistani backed Kashmir militants and regular
army units moved early into evacuated positions of the Indians, cheating on the
tradition. The Pakistani backed forces thus gained a significant tactical advantage
over the only ground supply route Indian forces can use to bring in supplies to the
most remote eastern third of Kashmir. By advancing onto these mountaintops overlooking
the Kargil highway, Pakistan was threatening to weaken Indian control over
a significant (yet barren) part of the contested province.
What was all the more alarming for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s hardline
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government was that the Pakistani military incursion
came after the Prime Minister had made a bold effort in early 1999 at reconciliation
with Pakistan by traveling by bus to the Pakistani city of Lahore for a summit
with Sharif. The spirit of Lahore was intended to be the mechanism for breaking
the two giants of south Asia out of their half century of violence and fear and
moving the subcontinent to a better future. Instead, the Indians felt betrayed, deceived
and misled by Sharif and were determined to recover their lost territory.
By late May and early June 1999 a serious military conflict was underway along a
hundred fifty kilometer front in the mountains above Kargil (some of which rise to a
height of 17,000 feet above sea level), including furious artillery clashes, air battles
and costly infantry assaults by Indian troops against well dug in Pakistani forces.
Pakistan denied its troops were involved, claiming that only Kashmiri militants were
doing the fighting — a claim not taken seriously anywhere.
The situation was further clouded because it was not altogether clear who was
calling the shots in Islamabad. Prime Minister Sharif had seemed genuinely interested
in pursuing the Lahore process when he met with Vajpayee and he had argued
eloquently with a series of American guests, including U.S.UN Ambassador Bill
Richardson, that he wanted an end to the fifty year old quarrel with India. His
military chief, General Pervez Musharraf, seemed to be in a different mold. Musharraf
was a refugee from New Delhi, one of the millions sent into exile in the 1947 catastrophe
that split British India and the subcontinent. He was said to be a hardliner on
Kashmir, a man some feared was determined to humble India once and for all.
We will probably never know for sure the exact calculus of decision making in
Islamabad. Each of the players has his own reasons for selling a particular version
of the process. Musharraf and Sharif have already put out different versions of
who said what to whom. Others like former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto have also given their views. What is clear is that the civil-military dynamic
between Sharif in Islamabad and Musharraf in Rawalpindi was confused and tense.
The United States was alarmed from the beginning of the conflict because of its
potential for escalation. We could all too easily imagine the two parties beginning to
mobilize for war, seeking third party support (Pakistan from China and the Arabs,
India from Russia and Israel) and a deadly descent into full scale conflict all along
the border with a danger of nuclear cataclysm.
The nuclear scenario was obviously very much on our minds. Since the surprise
Indian tests in May 1998 the danger of a nuclear exchange had dominated American
nightmares about South Asia. Clinton had spent days trying to argue Sharif out
of testing in response and had offered him everything from a State dinner to billions
in new U.S. assistance. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Central Command
chief General Tony Zinni, Assistant Secretary for South Asia Rick Inderfurth
and I had traveled to Islamabad to try to persuade him, but all to no avail.
After a few weeks of agonizing, Sharif had gone forward with his own tests citing
as a flimsy excuse an alleged Israel plot to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in
collusion with India. (I had the Israeli Chief of Staff deny categorically to the
Pakistani Ambassador in Washington any such plan the night before the tests but
that fact mattered little to Islamabad). In the new post-May era we confronted the
reality of two nuclear tested states whose missiles could be fired with flight times of
three to five minutes from launch to impact. One well-informed assessment concluded
that a Pakistani strike on just one Indian city, Bombay, with a small bomb
would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 alone.
Given these consequences for escalation, the U.S. was quick to make known our
view that Pakistan should withdraw its forces back behind the Line of Control immediately.
At first Rick Inderfurth and Undersecretary Thomas Pickering conveyed
this view privately to the Pakistani and Indian ambassadors in Washington in
late May. Secretary Albright then called Sharif two days later and General Tony
Zinni, who had a very close relationship with his Pakistani counterparts, also called
Chief of Army Staff General Musharraf. These messages did not work. So we
went public and called upon Pakistan to respect the LOC. I laid out our position in
an on the record interview at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. The President
then called both leaders in mid-June and sent letters to each pressing for a
Pakistani withdrawal and Indian restraint.
The Pakistanis and Indians were both surprised by the U.S. position: Pakistan
because Islamabad assumed the U.S. would always back them against India and
India because they could not believe the U.S. would judge the crisis on its merits,
rather than side automatically with its long time Pakistani ally. Both protagonists
were rooted in the history of their half-century conflict and astounded that the U.S.
was not bound by the past.
For the previous fifty years, with a few exceptions, the United States had been tied
to Pakistan, while India had been aligned with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Pakistan had been the take off point for U2s flying over Russia and for Henry
Kissinger’s trip to China. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s
Pakistan had been the U.S.’ critical ally in aiding the mujahedin freedom fighters
against communism, along with Saudi Arabia. In 1971 the Nixon Administration
had “tilted” toward Pakistan and against India during the war that led to Bangladesh’s
freedom. Although U.S.-Pakistani relations had cooled significantly after 1990 when
the U.S. determined Islamabad was building a nuclear arsenal (leading to an aid
suspension), the popular and elite perception in both countries was that the U.S. was
more pro-Pakistani than pro-Indian. The imposition of tough sanctions on both
countries in 1998 (so-called Glenn sanctions) after they tested nuclear weapons had
not altered the perception of American bias for Pakistan.
