Guess who first approached America and asked Bill Clinton to intervene.
Indian Army suffering badly in Kargil:
29 June 1999 WASHINGTON D.C.: A report in Washington says that India has suffered so badly in Kargil at the hands of Pakistani military forces that the only way out for it is to attack Pakistan on a large scale. The spectacle of hundreds of bodybags of Indian soldiers coming down from the mountains in Kargil was creating an intense public pressure on the Government in New Delhi to react. “New Delhi will be compelled to attack Pakistan if Islamabad failed to withdraw its forces from the Indian side of the Line of Co
ntrol. This was the sum and substance of an alarming letter that Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee wrote to President Clinton,” The Washington Post reports. The contents of this letter were conveyed to Clinton in Geneva. According to the newspaper, as he was delivering a speech to the International Labour Organisation, his National Security Adviser Sandy Berger “slipped out to receive the alarming letter.” The letter stoked rising American fears that India, having lost 100s of troops, would “storm across” the ceasefire line that divides Kashmir or open a second front elsewhere on its border with Pakistan. Such an escalation could effectively scuttle the Administration’s dwindling hopes of a “constructive new relationship” between South Asia’s two new nuclear powers. The Vajpayee letter seems to have had an immediate impact as the Administration’s foreign policy engine was thrown into high hear.
