The Longest August (44 page)

On the ground, the Indian forces, using Swedish-made Bofors self-propelling artillery guns and laser-guided aerial bombs, were making headway, rising up the heights steadily to make a final assault to wrest the peaks from the enemy. An insider view of Pakistan's position was provided fourteen years later in
Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak?
(Urdu: How Long This Silence?), a book by (Retired) Lieutenant General Shahid Aziz, then head of the analysis wing of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He wrote that the Pakistani troops were told by their commanders that no serious response would come from the Indians. “But it did—wave after wave, supported by massive air bursting artillery and repeated air attacks,” he noted. “Cut off and forsaken, our posts started collapsing one after the other, though the [commanding] general publicly denied it.”
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As the lead military planner, Musharraf took a decisive first step in Kargil, but, fatally, he had no exit strategy—an unforgivable failing.

Sharif feared that, faced with an imminent defeat, Musharraf would open new fronts in Kashmir, resulting in robust responses from Delhi, which would escalate to a full-fledged war with India—a disastrous scenario he felt compelled to avoid. As for Musharraf, having considered the worst scenario in the case of an all-out war with India, he started preparing for the deployment of the nuclear option—without even bothering to inform Sharif. He seemed unaware that he could not mask the activity he had unleashed at Sargodha Air Force Base where nuclear-tipped missiles were stored, from Washington's spy satellites.

The White House was monitoring the battle between the nuclear-armed neighbors closely. Just as India prepared to launch a three-pronged offensive to capture the mountaintops in Kargil on July 2, a nervous Sharif telephoned Clinton appealing for “American intervention immediately to stop the fighting and to resolve the Kashmir issue.” Clinton was equivocal. So Sharif used his Saudi card. He made an urgent call to Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States since 1983, to help. Bandar intervened on behalf of Sharif, who made yet another call to the White House.
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In Washington, Clinton had been alarmed to read the intercepts of satellite overheads obtained by the NSA showing that Musharraf had
ordered the unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles at Sargodha Air Force Base for possible use in a wider war with India, most likely without the knowledge of Nawaz Sharif.
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This was confirmed by Bruce Riedel, then senior director at the National Security Council and special assistant to Clinton on South Asia, in a policy paper he presented almost three years later.
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Eager to prevent a nuclear holocaust in South Asia, Clinton summoned Sharif and Vajpayee to Washington for talks. Mentioning previous commitments, Vajpayee declined, aware that a tripartite meeting in the United States on Kargil would compromise the long-held Indian position that Kashmir was a bilateral, not an international, issue. He had his eye fixed unflinchingly on the general election in September.

At Rawalpindi's Chaklala airport, Sharif was seen off by Musharraf, implying that the prime minister's mission had the backing of the military. TV viewers had no idea that Sharif was traveling to Washington with his family. When they arrived at Dulles Airport on July 3, they were picked up by Prince Bandar. On his way to the prince's electronically guarded, sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Washington, Sharif reportedly told his host that he was worried about his life and that he had brought his family along because he was not sure whether he would be the prime minister by the end of his mission.

Fourth of July 1999 at Blair House like None Before

“Gentlemen, thank you very much for gracing our Independence Day.” This is how Clinton, straining to smile, greeted Sharif and his team at Blair House, the presidential guest house, on July 4, 1999.
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Neither Clinton nor any of his team, which included National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Bruce Riedel, was pleased by having had to tackle urgently a war-and-peace issue in South Asia on the most celebrated secular holiday in the American calendar.

Progress was slow because the counterparty—Vajpayee—was missing. Without his say-so, a cease-fire—the ultimate objective of the Blair House meeting—could not be achieved. So fax machines were put to work. As the draft of a joint communiqué by Clinton and Sharif went through several stages, heavy fax traffic ensued between Blair House and the Indian prime minister's office.

As Riedel noted:

The Prime Minister [Sharif] told Clinton that he wanted desperately to find a solution that would allow Pakistan to withdraw with some cover. Without something to point to, Sharif warned ominously, the fundamentalists in Pakistan would move against him and this meeting would be his last with Clinton. . . . Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was? Did Sharif know his military was preparing their nuclear tipped missiles? Sharif seemed taken aback and said only that India was probably doing the same. The President reminded Sharif how close the US and the Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba. Did Sharif realize that if even one bomb was dropped . . . Sharif finished his [Clinton's] sentence and said it would be a catastrophe.

(This warranted a pause for everyone in the room to digest the ghastly consequences.)

The President was getting angry. He told Sharif that he had asked repeatedly for Pakistani help to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan. Sharif had promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorism. [Clinton's] draft statement would also mention Pakistan's role in supporting terrorists in Afghanistan and India. Was that what Sharif wanted, Clinton asked? Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action? Did he realize how crazy that was? You've put me in the middle today, set the US up to fail and I won't let it happen. Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.
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During the session, as the drafting of the communiqué inched forward with continued inputs from Delhi, Sharif whispered to Clinton, “They will get me, Mr President.” Clinton was unmoved. “Yours is a rogue army,” he rejoined. “Keep them under civilian oversight.” To which came a quick response from Sharif: “It is not the army. It is [a] few dirty eggs. They will meddle to cover up the Kargil debacle.”
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These “dirty eggs” were the so-called Dirty Five: Musharraf; Aziz Khan; Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, a broad-shouldered man with a walrus mustache who commanded the Tenth Corps in Rawalpindi; and Aziz Khan's immediate subordinates, Lieutenant General Aziz, director-general (DG) of Operations, and Major General Ehsan ul Haq, DG of Military Intelligence (MI).

The negotiating teams broke for lunch and rest. While Clinton stayed at Blair House, Sharif went to his hotel. That gave Clinton a chance to have a proper conversation with Vajpayee over the phone.
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When the two principals met again, Clinton placed a statement on the table. Sharif left the room to consult his advisers. He agreed to his troops' withdrawal to the LoC. “The mood changed in a nanosecond,” recalled Riedel. “Clinton told Sharif that they had tested their personal relationship hard that day but they had reached the right ending.”
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Later they posed for photographs at the White House.

The Clinton-Sharif statement said that steps would be taken to restore the unspecified LoC, thus facilitating a cease-fire that would follow as a preamble to the resumption of bilateral talks as the best forum to resolve all Indo-Pakistan disputes. Sharif parted with Clinton saying he felt he had done “the right thing for Pakistan and the world,” but he was not certain “the Army would see it that way.”
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His hunch would prove prescient, leading to his overthrow three months later.

There was of course no mention of the secret deal struck between Clinton and Sharif during their separate one-on-one parley after the formal talks. Clinton agreed to ease US economic sanctions against Islamabad and recommend to the IMF not to withhold its next loan to Pakistan. In return, Sharif promised to actively cooperate with Washington in apprehending bin Laden.
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On his return home, Sharif announced the Pakistan Army's withdrawal from Kargil while justifying Operation Badr, which, he argued, had drawn the attention of the international community to the Kashmir dispute. The pullback started on July 11, when the cease-fire became effective. Three days later Vajpayee declared Operation Vijay a success. The Kargil Way war consumed the lives of 527 Indian soldiers (versus Pakistan's claim of 1,600) and 450 Pakistani troops (versus India's claim of 700). The loss of one Indian aircraft was puny.

All along Vajpayee was fixated on the general election, when he wanted to present himself as a resolute leader committed to having peaceful relations but only on India's terms. In the final analysis, Pakistan's withdrawal to the LoC was achieved through the intervention of a US president. But Vajpayee and his defense and foreign ministers attributed it exclusively to Delhi's strong military response to the occupation of Kargil, combined with secret diplomacy conducted through the confidantes of the two prime ministers. Breaking with protocol, Vajpayee revealed that on June 27 he had told Sharif's emissary Naik in Delhi that “unless Pakistani forces leave Kargil, no discussions on any matter can take place.”
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These tactics ramped up the electoral chances of the BJP-led NDA.

A Spate of Popular War Dramas in India

In India, the public perception of the latest fight with Pakistan was formed differently from the earlier armed conflicts. In the past it was shaped exclusively by the broadcasting media run by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. But following the Supreme Court's ruling ending the state monopoly in broadcasting in 1995, this changed. The subsequent competition between several private Indian radio and TV channels, specializing in news and comment, led to the sensationalizing of war news. As a consequence, Vajpayee's announcement of Operation Vijay defeating Pakistan's Operation Badr received thunderous coverage.

The situation in Pakistan was starkly different. With its monopoly over the broadcasting media, the government controlled the news about the Kargil upheaval, attributing the fighting there to the mujahedin of Kashmir, who had taken up arms. But given the arrival of satellite and cable television in their country, Pakistanis had the option of seeking news from non-Pakistani sources. Their choices covered not only the BBC and All India Radio but also privately run Indian TV channels. Besides the accuracy (or otherwise) of the reports from the frontline, their presentation was far more engaging than the staid fare being offered by the state-controlled electronic media of Pakistan. With the complicity of Pakistani forces in Kargil becoming public knowledge, and Sharif agreeing to military withdrawal to the LoC, the credibility of Pakistan's media fell steeply.

Commenting on the media coverage of the Kargil War a decade later, Major General Muhammad Azam Asif lamented the fact that the Pakistani media gave up without putting up a fight against enemy media invasion. The Indian media created war hysteria using cricketers, film actors, and popular personalities to boost the morale of their troops. “Pakistan decided to withdraw due to low morale of troop's heavy causalities and mounting international pressure,” he added. “It [Pakistani media] lacked offensive posture and well coordinated and planned themes to raise the morale of the troops or to shield them against Indian propaganda.”
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In India, the Kargil conflict led to a spate of songs, documentaries, movies, and stage dramas. Within months of the war's end, the five-year-old, Mumbai-based, foursome rock band Pentagram released India's first exclusive-to-Internet song, “The Price of Bullets,” about the conflict. It featured famous Muslim poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar. Sahara TV aired a series, titled
Mission Fateh: Real Stories of Kargil Heroes
, chronicling the Indian Army's missions in a triumphalist mode.

In February 2002, Mumbai was the venue of
Fifty Day War
, a 15 million rupees ($330,000) gigantic theatrical production with one hundred performers, about the Kargil conflict. It was presented in a six-hundred-seat outdoor theatre-in-the round, with seats that revolved 360 degrees around the action of the play. Directed by Aamir Raza Husain, the play featured vast sets along with brilliant lighting, thundering sound, and the smell of gunpowder produced by actual explosions, and recreated the frontlines of the Kargil war in three dimensions—an extraordinary feat in the history of theater. “The play tries to break the conventional paradigms of time and space by transposing audiences from one set to another,” Husain told the
Financial Express
.
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As before, Bollywood producers tried to capitalize on India's successful military venture. In 2003,
LoC Kargil
, a four-hour-long Bollywood film, recreating many events of the war, set another record.

Unlike earlier war movies, which were in essence recruitment tools for the Indian Army, the fictionalized account of the Kargil conflict, as depicted in the expensively produced
Vaishya
(Hindi: Aim), released on the fifth anniversary of the Kargil War, broke new ground. Its protagonist was a wayward young man, Karan Shergill—played by superstar Hrithik Roshan—who realizes that the aim of his life is to join the army and retake a post captured by Pakistan-backed Kashmiri freedom fighters in the strategic heights of the Indian Kashmir. “All this is quite well done, without the usual excessive jingoism,” noted Ihsan Aslam, a Cambridge-based Pakistani historian, after seeing the movie. “There is, of course, a certain feel-good factor for the Indian viewers, but the Pakistanis don't come out entirely bad. . . . The latter part of the film has a very newsy feel because of [the lead female] Priety Zinta's role as a TV war reporter. The war scenes, all shot in the dark, are realistic as is the depiction of death and injury.”
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The script was written by the renowned Javed Akhtar and directed by his son, Farhan. It was a box office hit, making a profit of almost $1 million, a colossal sum in India.