The Longest August (49 page)

The Bush administration remained equally committed to maintaining a delicate balance in its relations with Islamabad and Delhi. It made sure not to express publicly its shock at discovering that most of the literature on guerrilla training that the Pentagon and the CIA seized at fifty sites in post-Taliban Afghanistan pertained to the training of jihadists for liberating Kashmir under the supervision of Musharraf as Pakistan's director general of Military Operations.
42
Powell persisted in pursuing the two neighbors to pull back from the brink of war. He succeeded, but the resulting thaw proved transient.

16: Nuclear-Armed Twins,
Eyeball-to-Eyeball

The Indo-Pakistan thaw ended on May 14, 2002. On that day three armed Kashmiri militants in Indian army fatigues boarded a bus at Vijaypur in the Jammu region destined for Jammu city. Just before the army camp at Kaluchak, they stopped the vehicle and sprayed it with gunfire, leaving seven people dead. Then they entered the army residential camp and killed thirty more by lobbing hand grenades and firing their automatic weapons, before they were shot dead. This daring attack on a military facility roiled the Indian government as never before.

Eyeball-to-Eyeball

On May 19 the Indian chief of army staff (COAS), General Sundararajan Padmanabhan, centralized command of the paramilitary forces, including the Border Security Force, posted along the international frontier, and the Central Reserve Police Force. That same day the Indian Navy took operational control of the coast guard. All Indian merchant ships were placed “on alert” and directed to file daily location reports to the navy. Soon after, the navy redeployed its warships from their eastern fleet home base in Vishakapatnam to the Arabian Sea, closer to Pakistan. Delhi's strategic aim was to assert total control of the sea and deny movement to Pakistani ships and submarines.

On May 22 Indian premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee asserted that the time for a “decisive fight” had come and that India needed to be ready for
sacrifices while reassuring his fellow citizens that it would be a fight to victory.
1
He ordered the air force to hit training camps inside Pakistan-held Kashmir. He was told that the military lacked enough laser-guided bombs and night-vision pods to accomplish the task. His government approached the United States for fresh supplies. But President George W. Bush, anxious to cool the dangerous upsurge in the already fervid Delhi-Islamabad relations, refused to oblige. Vajpayee then turned to Israel, which agreed. But it was June 5 by the time these munitions and night-vision pods arrived in three C-130J Hercules transporters at Delhi's Palam airport, along with Amos Yaron, the director-general of Israel's defense ministry.
2

Alarmed by Delhi's military moves, Bush publicly called on Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf on May 25 to stop infiltration into Indian Kashmir. He resorted to public diplomacy after the brush-off that Colonel David Smith, the US Army attaché in Islamabad, repeatedly received from Pakistan's generals. They would often tell him: “We are the only ones that you can rely on to get these guys in Afghanistan—you can't do it without our help, and we're helping you in every way we can. You're putting tremendous pressure on us, and you're doing nothing on the Indian side.”
3
Bush's tactic worked. He got an assurance from Musharraf that the militants' infiltration into Indian Kashmir had ceased. The White House passed on the message to Delhi. Two days later Musharraf repeated his promise to curb jihadist organizations. But Vajpayee's cabinet had lost trust in his word.

By the end of the month, Padmanabhan had moved eight of the ten strike divisions of the army to jumping-off points near the border. The Twenty-First Strike Force had advanced toward Akhnoor in the Jammu region and set up a forward command post. Each of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Corps stationed in Kashmir was reinforced with additional armored and infantry brigades to be able to switch from a defensive posture to an offensive one. While maintaining nine divisions in a holding formation, Musharraf and Vice COAS General Muhammad Yusaf Khan moved an attack force of armored and motorized infantry divisions into combat readiness positions. They redeployed two infantry divisions based in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province to the eastern borders. They augmented the Kashmir front by deploying two brigades of the Rawalpindi-based Tenth Corps. Equally, they reinforced the troops along the Indian border in Punjab and Sindh.
4

Anglo-American Exodus: An Effective Damper

Washington feared that India's impending cross-border attacks on the extremists' training camps in Pakistani Kashmiri would escalate to an exchange of nuclear missiles by the warring neighbors. Its fears were justified. The leaders of these sparring nations lacked reliable, comprehensive knowledge of each other's nuclear doctrine—that is, under what circumstances the highest official would unleash atom bombs. Soon after the attack on India's Parliament House in December 2001, John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, informed Bush's War Cabinet that intelligence analysts believed that given the confusion among decision makers in Delhi and Islamabad as to when and how a conventional war could escalate to nuclear confrontation, there was a serious risk of the first nuclear strike since August 1945.
5

The statements made so far by Indian and Pakistani leaders did not add up to a coherent, comprehensive nuclear doctrine. “We have formally announced a policy of Non-First-Use,” Vajpayee said in December 1998. “We are also not going to enter into an arms race with any country. Ours will be a minimum credible deterrent, which will safeguard India's security, the security of one-sixth of humanity, now and into the future.”
6
This was in contrast to the stance taken by Pakistan during the May–July 1999 Kargil War, when its spokesmen refused to give the same guarantee.
7

On August 17, 1999, the National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, appointed by Vajpayee, issued a draft doctrine. “The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons by any State or entity against India and its forces,” it stated. “India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.” The comprehensive document covered nuclear forces, credibility and survivability, command and control, and security and safety.
8
But in his interview to the
Hindu
on November 29, foreign minister Jaswant Singh said that it was “not a policy document” of the government because the advisory board's authority was legally nebulous. All the same, he went on to explain that “minimum credible deterrence” mentioned in it was a question of “adequacy,” not numbers. He described the concept as “dynamic,” which was “firmly rooted in strategic environment, technical imperatives and national security needs.”
9

On his part, Musharraf tried to project a moderate stance on nuclear arms. “Pakistan, unlike India, does not have any pretensions to regional or
global power status,” he said in May 2000. Three months earlier he had established the Strategic Plan Division in the National Command Authority and appointed Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai its director-general. Kidwai became the official spokesman on Islamabad's nuclear policy. In October 2001 he outlined its nuclear doctrine with the preamble that “It is well known that Pakistan does not have a ‘No First Use Policy.'” Nuclear weapons were aimed solely at India, he declared. In case that deterrence failed, they would be used if India attacked Pakistan and conquered a large part of its territory (spatial threshold); or it destroyed a large part of either its land or air forces (military threshold); or it proceeded to strangle Pakistan economically (economic threshold); or it pushed Pakistan into political destabilization or created a large-scale internal subversion (domestic destabilization threshold).
10
Among these scenarios, the most likely was the spatial threshold. This situation was open to wide-ranging speculation, and the uncertainty caused as much anxiety in Delhi as it did in Washington.

A report by Washington's Defense Intelligence Agency in early May 2000 estimated that in the worst-case scenario, an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war could result in eight to twelve million fatalities initially, followed by many more millions later from radiation poisoning.
11
Alarmed by this scenario, the United States and Britain advised around sixty thousand Americans and twenty thousand Britons, including many thousands of business executives, to start leaving India beginning on May 31. Most diplomats and their families departed for home. The American embassy and the British high commission in Islamabad gave the same advice to their nationals in Pakistan.

The prospect of Delhi being hit by a Pakistani atom bomb was considered so plausible that the aides of US ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in the embassy compound to survive a nuclear strike. But when they realized that those in the bunker would be killed by the effects of the nuclear blast, they abandoned the idea.
12

As Vajpayee flew to Almaty, Kazakhstan, on June 3 to attend the first summit Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the Defense Ministry in Delhi said, “India does not believe in the use of nuclear weapons.” That day, answering questions by reporters in Almaty on whether he would rule out the first use of nuclear arms, Musharraf said that “the possession of nuclear weapons by any state implies that they will be used under some circumstances.” He failed to spell
out these circumstances. At the summit, exchanging stony stares across a table, Vajpayee and Musharraf angrily blamed each other for five-and-a-half decades of conflict between their countries. “Nuclear powers should not use nuclear blackmail,” remarked Vajpayee stiffly. Concerted efforts by Russian president Vladimir Putin and Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev to bring about a meeting between the feuding protagonists failed, with the Indian leader insisting that Pakistan had to end its sponsorship of cross-border terrorism first.
13

The acute gravity of the crisis was summed up by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Progress is going to be measured day by day,” he said on June 5. “In a tense situation, lack of war is the goal. Reduction of tension is the goal. And while it remains tense, it remains delicate. War is not inevitable.”
14

That day the United States and Britain urged their citizens to leave India and Pakistan
immediately
. The raised travel alert came in the wake of Islamabad rejecting Delhi's offer of joint border patrols in Kashmir. Stock markets in India and Pakistan fell precipitately. That shook the two governments, more so the one in Delhi. The pro-business, center-right cabinet led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wanted very much to propel the country beyond the sluggish GDP expansion rates of the past. The abrupt loss of Western confidence in the improving health of the Indian economy gave Vajpayee pause.

Later, Brajesh Mishra, a Vajpayee loyalist who served as the national security adviser, put a spin on the premier's retreat from starting an armed conflict with Pakistan: “We almost went [to war] in May 2002, but Prime Minister Vajpayee, when he faced the final step, concluded that, at the end of a long political career, he wanted to be remembered as a man of peace.” For many Pakistani senior commanders, Vajpayee's decision offered cast-iron evidence that nuclear deterrence works. “Suppose Pakistan had been non-nuclear in 2002,” a Pakistani general told Steve Coll of the
New Yorker
. “There might have been a war.”
15

On June 6, Jaswant Singh said that his country would not use nuclear weapons first, whereas Musharraf reiterated that he would not renounce Pakistan's right to use nuclear weapons first. For India and other nations, the crucial unknown was the spatial threshold that would trigger Pakistan's activation of its atom bombs. Many defense experts surmised it would be the impending loss of Lahore, only fifteen miles from the Indian border. Others put the red line for the spatial threshold at Pakistan's sprawling Indus River basin.

Back from the Nuclear Brink

On June 15 Delhi accepted Musharraf's public pledge to end militant infiltration into India. It did so after the intercepts by its intelligence agencies showed that the Rawalpindi-based army general headquarters had ordered the Tenth Corps commander to stop infiltration across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. There were confirmed reports of the Musharraf government closing some militant training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. In return, India ordered its warships to sail away from the Pakistani shoreline and started reducing the presence of its army troops along its international border with Pakistan. On June 26 Washington officially announced that the high tension of late May and early June had subsided.
16

Since then, no threat of armed conflict on such a grand scale has emerged again, even though the underlying causes of the 2001–2002 eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation—jihadist terrorism, abiding mutual distrust, and an ill-defined system of mutual nuclear deterrence—remain in place.

Those who put a positive spin on this frightening episode argued that the 2001–2002 war scare was a rerun of the three-week Cuban missile crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962. Just as in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis period, the two superpowers ground nuclear deterrence into a mix of military restraint, diplomatic patience, and negotiations about underlying differences, so too did the nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after the Kaluchak crisis. In other words, Indian leaders learned to react defensively, by nonmilitary means, when faced with continuing jihadist terrorist strikes.

There was a major difference between the events in October 1962 and May–June 2002. In the earlier case President John F. Kennedy negotiated directly by a hotline with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. But in the confrontation between the nuclear-armed Delhi and Islamabad, the negotiations between the rivals were channeled through Washington.

The United States enjoyed the goodwill of both—albeit for diverse reasons. Pakistan was an almost indispensable member of Bush's coalition to defeat global terror, which stemmed from Afghanistan and the tribal belt along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, whereas India was a long-time victim of terrorism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in early May India and America carried out a weeklong joint naval exercise code-named Exercise Malabar in the Arabian Sea off the southern seaport of Kochi, far away from Pakistan.
17