Deception by Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark

Author:Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2010-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Kargil operation was the brainchild of army chief Pervez Musharraf, who was obsessed with Kashmir. Having led an attack on Indian positions in Siachen in 1987, he had been among those out front in 1988 asking Bhutto to change the rules of war so as to enable the army to launch surprise attacks in Kashmir without her say-so. The strategy had been rejected and then put again to Bhutto directly by Musharraf in 1992, when she appointed him director general of military operations, and although he had been refused, Bhutto had allowed the general to send thousands of infiltrators into Kashmir, creating turmoil. The roots of this new war lay in October 1998, when Sharif had sacked General Karamat as his army chief.

General Karamat’s mistake had been to lobby for Pakistan to form a national security council, which the paranoid Sharif read as a bid by the military to take over politics. Having got rid of Karamat, the soldier least likely in Pakistan to mount a coup, Sharif was quickly convinced by his new man, General Musharraf, that India was “creeping forward” towards the line of control demarcating Pakistan-run Kashmir from that administered by India. Musharraf wrote: “We know the Indian army had procured Iarge quantities of high-atitude equipment, special weapons, and new snow scooters and snowmobiles.”8 In reality, India was not planning a pre-emptive strike and Sharif later insisted he was never consulted about the Kargil infiltration until it was a fait accompli. “We went to the Indians and they thought we were friends,” he recalled.9 “Then our army invaded and India called and said, ‘You’ve stabbed us in the back.’ But all the time it was me who was being stabbed in the back by Musharraf. I knew nothing about Kargil until after the soldiers had marched over the line of control. Then, when our soldiers were in place, I had to accept we were at war and of course we understood that everyone was now worried that things could go nuclear very easily.”

Whether Sharif was in reality pushed into a war by Musharraf, or was attempting to diminish his role in the crisis as Musharraf later claimed, when he flew to Washington on 4 July 1999, the Americans were unsure as to who was really in control in Islamabad. The Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a long-term Sharif ally, was asked to soften up Pakistan’s prime minister in the car ride over from Dulles airport. Bruce Riedel, at the National Security Council, recalled: “Bandar called me up and told me the PM was distraught. He was deeply worried about the direction the crisis was going towards, but equally worried about his own hold on power and the threat from his military chiefs.”10 The US was right to be worried, as Sharif doubted his ability to call off the war. Equally worrying, Sharif had brought his wife and children with him to the US, suggesting that he was prepared not to go back or that there might be no Pakistan to return to.

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