The Longest August (43 page)

“When the helicopter landed on the lawns of the Governor's House he [Vajpayee] was received by the three Service Chiefs led by the Chief of the Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf, who saluted him and extended his hand,” Hussain revealed later in an interview with
Frontline
, an Indian magazine. “So did the Air Chief Marshal, Pervez Mahdi Qureshi, and Admiral Fazi Bukhari, Chief of the Navy Staff. Then we all went inside the drawing room . . . for a tête-à-tête over tea. They [Service Chiefs] returned to Islamabad because [Foreign Minister] Sartaj Aziz was hosting the same night a banquet for the visiting Chinese Defense Minister, and the three Service Chiefs had to be there.”
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According to Hussain, “When the formal talks began between Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Sharif, Mr. Sharif began by smilingly thanking Mr. Vaj­payee, saying ‘You provided us an opportunity for becoming a nuclear power, because had you not gone nuclear, we would not have probably tested. So, it was India's tests, India's initiative on becoming a nuclear power
by coming out of the closet that forced Pakistan to respond in kind.' . . . Mr. Vajpayee merely smiled faintly at that.”
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Sharif went out of his way to ensure that Vajpayee did not encounter hostile crowds in the city. To abort the chance of their removal, the welcome banners for Vajpayee were displayed along the main thoroughfare, the Mall, only late at night on February 19. Whereas the mainstream political parties, including Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), welcomed the visit, the Jamaat-e Islami (JeI) called a general strike in Lahore on February 20. It was noteworthy that it was at the behest of Major General Ehsan ul Haq, the director-general of Military Intelligence, that JeI leader Qazi Hussein Ahmad had given the call for protest. And it was at his house in Rawalpindi that Ahmad hid to avoid arrest
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while hundreds of his followers were detained. This provided evidence of linkage between the intelligence agencies of the military and the Islamist groups. The origins of this unholy alliance went back to the rule of General Muhammad Zia ul Haq, who resorted to using Islamist organizations and their armed wings first against the Marxist regime in Kabul and then against Delhi in the Indian Kashmir.

Several ambassadors invited to the state banquet for Vajpayee at the historic Lahore Fort were blocked by the protesting demonstrators.

To leave nothing to chance, the next morning a helicopter flew Vaj­payee and his party to the lawns of the Iqbal Park, the site of the Minar-e Pakistan, barely two miles from the Governor's House. A fluted, tapering column of white marble, two hundred feet high, it rose from a marble cupola resting on a high platform—the result of eight years of expert workmanship in the 1960s—ringed by fluttering green-and-white national flags. This was the site where, on March 23, 1940, the All India Muslim League passed its resolution for a homeland for the Muslims of India.

Accompanied by his adopted daughter, Namita, Vajpayee read the printed legend, which stated in part: “This session of the Muslim League emphatically reiterates that the scheme of federation embodied in the Government of India Act, 1935, is totally unsuitable and unworkable in the peculiar conditions of this country and is altogether unacceptable to Muslim India.” In the visitors' book Vajpayee expressed “the deep desire for lasting peace and friendship'” that the people of India nursed toward Pakistan. “A stable, secure and prosperous Pakistan is in India's interest. Let no one in Pakistan be in doubt. India sincerely wishes Pakistan well.”
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Vajpayee's highly symbolic visit to the Minar-e Pakistan was meant to reassure Pakistanis that even Hindu nationalists in India no longer
questioned Pakistan's right to exist. This was a preamble to the signing of the Lahore Declaration by the two prime ministers. It stated that the possession of nuclear weapons by both nations required additional responsibility to avoid conflict and promote confidence-building measures. To avoid accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, the signatories agreed to give each other advance notice of ballistic missile flight tests and accidental or unexplained use of nuclear arms in order to stave off nuclear conflict. They also agreed to discuss their nuclear doctrines and related security issues.
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After the signing ceremony, Sharif hoped that “Pakistan and India will be able to live as the United States and Canada.”
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At the civic reception given by the city's mayor, Khwaja Ihsan Ahmed, the Indian prime minister said in Hindustani, “There has been enough of enmity. Now we must forge friendship. Achieving friendship will require difficult decisions. For the sake of friendship we have to talk about Kashmir.”
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These words were music to his listeners. Consequently, his trip was covered in glowing terms by the Pakistani media.

Across the border, too, politicians and the press welcomed the easing of bilateral tensions that had intensified in the wake of the nuclear tests. Had a Congress prime minister undertaken such a trip and held out an olive branch to Pakistan, he or she would have been mauled by the BJP for being “soft” on the unfriendly neighbor. It was left to India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, a BJP leader, to encapsulate the significance of Vajpayee's historic visit. He averred, rightly, that “like Richard Nixon's visit to China [in 1972], it was a kind of gesture that only a leader with strong conservative credentials could get away with.”
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President Clinton was quick to commend Vajpayee and Sharif for “demonstrating courage and leadership by coming together and addressing difficult issues that have long divided their countries.”
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What he did not know was that during the last of their three meetings, held on a one-on-one basis after the signing of the Lahore Declaration, the two premiers secretly agreed to open a backchannel to devise a mutually satisfactory formula on Kashmir, also agreeable to Kashmiris.

On February 28, Sharif used the hotline to inform Vajpayee that he was ready to receive his nominee, Rishi Kumar Mishra—a sixty-seven-year-old founding chair of the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based think-tank—in Islamabad to talk to his principal secretary, Anwar Zahid, on Kashmir. Mishra and Zahid met on March 3.

But a week later Zahid was dead. Sharif replaced him with Niaz Ahmad Naik, a former foreign secretary. During his five-day stay in Delhi
toward the end of March, Naik and Mishra hammered out a four-point set of guidelines. One of these points required Vajpayee and Sharif to refrain from asserting their official positions—India's insistence that there is nothing to discuss about Kashmir, a settled issue, and Pakistan's reference to the UN Security Council Resolution 47. They also decided to resolve the Kashmir dispute before the advent of the new millennium.

Unknown to them and their principals, however, Pakistan's military brass had other ideas.

Stab in the Back

While overt and covert diplomacy was in train to resolve the bitter Kashmir dispute, the Pakistan Army's top generals had secretly embarked on a plan to break the status quo in Kashmir in Islamabad's favor. The initiative seemed to have come from Lieutenant General Muhammad Aziz Khan, chief of the general staff, distinguished by his elegantly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard and a fixed, middle-distance gaze, in charge of operations and intelligence. As leader of the Sudhan clan dominant in the Poonch district of Pakistani-held Kashmir, he was emotionally interested in loosening Delhi's grip over 48 percent of Kashmir.

During and after the anti-Soviet jihad, Aziz Khan had supervised the establishment of training camps for the radical Harkat ul Ansar—renamed Harkat ul Mujahedin after being listed as a terrorist organization by Washington in 1997. It was committed to securing all of Kashmir for Pakistan. His idea was adopted immediately by General Musharraf, who turned it into his brainchild. Keen to keep it super-secret, he did not even share it with his friend Air Marshal Qureshi, chief of air staff.

Musharraf's coteries focused on capturing the Kargil region in the east-central part of India-held Kashmir as a means of diverting Indian troops from the western front abutting Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The plan was code-named Operation Badr. The sole highway linking Srinagar with Leh, the regional capital of Ladakh, passed through the Kargil region lying close to the Line of Control (LoC). Here jagged peaks soared to 16,500 feet, and average winter temperatures dropped to an incredible –60º Celsius (–76º Fahrenheit). Such harsh conditions had led India and Pakistan to reach an understanding in the mid-1970s to leave their pickets unmanned in the area from mid-September to mid-April.

In early spring 1999 Pakistan violated this informal agreement. Under cover of heavy artillery and mortar fire, Aziz Khan launched Operation Badr. He airlifted one thousand troops of the Northern Light Infantry into the Dras sector of Kargil and provided them with the logistical support of a further four thousand. They in turn recruited several hundred local volunteers, described as mujahedin, to perform logistical tasks. Later, the combat forces would increase to five thousand. They succeeded in occupying 132 Indian posts along the seventy-five-mile frontline, which had a depth of five to ten miles, covering three hundred square miles. Their tactical aim was to dominate the Indians' supply line to the Siachen Glacier and force them to withdraw from there.

In early May the returning Indian soldiers found Pakistanis occupying mountaintops overlooking the Kargil highway. The discovery came within weeks of the fall of the Vajpayee government on April 17, following its failure to win a vote of confidence in the lower house of Parliament by a single ballot. When the opposition failed to assemble a majority in the house, President Kicheri Raman Narayanan dissolved Parliament on April 26 and appointed Vajpayee caretaker prime minister. With fresh elections scheduled for September (after monsoons), Vajpayee found it politically profitable to take a tough line with Pakistan.

Delhi protested Islamabad's action in Kargil. But Pakistan claimed that it was the local Kashmiri freedom fighters—the mujahedin—who had occupied Kargil. On May 22 India launched air strikes at the enemy-occupied territory as part of its Operation Vijay (Hindi: Victory). But aerial bombing amid jagged peaks was only partly effective.

India then bolstered its infantry in the battle zone by moving troops from the Kashmir Valley—not the western front line, as Musharraf and his senior commanders had anticipated—to expel the Pakistanis from the occupied posts. The reported exclusion of Air Chief Qureshi from the original planning seemed to be the reason for his refusal to deploy warplanes or lend them to Musharraf, thus tying Musharraf's hands.
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During the seven-week war, Vajpayee and Sharif made repeated use of their hotline. And as early as June 3, President Clinton wrote to the two premiers to act with restraint. Pakistan's foreign minister Sartaj Aziz arrived in Delhi on June 11 with a plan to de-escalate the conflict by finding a way of seeking safe passage for the Kashmiri mujahedin.

Unluckily for Pakistan, that day India released intercepts of the telephone conversation between Musharraf, then visiting Beijing, and Aziz Khan in Rawalpindi. By so doing, Delhi demolished Pakistan's repeated
assertions of noninvolvement in the occupation of Kargil. The origins of this intelligence coup have been open to speculation. The claim of India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to have recorded the intercepts is suspect. It is most likely that Washington's lavishly funded NSA, working with the CIA, intercepted all of Aziz Khan's conversations and passed on the relevant ones with Musharraf to India's RAW as instructed by the White House. Clinton was keen to see the conflict end.
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Having indisputably established the Pakistani Army's occupation of Kargil, Vajpayee said in his third telephone conversation with Sharif on June 13: “You withdraw your troops and then we are prepared for talks.” The next day Vajpayee received a call from Clinton advising him against escalating the conflict by opening a new front in Kashmir. On June 15 Clinton telephoned Sharif urging him to withdraw his forces from Kargil. He found Sharif's response unsatisfactory.

Sharif was caught between a rock and a hard place. The senior generals had kept him in the dark, as he claimed later repeatedly. Amid much speculation on the subject, it could be deduced that they presented the plan to him long after mounting the offensive. It happened only on May 17—a fact confirmed by the presenter, Lieutenant General Jamshaid Gulzar Kiani, who described the briefing as “perfunctory.”
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With the two armies engaged in a hot war, Sharif was faced with a fait accompli. He could not disengage himself from the ongoing armed conflict, thereby highlighting his humiliating lack of control over the military high command.

To add to his woes, Sharif lost out to Vajpayee on the diplomatic front. The Indian leader won the backing not only of America but also of China, which called for the withdrawal of forces to prewar positions along the LoC and settling Indo-Pakistan border issues peacefully. Both Sharif and Vajpayee maintained ongoing contact with Clinton, but it paid better dividends to Vajpayee than Sharif.

At Vajpayee's behest, Clinton lobbied the G8 Summit—a meeting of a group of eight industrialized nations—in Cologne, Germany, on June 19 to take a stand on the Kargil War. Its communiqué issued the next day stated: “We regard any military action to change the status quo [in Kashmir] as irresponsible. We therefore call for an immediate end to these actions [and] restoration of the Line of Control.”
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Predictably, Vajpayee welcomed the G8 statement, and Sharif and his generals did not.

As the strain between Delhi and Islamabad intensified, Clinton dispatched General Anthony Zinni, commander in chief at US Central Command, and Gibson Lanpher, deputy assistant secretary of state, to
Islamabad on June 22. While India declared that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, Pakistan's information minister Hussain, appearing on the BBC World's
HARDtalk
program on June 23, refused to give the same guarantee, describing the idea of a nuclear war as “too far fetched.”
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