Kargil Revisited

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ramana
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Kargil Revisited - I

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http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/June-2003/9/EDITOR/op3.asp

The Kargil Conspiracy
by A.H. Amin
There is general consensus that military juntas are convenient agents of change employed by larger powers to bring desired policy changes in smaller countries. This is more true for Pakistan where the USA has had a record of using the military juntas as agents of change. Ayub was cultivated in the 1950s and proved his worth as USA?s collaborator par excellence in destroying democracy in Pakistan.
The Zia coup was US inspired and had complete US blessings since the USA viewed Mr Z.A. Bhutto as a dangerously charismatic leader capable of uniting the Islamic/Third World. Thus Operation Foul Play of 5th July 1977. When Liaquat Ali Khan the then prime minister of Pakistan warned the US Ambassador to Pakistan that the Graham Report on Kashmir must be presented in the UN by 15th October 1951 he was assassinated on 16th October 1951. Raja Ghazanfar Ali then Pakistan?s ambassador to Iran noted that Liaquat had planned an Islamic conference to discuss Kashmir, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Palestine.
Keeping this background in mind the fact that a deliberate conspiracy with a design to control and manipulate Pakistan?s geopolitical future with Kargil as the key point cannot be ruled out. It is possible that Kargil may have been designed as the catalyst to create a civil-military political conflict in Pakistan and as a future launching pad of a military coup.
In 1998 Nawaz Sharif often criticized as a man with limited IQ took one of Pakistan?s most decisive strategic command decisions defying USA, not appeasing it as Musharraf took in September 2001. It is on record that Nawaz Sharif did not surrender on one telephone call from US president like General Musharraf did and defied US threats not to go on with the nuclear tests despite four telephone call threats from US president Clinton and resolutely went on with Pakistan?s Nuclear blasts. Recently Dr Qadeer Khan speaking at a function in Karachi on 3rd April 2003 stated that Nawaz even refused an offer of bribe from Clinton wherein Clinton had offered to deposited 100 Million USD in Nawaz Sharif?s personal bank account.
All evidence proves that Nawaz Sharif?s decision to go on with the Nuclear blast was a political decision and the role of the armed forces was merely that of a technocrat consultant. It appears that from May 1998 the US policy makers came to the conclusion that Nawaz was an irresponsible man and must be taken to task.
By September 1998 it appears that the Americans had succeeded in their manipulations. The then Army chief General Karamat at this stage started pressurizing the political leadership to include the army in the political decision making.
Nawaz had done his homework well. With the ISI firmly under the Prime Minister?s command under Lieutenant General Ziauddin one senior officer Zulfiqar presently chairman WAPDA had been sent to Ukraine to find details of kickbacks given to General Jahangir Karamat in the Ukrainian tank deal with Pakistan. Full evidence was prepared of Jahangir?s complicity in taking kickbacks. Once Karamat asserted his political ambitions Nawaz threatened him with prosecution for taking kickbacks. Thus Jahangir Karamat?s unceremonial exit from power. USA?s likely agent of change had been removed.
Now comes Kargil. With the appointment of Musharraf as army chief the more Machiavellian geopolitical moves were planned. The men who planned Kargil military operation using Pakistan?s 80 Brigade to infiltrate Indian positions in Kargil Sector were instruments of a grand conspiracy to destabilize Pakistan?s political government which had defied the USA and wanted to make peace with India without US involvement.
The ambition of General Musharraf and his team while planning Kargil had infected the entire military thought process. The Kargil plan was adventurist, superpower manipulated and its intrinsic violence penetrated and cut open the very arteries of the Pakistani state, spurting out in civil military strife and finally a military coup.
The heroes of those rocky pinnacles are all dead. Sacrificed in vain. Diabolically launched into the valleys of death by men who now are dead earnest to make peace with India but propelled by promiscuous and unadulterated ambition, wanted to sabotage Nawaz Sharif?s Lahore Peace move in 1999. Once Vajpayee came to Lahore on Nawaz?s initiative in 1999 he was a vampire but once Musharraf went to Agra later Vajpayee was an angel.
At the super power level Kargil was planned with a view to ridicule Pakistan?s political leadership, embarrass the Pakistani prime minister and to create a civil military divide aimed at a military coup in Pakistan. Why? Someone may ask naively. Because the USA views the military junta in Third World countries as a more reliable collaborator agent of change than a prime minister who repeatedly defies US threats of retaliation and a 100 Million USD bribery offer.
Thus Kargil operation was launched with an ulterior motive to divide Pakistan?s political and military leaderships. It is an unfortunate fact of history that Nawaz Sharif was not aided by a good defence analysis team. Those who were with him and supposedly considered defence experts were either in secret league with Nawaz?s handpicked military man or too naive to understand the military intricacies of Kargil.
Kargil in the final analysis stands out as the meticulously planned conspiracy catalyst employed to trigger a chain of events that led to the primacy of the military junta on 12 October 1999. So far the Americans have succeeded. The Pakistani Nuclear programme is in safe hands. Pakistan, the beautiful woman in the words of General Habibullah has sold herself to, not the highest bidder, but the only bidder at a relatively low price.
The aim of Kargil Operation was not to conquer Kashmir but to conquer Islamabad and that was accomplished on 12th October 2002. 500 men sacrificed for the capture of the capital of an Islamic state with nuclear weapons.
The military junta has divided the society. It has bought the pillars of state, balkanized the political parties, marginalized the society introducing unjust ethnic domination in the army, reduced the Sindhis into a political minority, pitched Punjab against Sindh by Machiavellian agreement to Thal Canal and is all set to strike a deal with India which would ensure that Pakistan?s military junta is given a permanent share in the political hierarchy simply because it is USA?s best and most reliable agent of change. Life goes on.
---------------
The signinficance of the above link is that some people in TSP are now suggesting that Kargil happened with uncle's blessing.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Rangudu »

Articles by former Pak Army officer Shaukat Qadir on Kargil.

An Analysis of the Kargil Conflict 1999 - RUSI Journal - UK

Qadir wrote a four part series on Kargil in the Pak paper "Daily Times"
Part 1 - Why did Kargil Happen?

The RAND Corporation, one of the most influential think tanks in Washington D.C., recently published a study on the Kargil war in 1999 titled, “Kargil: War under the Nuclear Umbrella”. From the Pakistani perspective, it is potentially the most damaging analysis of the events. It combines some realities with believable half-truths and some misperceptions, which appear very reasonable, to reach erroneous, but believable conclusions.

The very title is a misperception. It implies that Pakistan initiated the war under the misconception that India would be deterred by Pakistan’s nuclear capability and its response to hostilities would thus remain confined. But this, and many other misperceptions and erroneous conclusions stem from the basic question of why did Kargil occur at a time when the Lahore process had gone underway and the international community had pinned its hopes on it? This article will attempt to answer that.

Did the military merely have an inherent mistrust of the Indians and executed the plan despite the approaching peace initiative merely on that basis, or did it have a more sinister motive? Did the military plan to sabotage a possible political solution to outstanding issues with India, because it was not in its interest to make peace with India? Or was this intended as a precursor to the inevitable military coup in October 1999? Admittedly, these and many other conjectures and misperceptions are the direct outcome of the military’s reluctance to share information, in the interest of “national security”, though clearly silence is doing more damage because of giving rise to conjectures and misperceptions.

There is little doubt that the operation came at a particularly unpropitious moment, both for India and Pakistan. Vajpayee had just then lost a vote of confidence in the parliament, and was heading an interim government coming up for re-elections. That events at Kargil might have contributed to his victory is irrelevant. For Pakistan, the outcome was destined to be particularly embarrassing, since even China was critical of the operation. The embarrassment was further compounded since the army put out the story about the Mujahideen.

The strategic significance of the road link across Dras and Kargil to Siachin, which could be interdicted by the occupation of these heights, has often been highlighted, as also the fact that this plan had been made earlier as a possible response to the Indian interdiction of the Neelum valley, and had been shelved. But these considerations were a constant. Why the decision at that particular juncture?

The reality is that the Kashmir freedom movement was seen as “flagging”, and this operation was conceived as a way of giving it a “fillip”. It was intended to be a minor tactical operation, not of the magnitude it acquired. It was for this reason that initially the plans were confined to the COAS, Gen Musharraf, CGS, Lt Gen Aziz, Corps Commander, Lt Gen Mahmood, and Commander FCNA, Maj Gen Javed Hassan. Despite Nawaz Sharif’s denials, there is ample evidence that his permission was sought initially only in passing, and later, as the operation grew, he was briefed regularly. The first formal briefing took place on March 12, 1999.

The RAND assessment is partially correct that, at that point, Pakistan had little option but to continue supporting the low intensity conflict. But the report’s other conclusions are one-sided, since it did not take into account that at its conception the operation was supposed to be a tactical one — of a size the Indians would have grumbled about but ignored in the greater interest of avoiding conflict. However, in mountainous terrain, every next height appears more dominating than the one you are occupying. Consequently, without intending to do so at the outset, the Corps Commander kept sanctioning the enlarged occupation; the COAS was only told the troops had gone in a little deeper.

It was only when almost the entire region was occupied that the COAS became aware of the total magnitude. It was at this juncture that the sheer size of the ingress made it necessary to take the entire military into confidence, since the repercussions of a penetration of this size had not been earlier considered. Thus it was that the Military Operations Directorate was tasked to come up with a political and military aim for the operation, and an operational strategy to support it. It was their brilliant response to what was already a “given situation” which was presented to Nawaz Sharif and the other service chiefs on March 12.

Much has been made of the fact that the operation was conceived by and confined to the four individuals mentioned earlier. Some have credited this to the secrecy with which the operation was planned, others have discredited it for keeping the other services out of “the loop”, and ascribing more sinister motives to the secrecy, but if it is understood that the initial size of the operation was a tactical penetration, intended merely to provide a fillip to the freedom struggle in IHK, much of the significance of the secrecy will disappear.

Considerable criticism could be offered to Gen Musharraf for permitting the operation to grow beyond its intended size, but it must be understood that a corps commander is a very senior officer, who enjoys considerable liberty of action, which Mahmood exercised. Nor is it intended to make Mahmood the scapegoat, now that he is out of favour. In all likelihood, he was doing what he thought was in the interest of defending an area he was responsible for holding after it was occupied.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

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Part 2 -Kargil: what followed

In March 1999, the Military Operations (MO) Directorate came up with a political aim, which probably read, “Internationalize the Kashmir issue, so as to seek a just and permanent solution in accordance with the wishes of the people of Kashmir”. The military aim, which underpinned the operation in order to achieve the political aim probably read, “to create a military threat, which could be viewed by the Indians as having the potential of leading to a military solution, so as to force the Indians to the negotiating table from a position of weakness”.

Further, the MO Directorate concluded that the total military capability of India at that point was incapable of inflicting a military defeat on Pakistan; consequently, India would avoid all-out war, which would probably end in a stalemate, and a stalemate would be viewed as victory for Pakistan, being the smaller country. Thus, while nuclear deterrence was an underlying factor, always in consideration, the conclusion that the war was unlikely to escalate into all-out war, which could possibly result in a nuclear conflict, was based on an objective assessment of the conventional capability of India. This and other perceptions will become relevant when we study (in the subsequent articles) the erroneous conclusions the RAND Corporation and other such studies have reached.

The MO directorate further concluded, and rightly, that the initial Indian reaction, as in the case of any military, would be to probe the incursion with patrols before inducting further forces into IHK in the attempt to oust the occupying force. This induction of forces into IHK would further erode the Indian capability of offensives elsewhere, even though other options were not ignored. When preparing operational plans, various “hypotheses” are considered. Hypotheses are the possible courses of action open to the opponent (from H-1 down in order of priority), for each of which “variants” (possible responses) are worked out. Although not privy to the hypotheses considered, but knowing the methodology of GHQ, it would indeed be surprising for me to think the GHQ did not consider all possible options.

It is possible, though that some options might have been dealt with simplistically; in fact, if some analysts were to make such an assessment, it might not be easy to refute it. However, an oft talked about option is an Indian naval blockade. While opinion among naval officers is divided on this as a possibly successful course of action, the National Defence College has carried out studies which conclude that it is not likely to be as successful as some analysts fear. This is principally because we are fortunate to have deep waters close to our shores, where naval vessels can “hug the coast” in their approach under the protection of the naval air arm, which is fairly effective.

The leading hypothesis, on which the response is planned, with variants for the less probable hypotheses, was that the Indian army would confine to responding within IHK, most likely to recapture the lost positions, which is what actually happened. Some analysts, including the RAND Corporation have expressed the view that Pakistan did not foresee the extent of vertical expansion India was capable of, nor did it plan for it — i.e., the use of airpower. I do not think this conclusion is correct. Firstly, the use of airpower is extremely inaccurate in this type of terrain unless laser guided; secondly, within a couple of days of employing air power, the Indian forces lost a couple of aircrafts and a couple of helicopters. This could hardly have been possible if the intruders were unprepared for such escalation.

Possibly, the only aspect Pakistan had not catered for was the effect of the induction of “Bofor’s guns” (artillery pieces light enough to be inducted into the Dras region), which allowed the Indians to successfully retake four posts, though they could not do so elsewhere (for a detailed examination see Brig. Shaukat Qadir, Royal United Services Institute-RUSI Journal, April 2002, Volume 147, Number 2).

Some day it might be revealed as to why the decision was taken to disclaim the military responsibility for the operation, but it is my considered opinion that the decision was political, not military. Not because Nawaz has become a convenient whipping boy, but because given his nature, he was likely to enjoy thumping his chest, which he did. But he was also sufficiently politically canny to realise there would be international pressure, for which laying the blame at the Mujahideen’s door might be a convenient alternative. Whatever the reason, this was the greatest of Pakistan’s mistakes, since after such an unbelievable assertion, all other assertions, however truthful, became suspect.

While Nawaz was regularly briefed and was aware of all that was happening, he was unlikely to closely question the entire range of the repercussions. Nor, it must be acknowledged, did the military take the trouble of explaining to him any more than was necessary, or was sought.

The international pressure was becoming unbearable for Nawaz, and the loss of a couple of posts totally unnerved him. The military also made no effort to explain why those particular posts could have been recaptured by the Indians, while the rest could not. He began seeking a way out, negotiated first with Vajpayee, unsuccessfully, since by then Vajpayee and India had won the diplomatic campaign and then turned to Clinton. That round led to his visit to Washington on July 4 and resulted in a withdrawal. Since the withdrawal had not been initially catered for by the Pakistan forces, the maximum losses occurred during this phase. Thus India ended up with a military victory, which it had not won, and Pakistan with a military defeat, which it had not suffered, though there is little doubt that the diplomatic victory was India’s.

To top it all, Nawaz wanted some heads to roll, for a military operation which he had sanctioned but which had politically embarrassed him. The coup and counter-coup became inevitable.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

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Part 3 -Kargil: misperceptions and erroneous conclusions

The Rand Corporation’s Kargil study concludes that “Pakistan has proven itself to be a risk taking country... it has no option but to continue its policy of supporting a low intensity conflict in Kashmir... Kargil like operations are likely to recur... India will continue to follow its usual policy of restraint, but may be constrained to retaliate with punitive strikes”. In short, that India has more or less accepted the possibility of a “limited war”. The study’s conclusions, coming from an ostensibly objective and respected source and based on apparent logic appear eminently believable. As a consequence, it has not only provided justification for India’s present stand on “cross border terrorism” and its current belligerence towards Pakistan, but also any future possible punitive strikes that country might contemplate against Pakistan. As if the RAND study were not enough, in a recent op-ed, Henry Kissinger has expressed the view that a US attack on Iraq would provide justification for India to attack Pakistan!

That Kargil was an error, since it was an aberration to the times, goes without saying. It may have “internationalised the Kashmir issue”, but whether it did so in the interests of Pakistan or the Kashmiri people is a question only time will answer. While it is true that Pakistan’s bargaining ability with India rested upon the magnitude of the Kashmiri struggle for freedom and that, consequently, the establishment was, at the very least, complicit in permitting cross border assistance to the freedom struggle, but, as stated in an earlier article, the greatest damage Pakistan did to the Kashmiri freedom movement was by converting it into a jihad.

That this jihad was a natural fallout of the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which had the approval of the US, is no longer relevant. The events of Sept 11 have changed perceptions, and this jihad too had to stop. That might not have been the case were it just a struggle for the right of self determination. Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir was, in any case too open ended. It did not have an end in sight. While tying down a large number of Indian forces would make eminent sense if a war was being contemplated, in the absence of such a possibility, the suffering of the Kashmiris needed to end.

The events related in the preceding two articles become relevant here. If Pakistan indeed considered all eventualities and came to the logical conclusion that India could not afford to escalate to even an all-out conventional war, thus rendering the possibility of escalation to a possible nuclear conflict out of the question, was there a risk of a nuclear war? Were escalation to occur and a nuclear conflict to take place, which of the two would act as the irresponsible party and take the illogical course leading to such an eventuality? While Pakistan could have been accused of initiating the conflict, as Japan did in the Second World War, no one can accuse Japan of causing the nuclear holocaust it was subjected to. That illogical recourse goes to the credit of the party that took that course. Is Pakistan a “risk taking country”?

The thought of using the words “usual restraint” with regard to the Indian policies in Kashmir is, at least, surprising. The entire international community is aware of the atrocities being committed by the Indian security forces in Kashmir; these have been recorded by international agencies. If the governments of the world choose to ignore them for a host of reasons, that does not mean that India is exercising restraint. As far as its restraint in retaliating against Pakistan is concerned, this is more an outcome of an understanding of its own military limitations rather than an innate desire for exercising restraint.

While India might still not be in apposition to inflict a military defeat on Pakistan, if it were to initiate an offensive war against Pakistan, there is little doubt that it could muster the strength to undertake successful limited offensives in AK for the purpose of punitive strikes in Pakistan, whether, by air, or through heliborne or ground forces or a combination of them. However, the fact is that Pakistan is capable of extracting a terrible price for such a venture, enough to make it self-defeating.

At a recent conference on Kargil in the US, a very senior Indian counterpart expressed the same view as the RAND study that, “if low intensity conflicts continued to extract a price, it would be logical to retaliate, and that in the view of the Indian military, there was space between a low intensity conflict and all out war, which could be utilized for escalation to a “limited war”. The subject of “limited war” merits separate consideration. However, if the response to the inability to control a situation is to escalate, then logically the response to escalation would be further escalation. Unlike Clausewitz, this author does not consider “war as an extension of policy”, but in fact a failure of policy.

What the senior Indian military officer failed to mention, as also do so many of our colleagues in Pakistan, that to a political problem, there can only be a political solution and to a problem of social justice, there can only be a response by providing social justice. And that in the event of a failure of policy, the employment of the military can be solely to purchase the time required for governments to find a political solution, or arrange to provide social justice. The same is true of the “war against terrorism”. Solely punitive measures employing the military, will not solve a political issue, which has dimensions of un-empowerment and social injustice. These issues have to be addressed simultaneously.

At the same conference on Kargil an Indian colleague also acknowledged that the Indians, as also the Pakistanis, are learning all the wrong lessons from Kargil. One can but agree, in all humility.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

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Part 4 - Threat of a nuclear war in South Asia?

Shaukat Qadir

A simple solution to the complicated India-Pakistan problem in the ‘interest of mankind in South Asia’ is that the US should take out Pakistan’s nuclear capability. Pakistan’s tragedy is that even such reasoning finds an audience!

An Indian Express article (“The morning after,” by W. Lawrence Prabhakar and Gopalji Malviya, June 9, 2002), written at the height of India-Pakistan tension, opens with three possible conflict scenarios. The first, what the writers describe the most likely, begins with a land offensive by the Indian strike forces in a “salami like” manoeuvre, enveloping Pakistani forces, which, despite their counter offensives, are likely to be enveloped, forcing Pakistan to use a tactical nuclear weapon to eliminate this Indian thrust. India would then be forced to respond, and the process of escalation would end with Pakistan’s total destruction and considerable damage to northern India.

The second scenario opens with Indian “surgical air strikes” on “Pakistan’s infrastructure of terror and the logistical facilities that aid terror”. These strikes coupled with a heavy artillery barrage should not provoke a nuclear response from Pakistan, but “a Pakistani logic may impel it to brandish its nuclear strike force with obvious intent to display to India and the US that it is moving its missile platforms mated with its nuclear payloads readying for a strike. Pakistan’s deployment of its missile force would be an insurance to stave off a conventional defeat in air or land and hence may be prompted by the impulse to launch a limited strike on Ahmedabad or Jodhpur in a first wave attack that could shock India. Indian retaliation would depend upon its ability to recover and stage the retaliation, the choice of Pakistani targets — soft targets (civilian) or hard targets (military), and the international pressure on India to desist from retaliation are vital factors that would be factored in any Indian response”.

The third, and final, scenario is the possibility of an “inadvertent attack on Kashmir by a fidayeen outfit using a stolen tactical nuclear weapon compromised from Pakistan nuclear arsenal and launched on India. Such an assault would inevitably trigger an Indian response on Pakistan”. The article then goes on, very rightly, to bemoan the insanity of such eventualities and the resultant phenomenal human and environmental tragedy.

While the insanity of this is obvious, it should not preclude us from taking a military view of the three scenarios as presented by the writers. Let us begin with the first: Despite the considerable imbalance in Pakistan’s system of forces (the present Indian imbalance being no less), I attempted in an earlier article in this space to explain why conventional Indian forces were presently incapable of inflicting a military defeat on Pakistan (though this equation could undergo a change in India’s favour in a few years). Consequently, unless the Pakistan military was totally incompetent, which it is not, the inevitable outcome would be a stalemate — viewed by the world as a victory for Pakistan, since the mighty India would have been unable to defeat the puny Pakistan.

In the event, it would be unwise for India to resort to conventional conflict. (Incidentally, I presented the argument of India’s inability to inflict a conventional military defeat on Pakistan at a conference on Kargil and none of the senior Indian military representatives refuted it.) Moreover, it may be worth mentioning here that available information suggests that neither side so far has the capability to ‘miniaturise’, which is essential to produce a tactical weapon. Consequently, that assumption in the first and third scenarios might even be a factually erroneous.

In the second scenario, while there is little doubt that in Pakistan’s system of forces the major imbalance lies in its air arm, which Islamabad is seeking to redress, in the event of a defensive campaign, where Pakistan’s considerable air defense system will be able to reinforce the air force, the equation changes very radically. India could certainly launch such a strike, but the price it would have to pay would indeed be tremendous, and would result in the same outcome: a situation which would be viewed as a victory for Pakistan. It could be argued here that in both these eventualities, India would have little option but to resort to the use of a nuclear weapon to teach Pakistan a lesson and avoid a ‘stalemated defeat’.

In the third scenario, we are faced with the use of a stolen nuclear weapon to which India must retaliate. The interesting part of the statement is that it is stolen from the Pakistani arsenal, not the Indian arsenal, nor from Central Asia, which abounds with these weapons. The implication, of course, is that Pakistan’s arsenal is unsafe, or that there are rogue elements in the Pakistani establishment who might collaborate in the theft.

Somewhere towards the end, it also enlists the US with the logical conclusion from any of the above scenarios, predicting that it will enable, “the Al-Qaeda-Taliban combine that had taken refuge in the mountainous caverns of Pakistan to emerge and take control of the disintegrated Pakistan and more specifically any remnant of Pakistan’s fissile material stocks and surviving missiles for a second round with India. In effect such a scenario would depict the possibilities of the same being fired by the emergent Al-Qaeda-Taliban combine leadership against US forces in the Arabian Sea that have been evacuated during the spiral of the crisis or even a surviving Ghauri II/III could be targeted on India or even Diego Garcia to culminate their ultimate revenge of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban on India and the United States for having destroyed Pakistan”.

However, it is the conclusion that is most interesting. Having concluded that all three scenarios could result in retaliation against the US for Indian aggression, in the interest of preventing the outcome of a nuclear holocaust it recommends that, “South Asia’s doomsday however can be prevented and should be averted with the timely and decisive US action that should invoke its well decided contingency plan for a comprehensive Precision Guided Munitions strike combined with a Special Operation Forces (SOF) to disarm the nukes and target the storage facilities”.

Even if the erroneous assumptions of Indian military capabilities in scenarios one and two were, in fact, accurate, the authors make no impassioned plea asking India to desist from embarking on a course that could lead to the devastation that the authors’ analysis predicts. No plea to the international community to help resolve issues so as to prevent India from undertaking such a venture. India’s adventure (or misadventure) is a ‘given’, which cannot be prevented! A simple solution to this complicated problem: in the ‘interest of mankind in South Asia’, the US should take out Pakistan’s nuclear capability. Pakistan’s tragedy is that even such reasoning finds an audience!
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Rangudu »

ramana
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by ramana »

Links to BRM issues on Kargil:
1) Kargil

2) After Kargil

3) KRC report review

4) The Kargil Archive - BRF

Thanks R for the links. Will need to establish consensus on deleting such valuable threads.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

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Nawaz Sharif's statements/interviews on Kargil

DAWN - 'Hundreds of soldiers fell in Kargil': Army kept Govt in dark: Nawaz

Gulf News Interview - Feb 2002
Vajpayee 'was ready to solve Kashmir'

Nawaz Sharif, a former Pakistani prime minister who has now been exiled to Saudi Arabia for 10 years, has claimed that his Indian counterpart, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was ready to work for the solution of the Kashmir dispute, and had promised substantial progress on the subject in 1999, but the war in Kargil sabotaged the entire peace plan.

In his first ever interview since being deported from the country about 14 months ago, Nawaz lifted the curtain on the events that led to his downfall in October, 1999 in an interview to Urdu daily Jang where he made no secret that Kargil was a bigger disaster than 1965 and the 1971 wars because Pakistan lost over 2,700 soldiers.

The entire Northern Light Infantry was wiped out.

"When I reminded Musharraf of his claim that the operation will be risk-free, he replied that the Indians had resorted to carpet bombing, which looked rather naive to me," he said.

"Didn't you know that this will happen?" Nawaz said he had asked his army chief.

"Let me add here that Pakistanis fighting in Kashmir were without shelter, and some of the soldiers in the bunkers and outposts had been exposed to the extent that they lost their skulls by the dozens. The Indians were closing in on us when the Washington agreement was arrived at for an honourable pull back," he told the paper.


Secondly, neither he himself nor the cabinet was taken into confidence about the Kargil adventure, the former prime minister said and were given to understand after enquiries from the military "that regular troops will not be involved, and that the army had nothing to lose."

The then military leadership had not only misled the elected government at the time, but had placed the country in an embarrassing situation.

It was he who had to salvage the nation's prestige through the good offices of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Nawaz told the Jang, admitting for the first time that the ISI, the spy wing of the Pakistan army, had grown too big for its boots, and never really allowed the civilian set up to function.

"I knew that the army was not very happy with the decision."

The Muslim League leader confessed that elevating Pervez Musharraf to the rank of a full, four-star general, and appointing him the chief of the army staff was a mistake.

He said that, personally, he was in favour of giving the position to the seniormost general, Ali Kuli Khan, but General Iftikhar, as the defence secretary in his administration, and his younger brother, former petroleum minister, Chaudhri Nisar Ali Khan, had persuaded him to get rid of Ali Kuli, who happened to be the brother-in-law of former foreign minister Gohar Ayub Khan.

"I now think that both General Iftikhar and Chaudhri Nisar must have had some personal scores to settle with General Ali Kuli Khan," Nawaz remarked.

The interviewer has reported that the former premier and his family members were living in the stately Saroor Palace as the royal guests of the Custodian of Two Holy Mosques King Fahd bin Abdulaziz in Jeddah, had five luxury cars at their disposal, and a battery of servants and security guards.

The palace had three different sections, two of which were occupied by Nawaz Sharif and his younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif. The family was living happily, meeting friends from Pakistan. Some of their staff members were their old Pakistani hands.

Nawaz disclosed that he had persuaded the Indian prime minister to reach a solution on Kashmir, a dispute which had lingered on for over 50 years, and caused destruction on both sides of the border.

Vajpayee told him before coming for the historic visit to Lahore that the year 1999 will be the year for solution of the Kashmir dispute, to the satisfaction of India and Pakistan. "To this I had added that let it be a solution to the satisfaction of India and Pakistan, the people of Kashmir", said the former Pakistani leader, emphasising that Vajpayee had agreed with him.

A system of back channel diplomacy was put into operation, but events in Kargil, the war which India and Pakistan fought in the summer of the same year, put a halt to the entire process.

The Indians complained that that they had been stabbed in the back, and "I think that they were not wrong". Nawaz said that a "golden opprotunity" to solve the Kashmir dispute was lost. The Lahore declaration, signed jointly by him and Vajpayee, was a historic document.

The Indians, he said would not retreat from the stand they have now taken. "Forget Indian occupied Kashmir, try and save the part of Azad Kashmir which is now with us because the steps being taken by the present government would create problems" Nawaz said, and remarked that "a breakthrough will not be possible now."

"The Indians will have never have trust in us, because they will say that they can never trust a government which did not trust its own prime minister (Nawaz Sharif)".

He also said: "How can you trust Musharraf, he himself called for jihad in Kashmir, and is now trying to prevent terrorism in India. His conduct was full of contradiction. He was opposed to negotiations with India, and now was offering a voluntary handshake with Vajpayee in Kathmandu."

"Which of these behaviours can you rely upon as correct?" he quizzed, looking straight into the eyes of the interviewer Sohail Waraich who stopped in Saudi Arabia on his way to United States and had three or four different sessions with Nawaz and his family members.

He said that a gulf had been caused between him and the army leadership, which widened when General Musharraf as the army chief, sacked the Balochistan Corps Commander General Tariq Pervez for being in touch with the civilian set up.

"I was furious when I read about that in the newspapers, and asked General Iftikhar, the defence secretary and the ISPR to issue clarification, because the announcement from the army headquarters was meant to undermine the authority of the civilian government.

"General Tariq had never seen me at my house, and had met me once in an official function in Quetta (the capital of Pakistan's south-western province)."

"They dilly-dallied over over the matter, which gave me a distinct impression that they wanted to disgrace an elected prime minister of the country. I then decided to remove General Musharraf from command".

Nawaz agreed that the role of the ISI and the army in politics needed to be curbed.

He blamed his accountability czar for most of his problems, claiming that Senator Saifur Rehman was hell bent on arresting the PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, while "I had told interior minister Chaudhri Shujaat that I would like the lady to leave Pakistan before she is sentenced from the court (for corruption).

His younger brother Shahbaz Sharif, who had joined in the discussion, confirmed that he had been indirectly approached by the army for a compromise.

"But I replied to them that I would not betray my own family members." They never approached him after that.
Excerpts from Nawaz Sharif's interview to The Weekly Independent, March 7-13, 2002
The Kargil issue is another inevitable topic when we discuss the Nawaz-Musharraf relations. "As a PM I wasn't taken into confidence on the Kargil issue. I was told that there wouldn't be any problem or loss of life in the conflict. The attack of only Mujahideen would be sufficient and the Army would not be part of the attack. But when the battle began, the whole Northern Infantry was blown up and 2,700 soldiers were martyred and hundreds were injured. The death toll exceeds even that of the 1965 and 1971 full-scale wars. To my question, Gen Pervez said that India was bombing extensively. He said: 'Sahib! We didn't know India would launch so severe attack". When the Washington accord was being signed, the Indian had got half of the posts evacuated and was advancing, Nawaz said.

The question that whether he was aware of the military takeover turned his face red. "Yes I knew. Before that incident, there was a movement in the Army personnel at the PM house. One day a military group was sent which had wireless sets. I asked Military Secretary Javaid Malik to inquire into the matter. He contacted the GHQ but couldn't get anything about that movement. However, the group was called back after sometime. Then I came to know that a few troupes from the Triple One Brigade have been brought to Bara Kahu near Islamabad. So in a way, I knew that the generals were up to something."

On Indo-Pakistan relations, he said: "A golden opportunity to solve the Kashmir issue was lost. The Lahore Accord was a golden chance to solve this most important problem. Now keep aside the Indian-held Kashmir and worry about the AJK because of the policies of the present regime."

"Prior to the Lahore Declaration, Indian PM Vajpayee said to me that 1999 would be the Kashmir settlement year, and the solution would be acceptable to both India and Pakistan. I told him that the solution should also be acceptable Kashmiris and Vajpayee agreed with me. But then happened the Kargil and India stopped dialogue."
About military government's recent Taliban and Kashmir policies, Nawaz Sharif said: "First, the General used to say that our survival is linked to Taliban. But later he didn't take any time to desert them. He went to AJK and raised the slogan of jehad, and now has also changed his Kashmir policy. Similarly, he was against holding talks with India, but now in Kathmandu, he shook hands with Vajpayee and requested for talks. He is simply unreliable," Nawaz Sharif declares.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Rangudu »

The following is an article by Dr.Ayesha Siddiqa in The Friday Times, March 29 - Apr 4, 2002.
Pak army’s research and analysis is weak

The Pakistan military has traditionally encroached into the domain of policy formulation. Most of its decisions, therefore, have deeply impacted the country’s national security policy. There is need for that reason to question the quality of research and analysis the military can bring to bear on issues of strategy, especially if that strategy is thought to input into the country’s overall national security policy.

There are many questions here. Do the military’s tactical moves add up to a viable strategy; or, to put it another way, does the military begin with a strategy and tailor the tactical moves to suit the strategic objective? This would mean thinking hard about the consequences of a military undertaking – whether such a decision would sit well with a variety of other factors and determinants that make up the country’s foreign and national security policies; the financial and opportunity costs of a particular venture; its sustainability etc.

From an analysis perspective a recent assessment of the Kargil operation by a retired army officer is interesting.<font size=0.5 color=blue>She refers to Shaukat Qadir's article</font> It is perhaps the first study, though brief, of the conflict that brings to light, formally, certain facts. For instance, it establishes the fact that both the naval and air chiefs were not privy to the details of the operation much after it had been launched. Interestingly, the plan was opposed by both the Chief of Naval Staff and the Chief of Air Staff. The latter conceded the army’s agenda only at a later stage. The study, however, does not provide any explanation of why the air chief decided to change his mind.

The crux, drift and assessment of the study are highly interesting. It describes the initial tactical maneuvers and planning of the operation and identifies its political objective as a ‘fillip’ to the Kashmiri freedom movement and a response to the Indian Army’s incursion in Siachin in 1984. The study also claims that the plan was presented to General Pervez Musharraf by Lt. General Aziz Khan, then Chief of General Staff, and the then Major General Javed Hasan, then commander, Force Command Northern Areas.

The study says the fundamental analysis of the army high command was that its incursion in the area would not lead to nuclear escalation by India. In fact, if anything, planners calculated that the nuclear umbrella would help Pakistan stave off the threat of an aggressive Indian response. Resultantly, the eventual deployment by India of its air force came as a surprise. Intriguingly, the author ends the analysis at the point where the Pakistan Army, with the help of the mujahideen, was giving a tough time to the adversary and repulsing repeated Indian efforts to regain territory. There is no mention of the Indian forces hitting back after they had taken the initial beating. There is also no reference to the situation when the Pakistan Army had run out of manpower properly acclimatized to fight at such heights. Reports suggest that during the last week of the operation Pakistan had to pull out men deployed at Siachin, leaving positions there vulnerable to an Indian attack. Hence, it was in the Army’s interest to convince the prime minister to negotiate peace with the adversary. The study, however, puts the blame squarely on Nawaz Sharif who, it is claimed, had chickened out and gone to talk to the Americans and the Indians.


This particular ending of the said article regarding how the tactical maneuver failed does represent basic thinking in the army’s high command. According to another prominent general-turned-analyst, the top brass believed that they almost forced India to concede to negotiations with Pakistan on the Kashmir dispute and would have succeeded had the army been allowed to continue on its tactical adventure.

While one must appreciate the writer’s effort in exposing some truth, his analysis leaves much to be desired. For example, there are major gaps in the writer’s assessment of conflict escalation. Why did the army not correctly assess India’s commitment to protecting Kargil? Why did no one think about India upping the ante? After all, it did that in 1965. Furthermore, would it be fair to consider the objectives stated in the study as primary political aims for initiating such a major operation?

A fact completely ignored in the study relates to the Indian Navy’s preparation for a naval blockade of Karachi. Given the PN’s limited capabilities, involvement of the PAF would have induced greater belligerence. One would also like to question the assertion regarding India’s inability to use its nuclear deterrence option. New Delhi’s intention was not to use these weapons but through deterrence to force Pakistan down from the escalation ladder by withdrawing from the strategic positions. In fact, by using its fighter aircraft the adversary showed its willingness to escalate, a development not expected by Islamabad.

Not only are the conclusions of the study amazing, it makes one wonder about the level and nature of analysis within the military establishment. What is the level of conceptual clarity among military planners? What kind of planning is done in the military’s prestigious training and educational institutions? Are military personnel geared towards research and analysis? Anyone concerned about national security would ask these questions.

The scepticism on this count deepens as one realises the dearth of objective research in the military institutions. Some features about the environment of these institutions are noticeable. First, research and analysis is primarily geared to suit what is desired by the military high command. That compromises objectivity. A number of officers agree that pressures on individuals vary according to the service they represent. For instance, army personnel are often under greater pressure to conform to the ideas of their superiors instead of carrying out analysis. Second, the emphasis is on repetition with trainees repeatedly exposed to the same kind of ideas. Officers are not exposed to new or different ideas and the system is not geared to absorbing dissenting views. This problem tends to become relatively more extreme in certain periods as compared to others.

Third, a lot of research regularly produced is basically a rehash of existing literature that does not represent deep conceptual understanding. Fourth, research or analysis is not treated as a creative activity. Resultantly, one does not come across any impressive analysis of new technological, political or strategic concepts or issues extremely relevant for the armed forces.

This lack of analysis is not just obvious in training institutions. The problem is spread across the spectrum in the armed forces. Ask the officers about an assessment of Pakistan’s diplomatic relations or other vital foreign policy issues, and one is likely to get a highly conservative line of argument. This mindset results in gross policy miscalculations. The reference to the Kargil study has been made to point out the limitation of analysis in the military establishment or by people trained by it. One hopes that this error is eradicated in the better interest of the country and its security.

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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Rangudu »

For comic relief we must also take note of the fact that Shireen Mazari is coming up with what should be the Paki Establishment's spin on Kargil.

Dung's Shafqat Mahmood says what we think about that book
We have had other opportunities to move away from confrontation but somehow mess them up. Nawaz Sharif may have had many faults, and he did, but he was dead right about improving our relations with India. The Vajpayee visit to Lahore was a potential turning point but it was ruined by Kargil. Kargil did not cost us territory but history will tell someday that it was the greatest blunder by us since 1971. Whatever my friend Shireen Mazari may have cooked up :D in her forthcoming book on this conflict, the real story is yet to be written and it will be written. No one should have any doubt on this score.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by svinayak »

The aim of Kargil Operation was not to conquer Kashmir but to conquer Islamabad and that was accomplished on 12th October 2002. 500 men sacrificed for the capture of the capital of an Islamic state with nuclear weapons.

From the amin article we see that they allude to multiple power centers were after the crown jewels after 1998.
To stem the 'grab' the Kargil operation was executed with a final outcome as suggested by the author. These power centers are still hovering around.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by ramana »

An unifinished war- Pravin Swami

----------------
THE ARMED FORCES

An unfinished war

PRAVEEN SWAMI

The dismissed Kargil Brigade Commander Surinder Singh's battle with the security establishment shifts to the Delhi High Court, where the latter is likely to oppose an independent probe into the Kargil War as being harmful to the national interest.


Brigadier Surinder Singh.

The truth about what went wrong, where and why should not embarrass anyone and it is a must that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

- Defence Minister George Fernandes, speaking on post-independence wars, in New Delhi on August 14, 2002.

ON September 3, lawyers representing the Union of India are scheduled to file in the Delhi High Court documents arguing that an independent investigation of the Kargil War is not in India's interests. Their written replies to a petition filed by dismissed Kargil Brigade Commander Surinder Singh will reportedly say that the disclosure of classified documents will jeopardise national security and that legal redress to the officer will undermine military discipline. They are unlikely, of course, to mention that many of the classified documents concerned contain no worthwhile military secrets and have in any case already been published almost in their entirety in Frontline. There will be no references, either, to the many military histories that have blown apart the official accounts of the course of the war. And neither, of course, will they note that the sacking of Surinder Singh rates as one of the most disgraceful abuses of military law in the annals of the Indian Army.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of Surinder Singh's dismissal from service is that it took the Army the best part of two years to work out what crime it thought he had committed. His problems began early in the course of the war, when he found himself in confrontation with his immediate superior, 3 Infantry Division Commander Major-General V.S. Budhwar. Budhwar believed that the 121 Brigade in Kargil was facing only small numbers of terrorists, while Surinder Singh was certain he was facing a full-blown intrusion by regular Pakistani troops. On top of it all, media reports began to emerge suggesting the Brigade, and the Division and Corps above it, had failed to act on intelligence that suggested a heightened possibility of war. The choice was now clear. Either Surinder Singh could be held responsible for failing to guard Kargil properly, or his superior command - starting with Budhwar, on through Corps Commander Lieutenant-General Kishan Pal and on eventually Chief of the Army Staff General V.P. Malik - could be made to answer for larger errors of strategic judgment.

It did not take the Army a great deal of time to make the choice. In June 1999, Surinder Singh was removed from his command and shunted off to a succession of obscure posts. The problem was, there was no strong evidence of wrong-doing by the Brigadier. In June 1999, a Court of Inquiry began investigating charges that Surinder Singh had leaked documents to the media. Made up of three officers directly subordinate to Budhwar, his key adversary, its agenda was in no real doubt. The court even issued summons to Surinder Singh's legal counsel, Kapil Sibal and R.S. Randhawa, and journalists who had reported on the controversy, sparking off a furore which eventually forced Defence Minister George Fernandes to apologise before Parliament. Even Gestapo-style tactics - denying Surinder Singh leave to attend his daughter's wedding, for example, or pulling him off a military flight to Chandigarh, where he was going to visit his critically injured brother - failed to throw up evidence of leaked documents. Instead, the Court of Inquiry found Surinder Singh guilty of making photocopies of classified documents and carrying them from his office to his bunker, a charge outside its terms of reference.

Unsurprisingly enough, the Court of Inquiry refused to listen to Surinder Singh's obvious defence that he had made the copies to be sent along with his complaint about Budhwar to Gen. Malik. Soon afterwards, in August 2000, he was served fresh notice, asking him to show cause for the allegations made against him in the official Kargil Review Committee and the Army's in-house General A.R.K. Reddy inquiry. The allegations related to the vacation of Bajrang Post in Kaksar, which was abandoned by the 4 Jat Regiment in the winter before the Kargil War. Copies of both documents were, however, denied to the Brigadier, making it impossible for him to file a coherent response. Nor was evidence that Surinder Singh had direct responsibility for the Bajrang Post fiasco made available. During this second Court of Inquiry, no written evidence was produced to show that Bajrang Post had been upgraded from a winter-vacated post to a winter cut-off post, which would have obliged 4 Jat to stay there. Surinder Singh was also able to produce evidence that he had asked his subordinates to pass on the news of the vacation of the post to the 3 Division headquarters in Leh. Budhwar claimed to have verbally reprimanded Surinder Singh for the action but could give no sound explanation as to why he had not punished him at that very time for what would have been a gross act of negligence.

EVIDENCE, quite obviously, was no longer considered essential; neither was procedure. On June 2001, Surinder Singh was summarily dismissed, using extraordinary provisions that enabled the armed forces to terminate the services of officers at the pleasure of their supreme commander, the President of India. The order cited the findings of two Courts of Inquiry but made no mention of the fact that Surinder Singh had not been given an opportunity to defend himself in the next legal platform the charges ought to have been heard in, a court martial. Indeed, Surinder Singh had been formally attached to the 25 Infantry Division in January 2000, before the second Court of Inquiry commenced. Attachment is a military law procedure that precedes a court martial, but that was not held. Instead, Surinder Singh was indicted on the basis of the A.R.K. Reddy report, even though one-man inquiries are unknown to military law. Notably, not one of the inquiries into Surinder Singh's conduct had contested his competence to conduct 121 Brigade's military operations, the reason for which he was presumably removed in the first place.

But legalities aside, how credible is the Army's charge that Surinder Singh ought to take responsibility for the debacle in Kargil? The story of Bajrang Post is instructive. For weeks after the war took place, the Army repeatedly denied that any posts in the Kargil sector had been vacated during the war - and this despite the fact that Gen. Malik had told journalists in Pune that several posts had been vacated. Then, the Kargil Review Committee decided to admit that one post had indeed been vacated. The admission, it is now clear, was not prompted by any great concern for the truth. General Y.M. Bammi's The Impregnable Conquered, one of several authoritative military histories of the war produced with the cooperation of the Army, makes clear that at least one other post that ought to have been occupied through the winter, at Marpo La, in the Dras sector, was also vacated. No one was, for reasons the Army alone understands, punished for that action. The Kargil Review Committee only brought up the Bajrang Post affair to single out Surinder Singh for adverse mention, an act that violated its own terms of reference.

What is important, however, are the real reasons why posts were vacated in the build-up to the 1999 war. In the mid-1985, 28 Infantry Division was placed along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kargil, facing Pakistan forces, and freeing 3 Infantry Division to focus on the India-China border. Five years on, the division was pushed west, to join in counter-terrorist operations in the Kashmir Valley. Even though the situation there had eased not a little by 1997, the formation was never moved back. Although artillery exchanges with Pakistan escalated along the Kargil sector from that year, Indian commanders saw no reason to move troops back east. The reason was simple. Particularly after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of 1998, the Indian military establishment believed that a full-blown war was impossible. In this, it was not alone: no less a person than Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee himself described atomic bombs as "weapons of peace". Meanwhile, faced with a series of infiltration attempts and terrorist attacks on the National Highway through Dras, 121 Brigade had to juggle its LoC responsibilities with new demands for personnel to keep road movement safe. Forced to choose between an ostensibly quiet frontier and a potential disaster on the Srinagar-Zoji La route, it seems probable everyone from the corps level down to the brigade level quietly looked the other way when posts were closed.

Experts have attributed the problems in Kargil to strategic negligence. In his book, Kargil: Blood on the Snow, Major-General Ashok Kalyan Verma traces the problem to Kishan Pal's "obsessive counter-insurgency mindset". Documents annexed to Surinder Singh's court plea, which were first published three years ago in Frontline, show that the Brigadier repeatedly asked for additional troops. His pleas were denied with equal regularity; in private, Surinder Singh was decried as an alarmist. The sad fact is that Kargil has now been secured by creating a Siachen-like wall of posts in the high mountains, an exercise involving resources he simply did not have. 70 Brigade was moved into Dras in May 1999 to secure it against potential infiltration by terrorists. By then, of course, the war had begun, and the formation was moved post-haste to Batalik where it served with great distinction. Brigadier Surinder Singh also has other legitimate reasons for complaint. It has now become known that the first intrusions were detected not in the Kargil sector, but in adjoining Turtok, by 102 Brigade commanded by Prakash Chand Katoch. These April intrusions, which are now the subject of separate litigation by another controversially removed soldier, Major Manish Bhatnagar, were never reported to 56 Brigade in Kargil.

THE sheer scale of strategic disaster becomes clear through one of the Kargil War's least known stories. On April 6, 1999, even as the Pakistani offensive was well under way, a war-game modelling precisely this eventuality was being played out at the 15 Corps Headquarters in Srinagar. Major-General Mohinder Puri, the commander of 8 Division, which would soon lead the battle in Dras, played the role of Pakistan's Army chief, while 70 Brigade Commander Devinder Singh acted as the General-Officer Commanding of Pakistan's 10 Corps area. Much of the exercise was devoted to how a full-blown attack on the Kashmir Valley could be repulsed. Towards the fag end of the exercise, the group gamed a brigade-strength assault on the stretch between Zoji La and Kargil, aimed at interdicting National Highway 1A. Pakistani occupation of both Tololing and Tiger Hill formed a part of these deliberations. Kishan Pal and Northern Army Commander Hari Mohan Khanna dismissed the plan - already under way - as impossible to execute.

When war did break out, Kishan Pal's counter-insurgency concerns - shared, in fairness, by his predecessors - led him to commit gross errors of judgment. At one meeting of the Unified Headquarters in Srinagar, he proclaimed that there were "no battle indicators of war" and that traffic on National Highway 1A was moving smoothly. This in the face of strenuous objections by Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, who went on record to state that the infiltrators were not small groups of terrorists but regular Pakistani troops! The casual attitude was evidently shared by Khanna, whose assessment led George Fernandes to pronounce that the intrusion would be evicted in two days. Verma's book also records that, as late as June 10, Kishan Pal told Gen. Malik that just 45 terrorists, not Pakistani regulars, were active in the entire Batalik sector. It was only on June 13 that Kishan Pal, by his own admission in a television interview, accepted that Pakistani regulars were involved in the intrusion. All the while he had been pushing his subordinates to move quickly up the mountains - helping for an early resolution to the intrusion that had proved so costly.

Commanders on the field, like Surinder Singh, were simply in no position to make the rapid progress Kishan Pal and other superiors demanded. It was only after a massive military build-up was in place, and Malik accepted that a 16:1superiority against enemy forces was needed, that progress was recorded in the Dras sector. Even then, victories were hard won. Surinder Singh, publicly available evidence shows, paid the price for mistakes made by others. Budhwar, guilty of crimes like building a private zoo and ordering the capture of protected species to populate it, lost out on promotions but not his job. Kishan Pal, who comes out in a very poor light in both Bammi's and Verma's professional military analyses, will retire as Quartermaster-General of the Indian Army in August. General S. Padmanabhan, Northern Army Commander in all the key months in the build-up to the war, retired as the Chief of the Army Staff. Although Gen. Malik had no direct role in shaping the Kargil operations, he failed to protect his subordinates who were chosen to be sacrificial lambs.

And that is not, of course, counting the politicians. Vajpayee was joined in his conviction that wars were no longer possible after Pokhran-II by a host of top politicians, and almost all of the professional courtiers who make up the Indian security establishment. None seemed to have taken the trouble of consulting any undergraduate primer on the military implications of nuclear weapons, which would have taught them that militarily weaker states can use the nuclear umbrella as a deterrent against full-blown reprisals by stronger adversaries in cases of sub-conventional wars.

Now the matter is before the Delhi High Court. Indian courts have traditionally been reluctant to question military wisdom. Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat's unceremonious sacking, a key reason for the culture of pusillanimity that now prevails among the military top brass, found no legal redress. It took decades for the victims of the notorious Samba spy witch-hunt to clear their names in court; lives and reputation were destroyed in the process. Surinder Singh's petition asks not only for professional restitution, but also for a full-blown investigation into the Kargil War, modelled on the Shimon Agranat Commission, which was set up after the Yom Kippur war between the Arabs and the Israelis. The National Democratic Alliance, a fervent admirer of Israeli military might, ought to have no objections to emulating Israel's standards of military justice and transparency either. The odds are, of course, that it will find some reason not to do so.

-------------
Actually its more unfinished than Swami thinks.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Arun A »

From The Nation(TSP)
Kargil remembered

by Muhammad Ahsan Yatu
The Kargil expedition will remain somewhat mystery forever, because it will never be unfolded in its entirety. However, time will continue to construct its story bit-by-bit and year-by-year, benefiting from independent sources. Reports prepared for official purposes such as the one of K. Subramanyam Commission cannot contribute much towards finding the facts; neither can exclusive statements and writings of partial or emotional individuals. Nevertheless the KS report had between the lines a bit of real stuff.
Since we are averse to probe the action of the elite and the elitist institutions, no one from our side thought of setting up of a commission. Not even Nawaz Sharif, who claimed that he had differences with the army. (He openly took this position only after he was removed though; many of his ministers and supporters in media had started criticising the army right after the expedition had failed).
The complex and costly and months long exercise would not have been possible without the involvement of the intelligence agencies. It will not be out of reference to mention here that General Ziauddin Butt was heading the most effective of the agencies, ISI, during the under discussion period. Similarly the rulers even if they are civilians cannot be ignored. It is not due to any respect that army has for the politicians; it is because extra-budgetary funds could come only by involving the system. Methods of disbursement may remain a secret but the sanctioning authority cannot. So army’s claim that the Prime Minister was duly briefed carries logic. In the whole story an interesting question arises: Whether or not the ex-premier could apply his mind to the complexity of the subject? The army, which patronised him, knows better. A similar question should be put to the generals: Do they think before they plan? It seems they too are as prudent as the politicians they patronise.
However, what went wrong with the Kargil was not the expedition or the withdrawal; these are parts of the games that the conflicting countries are likely to play. Though they usually prove disadvantageous to the smaller side, sometimes even the superpowers face big losses. The Russians and Americans failed in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and eventually withdrawal was the only alternative left with them.
On Kargil there were three factors that failed us: First, our inability to sustain a prolonged conflict. Given the size and strength of the Indian military, it was one-sided match. Second, the attitude of the world. Third, our incompetence to wrap the things effectively.
World reaction from the outset was adverse and not a single country, not even China and brother Muslim states approved our tactics. Why? This question speaks of our political and diplomatic shallowness. In fact it looks that various aspects, particularly world reaction, were totally ignored vis-à-vis Mujahideen and Shimla Agreement. If the exercise was an answer to Siachin, even then it carried more sentimental impulsion than intelligent logic; because Indian occupation of Siachin, though, violation of Shimla accord too, was occupation of unspecified area; and hence a lesser transgression than crossing over the LoC
Our propaganda that the Mujahideen, and not Pakistan Army, had taken control of hundred plus peaks proved poisonous. How Indians exploited the situation on political front was superb. They after panicking for a day or two launched an aggressive media campaign, all over the world, by projecting and supporting our claims that the Mujahideen had crossed the borders. Though they added that the Pak Army pushed them in, but their main emphasis was on the intruders (Mujahideen). And that was enough of material to upset the other countries. Their apprehensions had a reason, because Mujahideen’s conquest of 120 positions at an average height of 15000 feet, and in the most difficult terrains and hostile weather, was incredible. And if the Mujahideen had really done it, then their contemporaries could do anything, anywhere and at any time. That was the message, which Indians succeeded in conveying to the world. That was why from China to America all resented our move; and thus the LoC attained universal sanctity, once again through our stamp and signatures.
Could Kargil or at least the humiliation in Washington be avoided? Kargil as such, perhaps not: because fixed views and that too of the military are not easy to erase, particularly when political disciplines are weak. However, occupation of 120 heights in itself was a remarkable feat. It was a job of utmost gallantry, secrecy and sacrifice; but the possible results and the quantum of Indian retaliation and world reaction were, most probably ignored; and that ultimately proved disastrous. In view of simultaneously conducted Bus Diplomacy the adventure damaged us morally as well.
However, Washington declaration could have been avoided. And it was entirely a subject of political manoeuvring. Military had done its job; politicians should have turned to management of the situation. The Prime minister should have immediately called a meeting of the cabinet and services chiefs, and discussed the repercussions of a prolonged war or possible withdrawal. Taking into consideration the comparative capabilities, no reasons would have come from any side in favour of clash, and withdrawal would have been the choice of all.
But how could jumping the Indians have been brought down to the earth. It would have required boldness and wit. The Prime Minister should have made a dash to Delhi with an offer of immediate withdrawal. There was no harm in issuing a diplomatic statement that our soldiers went astray due to confusing boundaries. It was to be done within first few days after the conflict had surfaced. We admitted army’s involvement but when the game had tilted in India’s favour. How would Indians have reacted to such move?
It would have pulled rug under their feet. It would have shocked them, but they could have done nothing other than to accept our version. No country wants to bleed its soldiers if things are settled diplomatically, and for the Indians it would have been much difficult to reject the offer, because they have a responsible democratic system that is also answerable to the people. They would have never gone for loss of life and money, if we would have delivered the offer in time; and it would have been a perfect message for them that in conflicts all is not only fair, but also possible, reachable and even manageable. Nothing happened, however, our way. What we need to learn from Kargil exercise is that conceiving of conclusion is also a part of planning.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Victor »

From the above paki article, the last sentence:
"What we need to learn from Kargil exercise is that conceiving of conclusion is also a part of planning. "

This is proof that these people are a thoroughly deluded lot of idiots. It should be so obvious that you 'plan' for the 'conclusion' by drawing up a Last Will & Testament.

What Kargil did for Pakistan was convince the world that it is a nation of half-wits. Its actions following Kargil simply cemented that belief. The Idiot-in-chief is still making all the right bodily noises to suit us:
Musharraf not to rule out another Kargil
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by rrikhye »

Another piece by Major Amin, which I will be running on my site, but which I thought you would like to see. It repeats some of the assertions Major Amin has made in other articles, but there is new stuff in here - not as far as we're concerned, but its new for someone on the other side to have said it.

BTW, refering to the articles above, Pakistan's belief that it could keep an offensive limited to Kashmir because Indian Army would not retaliate elsewhere is not the first time this mistaken approach was taken. Same thing happened in 1965, which is how the war escalated. India has always reserved the right to cross the IB in case of an attack across the Kashmir LOC. Anyone who read the newspapers of the time can see that Nehru had made this very clear on several occassions. So it was wishful thinking in 1965, and it would have been wishful thinking in 1999. Had Pakistan fed in reinforcements into North Kashmir, we would have had to open another front, and we would have.

But similarly, my dear friends, if we think we can make a limited attack and get away with it, we too are mistaken. Pakistan military doctrine also explicitly says they will retaliate as they see best, and they have done so, i.e., 1971.

If India seeks to retaliate against Pakistan for Kashmir [I agree this is becoming increasingly moot in the context of the very fast changing strategic situation, but I speak in context of 2002], India has to be prepared for an across-the-board escalation by Pakistan. If India fails to retaliate by counter-escalating to all-out war, it will be seen as an Indian defeat. As such, we may as well prepare and plan for an all-out finishing war in the first place and then go for it.

If anyone has heard from Johann can they please email me at rikhye1@hotmail - thanks
_______________________________________________

Kargil-A Military Analysis

Kargil stands as perhaps the final military effort on Pakistans part to settle the Kashmir dispute by military means.

Analysis has mostly centred around political aspects of the operation while the military aspects have been largely left to the imagination of the public.Lately it has been claimed that Kargil was launched to bail out Mujahideen as a last resort ! This is an insult to the memory of the Pakistani armed forces "Volunteers" who died in that Himalayan wasteland without a funeral and in circumstances of unimaginable misery !

Kargil operation cannot be understood unless the personalities and motives of the principal characters are examined ! Every action in history is the final culmination of a personality's self perception,ambition and subconscious as well as conscious urges.

In this context the Kargil operation was born out of two key factors ! One was the personality of general Pervez Musharraf and the second was the unceremonial manner in which Nawaz Sharif ousted General Jahangir Karamat Musharraf's predecessor army chief of Pakistan Army.

Musharraf as those who have served with him know which includes this scribe also has always been an intensely ambitious man ! One hallmark of his personality is that he wants to stand out as a great military commander ! Propelled by an enormous ego wherever he served he endeavoured to do something extraordinary ! However fate did not allow him the glory in battle which his other coursemates like shabbir sharif achieved ! In 1965 Musharraf was a subaltern in an artillery unit which saw little action apart from supporting operatiions by indirect fire ! The 16 SP unlike 3 SP which fired on Indian tanks with direct gunsights at Chawinda stayed in conventional artillery role ! In 1971 Musharrafs commando company was not involved in action ! Nevertheless Musharraf compensated for this lack of combat laurels by achieving laurels in army courses and in various command assignments ! His final opportunity came when he ascended to the post of army chief in a situation when the army was in a subservient position vis a vis the civilian head of state , something which was regarded by the military herarchy as worse than blasphemy !

The forced retirement of General Karamat by prime minister Nawaz Sharif was regarded as a personal defeat by the Pakistani military brass and by Musharraf who felt that he would be a far weaker army chief under a strong prime minister who had asserted civilian control over the military machine !

These two factors were the fathers of the Kargil operation ! Ambition accompanied by a perception that the Pakistani public must be convinced that the soldiers were better than politicians.

Kargil at the military level was the brainchild of three men i.e General Musharraf the army chief ,Aziz the then army Chief of general Staff and Mahmud the then corps commander 10 Corps ! Musharraf and Mahmud were motivated by intense ambition to achieve military glory and Aziz was motivated by his Kashmiri ancestry plus military ambition.The person they selected to execute the operation was again one distinguished by out of proportion ambition i.e Major General Javed Hassan , author of a book in 1990s that claimed that India was on its way to disintegration and in which mughal king Humayun was resurrected from the grave to fight at Second Battle of Panipat !

In November December 1998 just one month after Musharraf's elevation to the post of army chief volunteers were asked for at the army level for an operation in Kashmir ! Many thousand volunteered including both officers and men from various units !

At no stage did any Mujahideen enter Kargil ! This is a piece of fiction and has no veracity !



These were attached to NLI units in the 80 Brigade sector for training.The principal idea of the plan was to infiltrate four battalions of NLI (Northern light Infantry) stationed in 80 Brigade Sector into Kargil Heights overlooking and dominating the Srinagar Ladakh road the lone Indian link with the Siachen and Leh Sectors ! The idea being to cut the lifeline of Indian supplies to Leh and Siachen Sectors ! Indian held heights in Kargil were to be occupied in February 1999 while Indian infantry had abandoned these heights at the approach of winter snow as an annual routine since 1948.In occupying the heights no fighting was involved ! The real issue was that of supplying Pakistani troops holding these heights which was far more difficult from the Pakistani side than from the Indian side !

Plans were kept secret and even the Commander 10 Corps Engineers of was not allowed to enter the Operations Room in 10 Corps Pindi.

The distance involved in reaching the heights varied from 15 to 35 kilometres from Pakistan side over mountains as high as 13 to 19,000 feet .To do this each battalion was divided into two parts , one acting as porters taking supplies forward and one half occupying the heights .

The heights were occupied as per the plan but the four units while doing so were severly exhausted ! In March-April the Indians discovered the Pakistani presence and reacted severely ! Severe fighting continued till July once the Indians finally re-captured the heights after Pakistani troops had been left to the mercy of Indian artillery and overwhelming troop concentrations as a result of the Blair House Accord !

A brief military examination of the plan reveals following weaknesses.(1) Failure to assess strategic repercussions of the operation at geopolitic and national strategic level .(2) Logistic failure in incorrect appreciation of supplying the troops . (3) Failure to understand that by occupying the heights the Indians were driven into a corner and had no choice but to retaliate , not for glory as was the Pakistani military's case but for pure military survival . (4) At a more subtle level the use of the Chora-Batalik Sector as a future spring board for Pakistani operations against India was sealed since Indians heavily fortified this sector for any future war.

The Pakistani planners failed to assess that war as an instrument of policy is no longer in vogue at the international level and their temporary military success would only bring greater international censure and a negative war mongering image without any corresponding military gain at the strategic level.

This scribe interviewed a former commander of FCNA and 10 Corps about logistics and General Imtiaz Warraich replied as following :--

" We initiated this operation but failed to support it with comprehensive operational planning and above all buildup for essential logistic support without which no operation can succeed"......'" the principal reason for our heavy casualties and lack of progress was unimaginative and callous logistic operations to support the units".

At one point the sepoys who had volunteered to fight and had come from many other infantry units to the NLI units refused to act as porters carrying supplies over 15 kilometres and were so exasperated that they defied Javed Hassan's personal orders in unit durbars to carry supplies and when Javed Hassn threw his cap on the ground threatened to march over it unless they were not employed as porters ! One such volunteer told this scribe that we had volunteered to fight ,not to act as porters ! The same fact was also mentioned in ISI chief Ziauddin Butt's secret report to Nawaz Sharif prepared by an Engineer officer on Zia's staff in ISI !

The failure to assess the "Enemy" factor was another strategic planning failure at the highest level .I asked General Warraich this question and he stated " Capture of Kargil Heights would totally stop all Indian movement to Leh and Ladakh Sectors unlike Pakistan in Siachen and Indians had no option but to do and die " !

Lust for glory and honour in battle are perfectly reasonable aspirations as long as they are accompanied by commensurate military talent in the generals who are at the helm of affairs ! This was sadly lacking in the Musharraf team who planned the operation. Their egos were many times larger than their real military talent !

By promoting an intensely ambitious man to the rank of army chief Nawaz did a favour which could only be repaid by betrayal ! The plan was based not on sound military reasoning but on burning ambition and an unrealistic desire for glory by men far away from the heat of battle ! No one above major level died , yet in a report to the military secretarys branch Javed Hassan recommended retiring 75 % of officers involved in the operation below colonel level !

The prime minister was not fully briefed because of ulterior motives ! Had the operation succeeded it would have been projected as a proof of Musharraf's Napoleonic brilliance and if it failed as it did Nawaz Sharif would have been made the scapegoat !

The operations planners were distinguished neither by loftiness of thought,nor audacity in the conduct of battle athe operational or strategic level.Thus boldness at tactiacl level was sacrificed because of operational and tactical timidity at the highest level.

No one appreciated that the army men who were employed , and it is a fiction that there was a single Mujahid in Kargil , had flesha nd blood ! These men mourned by a few hundred families were sons husbands fathers and brothers !

The Kargil operation at the military level is a watershed ! Idealism that propelled many hundred to die in those Himalayan wastes is buried for good ! Now there is a new breed which dominates the army ! The ones who aim at going on lush UN secondments or to KESC,WAPDA or as well paid consulatants !

What can one conclude ! It was the human heart that failed in Kargil and this heart which failed was housed in the ribcage of men sitting in the GHQ and not on the rocky pinnacles of Kargil ! Once the supply lines were closed under Indian threat of a counter attack , these brave men all Pakistan Army regulars were abandoned to die , pounded by artillery fire , bayoneted by overwhelming numbers , weakened by starvation ! Who can hear their cries ! Our ears are covered with heaps of lies ! Truth died at Kargil ! What remains is a body guard of lies!

A.H AMIN
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by shiv »

Originally posted by rrikhye:
Another piece by Major Amin,

Musharraf as those who have served with him know which includes this scribe also has always been an intensely ambitious man ! One hallmark of his personality is that he wants to stand out as a great military commander ! Propelled by an enormous ego wherever he served

The Kargil operation at the military level is a watershed ! Idealism that propelled many hundred to die in those Himalayan wastes is buried for good ! Now there is a new breed which dominates the army ! The ones who aim at going on lush UN secondments or to KESC,WAPDA or as well paid consulatants !

Once the supply lines were closed under Indian threat of a counter attack , these brave men all Pakistan Army regulars were abandoned to die , pounded by artillery fire , bayoneted by overwhelming numbers , weakened by starvation ! Who can hear their cries ! Our ears are covered with heaps of lies ! Truth died at Kargil ! What remains is a body guard of lies!

A.H AMIN
Wow! What an article - a REAL keeper.

But . .

Source please?
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by kgoan »

On the previous thread, we were wondering whether or not an outside "catalysts" was responsible for Kargil. According to Major Amin, the answer seems to be "yes".

If Amin is correct, i.e. if Kargil was intended to conquer Islamabad and not Kashmir, then the possibility of an Indo-US "understanding" diminishes considerably, since Amin implies that the Paks have been manipulated by the US since Musharraf became COAS.

i.e, it implies that the US was more than willing to risk a nuclear conflagaration on the Subcontinent to further their aims, whatever those were.

Remember, at the time, there was supposedly a new, and untested, "far-right" govt in place that was still in election mode. If the US did act as a catalyst how could they, at that time, have known whether or not this new govt wouldn't have reacted ferociously and simply lashed out at Pakistan to settle things once and for all?

A few years down the track, with a better understanding of the NDA, we can laugh at that. But at that time?

So if Amin is correct, the US was willing to risk Indian cities for their own aims. That would, if correct, have frozen any sort of Indo-US "understanding", and would also, rightly, have pushed China into the number 2 spot on Kaka's list.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by svinayak »

The person they selected to execute the operation was again one distinguished by out of proportion ambition i.e Major General Javed Hassan , author of a book in 1990s that claimed that India was on its way to disintegration and in which </font>

can somebody find out more about General Javed Hassan and his book
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Sarma »

I don't know much about AH Amin. How does he know such intricate details about the Kargil operation? He seems to be knowing even the minutest details like "Javed Hassan throwing his cap on the ground" and many others.

Anyway, SHAME ON THE PAKISTANI ARMY FOR ABANDONING ITS SOLDIERS.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Gerard »

Originally posted by Sarma:
Anyway, SHAME ON THE PAKISTANI ARMY FOR ABANDONING ITS SOLDIERS.
Not only abandoning them but disowning them and burying their bodies in secret.

H+D ? how about Honor and Duty?

Paki army abandons its living and dead, leaving all their men behind.
They disown their fallen warriors, scorning those who gave their lives for their country.

Musharraf has no sense of duty to his comrades in arms and lacks honor.

He is nothing more than a thug in camo with a beauty queen sash.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Arun_S »

Nawaz Sharif unaware of Kargil incursion: SIFY

Islamabad: Ch. Nisar Ali Khan, who held several key cabinet portfolios during Nawaz Sharif's regime, has revealed that the former prime minister was not aware of the Kargil incursion, and that the military had kept him totally in the dark about it.

He said when Nawaz learnt about the Kargil operation he went to the US to save his army face humiliation at the hands of the Indian army. "The PM could not reverse or stop it even if he wished to do so because it would have had serious fallout both for the army and the government," he added.

Nisar said he opposed Nawaz's visit to the US saying, "Mian sahib let those people face the music who had planned all these things without taking politicians into confidence." But, Nawaz replied, "No Nisar I could not see my army face humiliation at the hands of India".

Nisar, a known Nawaz loyalist, said, "Kargil was badly conceived, badly planned and badly executed." He said this during an interview with The News on Thursday.

Besides Nawaz, Nisar also served in the governments of General Ziaul Haq and Mohammad Khan Junejo, and played an important part in country's politics. He said, "if Nawaz had been aware of the Kargil adventure, he was not so foolish to invite Indian prime minister (Vajpayee) to Lahore."

Criticising the military's role in Pakistan, he said, "Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, with his political wisdom, saved 90,000 Pakistani soldiers and was later hanged by the military. The same happened with Nawaz after 27 years.

Nawaz went to USA after taking all negative results of this visit on his own self but saved the military honour that was under serious danger because of Indian threats. The same army which was rescued by Nawaz, sent the man to hell."

Asserting that Musharraf and Nawaz enjoyed good relations, Nisar rejected the reports saying Nawaz was going to dismiss four top army generals - General Mahmood Ahmed, General Aziz, Corps Commander Northern Areas General Javed Hassan and General Tauqir Zia (DG Operations) for keeping the government in the dark about the Kargil operation. Nisar said, "this was an excuse to sack an elected government".

Nisar said an impression was created in the mind of Musharraf that after sacking of his four Generals, he would be next target.

"This actually created panic in the ranks of military Generals responsible for the Kargil debacle. They resolved to react if Musharraf was removed".

An alarmed Musharraf raised the issue with Nisar and Shahbaz who both assured him that this was totally wrong. To remove the impression, Musharraf was also made chairman joint chief of army staff.

Nisar said, "deliberately differences and misunderstandings were created between Musharraf and Nawaz." In the meantime, he said, the generals close to Musharraf decided to overthrow Nawaz if he tried to remove Musharraf and a message was conveyed that if this army chief was removed, army would react.

Intriguers close to Nawaz warned him if he did not react he would be dismissed. "Both sides reacted in their own way to pre-empt each other's reactions and finally Khakis won," he added.

ANI
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by svinayak »

Nisar said, "deliberately differences and misunderstandings were created between Musharraf and Nawaz."

Is this due to Foreign Hand
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by debjani »

YIP,

Remember that there was member who in the last thread on Kargil, poured scorn repeatedly on my statement that Pak made a logistic blunder and that it was impossible to sustain an operation on such terrain and heights without a Line of Communication i.e. proper logistic routes being open and also sanitised? That member quoted various links and arguments to back his claim including wondering the veracity of my statement given that Pak has guns deep inside Indian area till you told him that some may know more than what the media may say.

I now hope that Amin’s article clears all his doubts.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by kgoan »

Ray Sahib,

The problem is that Amin inserts his interpretation of events with the facts. That makes its difficult to separate one from the other, and raises questions about the validity of the facts if his interpretation receives a knocking.

Indo-US relations haven't collapsed since Kargil, if anything it's the reverse. That would, seem to imply that the Indian side do not see Kargil as US inspired, which in turn raises some questions about Amin's interpretation of events.

This is not to argue with your interpretation. It's just that appealing to Amin's articles as supportive evidence may be singularly ill-advised.

OTOH, Amin has written some very credible articles in "Defence Journal" and "Globe". But since 9-11, his disappointment with the Pak Army and Musharraf (their "cowardice", as he sees it) has tended to color his interpretation of events. To give you one example, during last years stand-off, Amin wrote:
. . .the Indian Adventure of 2002 is based on the more realistic premise that Pakistan will think twice before using nuclear weapons if India captures a limited area in Kashmir.

What is the solution? Tip the sword with uranium. Make clear our noble intentions. Kotli or Point 6799 is as important for Pakistan as Lahore or Sialkot. War is irrational and if the Indians emerged victorious in 1999, promise them a nuclear boquet anywhere along the LoC. In desperate times the boldest measures are the safest. Machiavelli said "it is better to act and regret, than not to act and regret". By not defending ourselves, regardless of whether it is north or south of Burjeal, where the international boundary changes into the LoC, we will be destroyed for eternity. If this is Armaggedon for us, let it be so for India too.
.
That was published in the May 31, 2002 edition of Paks "Nation" newspaper. It gets a little difficult to take the proponent of such views "seriously", although of course it is on par for the type of Pak "startegic thinkers" like Gul and Beg.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by debjani »

Originally posted by kgoan:
Ray Sahib,

The problem is that Amin inserts his interpretation of events with the facts. That makes its difficult to separate one from the other, and raises questions about the validity of the facts if his interpretation receives a knocking.

IThis is not to argue with your interpretation. It's just that appealing to Amin's articles as supportive evidence may be singularly ill-advised.

OTOH, Amin has written some very credible articles in "Defence Journal" and "Globe". B captures a limited area in Kashmir.

No, I am just speaking about Kargil. I have been there and that I was stating the ground realties and as during the Operations.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Arun_S »

Originally posted by acharya:
Nisar said, "deliberately differences and misunderstandings were created between Musharraf and Nawaz."

Is this due to Foreign Hand
Much like a virus the ISI is the other power center in the emperors seat that has the motivation and resources to easily do it.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Umrao »

Musharraf had brought Kargil plan to me: Benazir

By a correspondent | June 25, 2003 23:08 IST

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has revealed that President Pervez Musharraf had brought the Kargil plan to her when she was the prime minister and he the Director General of Military Operations.

"Kargil was an absolute disaster," Benazir said in an exclusive interview with Third Eye Television. "I asked Gen Musharraf what would happen when the Kargil plan was put up to me and he said he would put the flag of Pakistan on the Srinagar Assembly."

She said she vetoed the plan because she knew that 'ultimately we would have been asked to go back to where we were and that's exactly what happened'.

"So, I wish they had listened to what I had said at that time and not got lost in the brilliance of the military strategy," she said.

During her tenure, she said, there were no non-Kashmiri groups involved in the Kashmiri insurgency.

"Yes, Kashmir was an issue during my tenure. But during my tenure there were certain differences," she said. "For example there was no attack like the Bombay blasts or the attack on Indian Parliament. The second issue is that there were no non-Kashmiri groups involved in the Kashmiri insurgency," she said.

"It is under Musharraf's watch that the Taliban have regrouped. And it is under Musharraf's watch that the home grown militants are dictating the foreign policy of Pakistan. Where we have incidents like Kargil and we have incidents like the Indian Parliament attack and we have incidents where the housing colony of wives and children of military officers in India are blown up," she said.

Asked how she would have responded to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's peace efforts, she said, "We (PPP) would have taken to task the home grown militants and simply not allowed them to dictate Pakistan's foreign policy agenda by doing what they want and when they want. In fact we would have been deeply concerned about the fact that Al Qaeda people are turning up in our country. And we would have made the situation very difficult for them to either seek refuge in Pakistan or for the Taliban to regroup in Pakistan or for our own homegrown militants to use Pakistan as a base for launching attacks on other countries."
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Umrao »

Kargil ruined Kashmir peace
plan: Nawaz Sharief

June 25, 2003 20:18 IST

Describing President Pervez Musharraf as a 'traitor', former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharief has said that the Kargil conflict, which was staged by the Pakistani military, ruined the Kashmir peace process.

"I can only say here that (Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari) Vajpayee and I had almost decided a deadline for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute," he told Pakistan's Daily Times from Jeddah, where he is in exile.

"Vajpayee's visit to Lahore was a link in the chain. Had it not been for Kargil, whereby all our plans were sabotaged, the issue of Kashmir would have reached a historical resolution long ago," he said in his first interview on record ever since he was exiled.

He said, "All events in the aftermath of Kargil episode, especially 12th October 1999 (when the coup in Pakistan took place), are inextricably linked. The true version of the misadventure of Kargil shall not remain a secret… the facts shall be brought before the public and all those responsible shall have to account for their deeds.

"For the time being I can only say that I took everything on my shoulders to save our army from a major embarrassment."

He said he would not return to Pakistan by working out an 'arrangement' with Musharraf.

Sharief said there appeared to be no meeting point between the opposition and the president.

"But who is responsible? How can one man play with the destiny of 140 million people? There is only one recourse to it now. Musharraf has to drop his Legal Framework Order completely, give up his uniform and step down.

"Nothing short of it is likely to work or should work," he said.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Aditya G »

Extract from Dateline Kargil By Gaurav Sawant pg 140:
The artillery lauched several late night attacks on the Pakistani positions. "We have recently acquired Cargo bombs and these have been wreaking havoc both across the LoC and on the enemy positions on the Indian side," one of the youngsters explained at a new gun position near village Dah in Batalik sub-sector one windy evening in June.

Sipping a cup of hot coffee, laced liberally with brandy, we stood at his position at the last light, "Come on! Come on! bring the bloody Cargos. Tonight we will ensure those chaps don't keep their feet on the ground," he said angrily. Despite the cold, the gunners were sweating, carting the heavy shells on their shoulders to the gun position. Everything was done with mechanical precision. The shell cases were pried open. The shells brought out and then tested. They were kep on a mat on the ground.

At last light the orders to fire came. Wearing their ear plugs, the soldiers conversed with each other thru signals. The shells were loaded and information fed into the panel of the Bofors. The commander raised his hand and the first shell went with a deafening roar. Dust flew and the soldiers took a step back involuntarily.

The Gun commander had so far refused to tell us what Cargo shell meant. But when the shell landed with a THUMP! somewhere far beyond the peak in vision, he laughed. "This shell has 72 bomblets inside. The shell would would have pierced the bunker and exploded inside killing everyone. But even if it did not, the bomblets will get embedded in the ground and explode the moment the bloody Pakistani soldiers step on them. God willing, tonight I'll send back dozens of cripples to the Islamabad hospital," he added with another laugh.

And we laughed with him. It is just not possible to survive in the face of death without being gross and crass, he admitted, and more than a month in the conflict zone, I felt the same way.
The above is a good example of the willingness to escalate.

(I hope to make more Kargil posts as Kargil Vijay Diwas approaches)
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Aditya G »

Any reasoning that PA lost the war because they made incorrect estimates on the Logistical effort that would be required to win the war, and hence gifted a victory to India is either INCORRECT or an ATTEMPT TO MISLEAD OPINION.

The fact is that they had arranged for logistics in a very scientific and comprehensive manner:

(1) Involvement of the (Pakistan) Army Aviation -

The PA Mi-17s and Aloettes were very active in their support to the whole operation from the beginning. Read the diaries left behind by the pak officers - it is beyond me to understand how these guys managed to cary out ops without rasing an alarm. This support was reduced drastically when the IAF came into the picture, but was not stopped. Not only did they bring in supplies but on atleast three occasions they also dropped in SSG personnel for mounting counterattacks.

Lets not forget that they brought in three 105 mm guns too. Hell, even Musharraf himslef (yes) visited mushkoh himself before the fighting started.

(2) When the withdrawal was officially sanctioned, PA personnel had enough stores left to burn off before they left. Fires could be seen all over the mountains.

(3) Often when the PA was forced out of a position, IA troops would often eat the remaining stores that were still sealed. The amount of supply they had could have lasted for months. While our boys were struggling with shakarparas and poori-subzi, they had honey, meat, oranges and ghee up in mountains. <u>They had built up their stores over for almost 6 months</u>.

(4) They did factor in the IAF. Evidence is the very active SAM threat throughout the war. According to GlobalSecurity, atleast 100 were fired, and only 3 missiles connected, out of which 1 ac survived and one was a helicopter.

(5) The "bunkers", which are intentionally called sangars by the IA, infact did use cement and steel in many places for construction. If the lines were under so much pressure, how could they possibly transport cement till those points?

There are numerous instances of how the Pakis would call for support from the camps (eg Muntho Dhalo and Shangruti) whenever they were under pressure. This support was duly sent. Positions often had telephone cables running done the reverse slopes in order to prevent RT intercepts. eg: Why were the Biharis led by Major Sarvannan* unable to hold the peak he captured _weeks_ before any Indian was to set foot on that territory again?

The "Honest" Pakis (Qadir, Amin and co) would want us to believe that the Indian Artillery and "overwhelming" numerical advantage was too powerful (powerful it was) and during the latter stages of the war where there was no support for the PA troops (not true for all positions) was one the reasons why they lost and that they got their max casualties only in the end when they were 'retreating'. This is complete BS - an attempt to rob the IA of victory. This is reflected in the following statements:

Qadir -
The international pressure was becoming unbearable for Nawaz, and the loss of a couple of posts totally unnerved him. The military also made no effort to explain why those particular posts could have been recaptured by the Indians, while the rest could not. He began seeking a way out, negotiated first with Vajpayee, unsuccessfully, since by then Vajpayee and India had won the diplomatic campaign and then turned to Clinton. That round led to his visit to Washington on July 4 and resulted in a withdrawal. Since the withdrawal had not been initially catered for by the Pakistan forces, the maximum losses occurred during this phase. <I>Thus India ended up with a military victory, which it had not won, and Pakistan with a military defeat, which it had not suffered, though there is little doubt that the diplomatic victory was India’s.</I>
Amin -
Severe fighting continued till July once the Indians finally re-captured the heights after Pakistani troops had been left to the mercy of Indian artillery and overwhelming troop concentrations as a result of the Blair House Accord.
The truth is when the withdrawal started 24 Hrs of ceasefire was declared, which was later extended to 36 Hrs (IIRC). Infact the PA refused to vacate some peaks (and still haven't given atleast one peak pt; 5353) and the fighting kept on with complete support from artillery on both sides.

If the Indian Arty was on full song, the PA wasn't sitting on their arses having chai thruout. They were involved from Day 0 to even during (and after) the withdrawal and were very effective due to their weapon locating radars. Obviously they did not face any logistical issues did they? The IA lost atleast one 105 mm gun in counterfire. They could affect our supply lines in the same way we disrupted theirs.

A small snippet from Gaurav Sawant's book -
"The basic problem for the advancing infantry", an artillery officer later explained "was that the enemy guns are firing accurately, stopping our boys from advancing. So along with SF Commandos we had sent some of our OP officers to scout for the enemy gun positions. Now that we have the co-ordiantes for their gun positions we are trying to destroy them.
The numerical advantage of the IA as an excuse for the PA's many losses has been abused since 1947. This argument is as useful as a 5o years old condom that has been used 5 times. Do they forget that in the Kargil terrain, victory was a miracle regardless of the numbers, because even if you are 9:1, you simply cant win. There is no victory if the posts were to be taken back aftern too great a number of casualties ("self defeating"). We brought in artilley in a manner that has NEVER been seen in South Asia:

orbat.com says -
Most important, India used firepower to an extent unprecedented in South Asia. In just one operation to seize three posts in the Dras area, for example, Indian guns fired over 4000 rounds. This may be quite routine in western armies, but is an unheard of ammunition expenditure in South Asia. Pakistan artillery, which works to a high standard and was a big reason the Indians did not do better in 1965, could not operate effectively once the NLI was pushed off the high piquets and it lost its forward observers.
URL: http://orbat.com/site/data/historical/pakistan/nli_kargil1999.html

The argument that the PA lost out due to poor logistics and an incompetent civilian leadership support their oft repeated assertion that the Kargil War was a tactical victory but a strategic loss, esp in the diplomatic arena (due to incompetent politicians):

Ashley Tellis et al:
A second common variant is that Kargil was a tactical success but a strategic failure. This view was also articulated by a number of in-formants and has been reiterated in various articles. Shireen Mazari, for example, has written that “the military aspect of the Kargil action was simply brilliant.” Later in the same piece she laments that India was able to “turn a military defeat into a diplomatic victory . . . [and] that Pakistan was unable to translate a tremendous military success into a politico-diplomatic victory.” Interlocutors who held this view asserted—often against the weight of evidence—that the Pakistani Army’s operational performance at Kargil was flawless, and they in-variably concluded that the Army’s attainment of strategic surprise at Kargil was in effect synonymous with the achievement of victory in the campaign writ large. Since those who hold this view entirely neglect the fact that the Indian Army, once mobilized, redeployed, and committed to eviction operations, actually secured repeated tactical victories—often against great odds—throughout the concluding half of the Kargil campaign, they continue to claim that Kargil must be chalked up as an operational victory for the Pakistani Army even if it otherwise appears to be an unnecessary political defeat for Pakistan at large.
Agha (on Qadir's report):

URL: http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1450/
Resultantly, the eventual deployment by India of its air force came as a surprise. Intriguingly, the author ends the analysis at the point where the Pakistan Army, with the help of the mujahideen, was giving a tough time to the adversary and repulsing repeated Indian efforts to regain territory. There is no mention of the Indian forces hitting back after they had taken the initial beating. There is also no reference to the situation when the Pakistan Army had run out of manpower properly acclimatized to fight at such heights. Reports suggest that during the last week of the operation Pakistan had to pull out men deployed at Siachin, leaving positions there vulnerable to an Indian attack. Hence, it was in the Army’s interest to convince the prime minister to negotiate peace with the adversary. The study, however, puts the blame squarely on Nawaz Sharif who, it is claimed, had chickened out and gone to talk to the Americans and the Indians.
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While one must appreciate the writer’s effort in exposing some truth, his analysis leaves much to be desired. For example, there are major gaps in the writer’s assessment of conflict escalation. Why did the army not correctly assess India’s commitment to protecting Kargil? Why did no one think about India upping the ante? After all, it did that in 1965. Furthermore, would it be fair to consider the objectives stated in the study as primary political aims for initiating such a major operation?
URL: http://www10.brinkster.com/anti007/Agha_Kargil.html

Amin attempts to hide PA's loss by passing off by more comments like:
Failure to understand that by occupying the heights the Indians were driven into a corner and had no choice but to retaliate , not for glory as was the Pakistani military's case but for pure military survival.
...just another shameless attempt to rob us of any feeling of victory..

If there was anybdy who was logistically unprepared, it was the Indian Army. This was brutally true especially in the beginning. But that was all sorted out with time and clearly noted by Tellis et al (see quotation above).

It can never be denied that mistakes by one side contributes to the victory of the other, but the victor must act on his own in order to force the cracks in the opposing force. Their logistics were excellent but could not be supported due to the conditions imposed on them by our intensive action. eg: if the PA ran out of men acclimatized to hi altitude, it happened because of the massive pressure that was applied on them.

<U>The reason the Pakistan Army was defeated was not because their soldiers were left to die in Kargil by their own people but because their forces were unable to hold once the Infantry+Arty+AF combine hit back *decisively* after initial reversals.</U> IMHO, we won because they failed to comprehend that such a well defended and well supported line could be broken by us Indians and that we would fail to win back those peaks from them even after a prolonged period. We must understand that the outcome of the war would have been very different if we hadn't started taking back peak by peak by the second week of june.

The truth is in the first week of July there were still peaks that were being held by the PA, which we were unable to or hadn't tried to free from them. The peaks we won, were won after a brutal fight, heavily favoured for the PA, and yet were able to win with a death toll that was far lesser than them. Unfortunately, their death toll is unknown (500? 750? or 2700?), and will remain to be for the forseeable future.

The purpose of this lengthy post is just to clear one thing: That we won kargil because we were better and fought hard, and not only because the Pakistanis made mistakes that they could have avoided.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by ramana »

aditya, would you like to write a summary article on Kargil for BRM?
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Babui »

Aditya - very nicely put. I suspect the Paki version of 'tactical victory, strategic defeat' was put out by the generals shortly after the Paki retreat to save their necks from getting lynched. Remember the news articles (shortly after the war) of Paki generals addressing disaffected officers/men throughout the country who had been led to believe that they were winning the war. It wasn't long after these news articles came out that the Paki generals started handing out gallantry awards (thereby confirming the presence of the Paki army in Kargil) and changing the status of the NLI. All this to deflect the blame from their mess to Nawaz Sharif's neck. To be a Paki general and fight a war against India is to ride a rocking tiger.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by debjani »

Aditya,

We won the war fair and square. No quarters asked and no quarters given.

Notwithstanding, I find your post most fascinating. I also find the following statement equally fascinating:

“Any reasoning that PA lost the war because they made incorrect estimates on the Logistical effort that would be required to win the war, and hence gifted a victory to India is either INCORRECT or an ATTEMPT TO MISLEAD OPINION.”

I have to ask just a few clarifications:

1. Have you been to the Kargil Area? I am not talking about as a sightseeing mission along NH 1A, but on the heights and stayed there, preferably during winters which are cut off?
The mountains are craggy, and the spines along which the movement takes place especially on heights are like a spine. When the snow falls, it is most dangerous because one doesn’t know if under the snow the spine is there or it’s just another pile and you go down a 1000 or more feet! Therefore, all movements have to be done along beaten tracks. It is a common practice that all movements in such terrain where there is a doubt, tracks are first beaten and then moved upon.

2. You state that the Pakistanis who occupied Kargil and lived there had – ‘The amount of supply they had could have lasted for months. While our boys were struggling with shakarparas and poori-subzi, they had honey, meat, oranges and ghee up in mountains. They had built up their stores over for almost 6 months’.

(a) Indeed if that be correct, how come that the Indian Army even during peacetime conditions and along proper mule tracks and mountain roads take more than 6 to 7 months to stock for the winter that last 5 months at best? Rather inefficient an army to say the least, I must say. What would be the weight of such rations that last 6 months and that have such delicacies as meat, honey and oranges apart from the standard rations?

(b) Further, when the Pakistanis came in [about a Brigade worth or more], they would have also brought in ammunition for at least their rifles, platoon mortars, battalion mortars, MMGs, etc? You state that were geared for six months. What would be the weight of such ammunition they would have carried apart from the weight of the said weapons? All carried manpack? A man can carry about 15 kgs manpack in High Altitude unless you claim that Pakistanis are supermen. What would be the porter train like? Now if everything was delivered by helicopters it would be like a beehive disturbed! If mules were used how many mules would have been required? Indeed, if such happened and the troops failed to see it, then they were bloody useless. Therefore, it would be fair to surmise that helicopters were not swarming logistics nor were large mule caravans!

You must also note that kargil heights are without trees. Surely, they cooked. So, would they have firewood? If so, who carried that and that too a six month supplies? If they banked on Kerosene, that would be heavier than firewood. Who carried the six month supply?

Just add up the weight of the weapons, ammunition, kerosene oil and rations including the honey, oranges and meat. And of course, we must not forget, the steel and cement for the bunkers which you state they built! They weight carried would be colossal and that too they ferried it in four months!

Let’s say they carried it, for argument’s sake, are you suggesting that they did so in four months i.e. Feb to May? If they did, they could not have moved such large supplies along the spines of the mountain that too covered with deep snow in four months. Therefore, how did they do it? In comparison, the Indian Army takes five to six months for their winter stocking, in peacetime conditions and along proper tracks and roads and on terrain they are familiar with, a factor the Pakistanis did not possess i.e. know the ground!!! I leave it to you to judge the soundness of your contentions.

(c) Musharraf visited Mushkoh before the fight started? What was the route used? He walked through the snow? Who did he go to meet? Mushkoh is well inside the Indian Territory and a village is there where there is routine army patrolling which most of the winter is impassable.

(d) One Pakistani diary was captured. I have read the original. It was a sad commentary about their preparation.

(e) Bunkers were made of steel and cement? Sadly, we didn’t see any. It would not have been possible to do so, given the accumulated weight they are supposed to have been carrying given your contention. Fabricated Reinforce Plastic huts were there but only a few.

(e) You state that they had telephone cables on reverse slope to avoid RT. How does having telephone cables on reverse slopes have anything to do with RT. RT is Radio Telephony or wireless.

As far as Gaurav Sawant goes, I beleive he wrote that he had sat in a drain outside the Brigade HQ along with 'Tambis' {Madrassis)who were shivering in the cold. First of all, there were no Madras troops there, the ERE being Dogras and secondly, whether you are a Tambi or a Sikh, you all shiver.

I have tried to state the issues as logically and scientifically as I could.

Having said that, so that patriotic feeling should not cloud a dispassionate analysis, there is NO DOUBT that it was the magnificent actions of the Indian Army that won the day against heavy odds. The individual valour and the collective will is indeed laudable. It was a crowning moment.

I would also state that the way the country stood behind the Army too played a great role in boosting the morale that finally won the day.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by putnanja »

Ray, was wondering where you were :)
You had mentioned long time back that you would find out the paki casualties during Kargil, or rather the IA estimate. Any info on that?
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by debjani »

Originally posted by Ravi:
Ray, was wondering where you were :)
You had mentioned long time back that you would find out the paki casualties during Kargil, or rather the IA estimate. Any info on that?
Let's just say I was there. In fact, I was there twice and both time in combat! Interstingly, I have done all what I wrote in the earlier post and so I know its a real horrendous task but a task I look back upon as very satisfying. Also, Pakistanis are no great joes. They are as good or as bad as us. There army backup is shocking to say the least. The Pak officers diary is cocky in the beginning with lot of talk about his God and the Mission and then it turns pathetic. As a human being, I feel sorry for him that he and his comrades were left to fend for themselves. Much of it was in Urdu.

Further, Aditya states that the Indian Army ate the Pak rations. You never do that. It will surely be poisoned like all areas abandoned like sangars are most likely booby trapped. Any wise enemy would do that.

I say that while we have done well, we should not put the blinkers on. Even the books written on war [any war] can never be totally true. Hindsight is a great saviour from the unpleasant and satements in hindsight is normally said with a straightface, which one may not be able to do if asked immediately after the event and a bit shell shocked. Like Mrs Clinton's book.

I could not obtain the causalty figures and I gave a post stating so. We somehow seem to have missed up on that since the bodies were surfacing on and oft and othr issues took predominance. I believe, Lt Gen Bami's book gives some estimate and so the the other book Blood on Snow.

I also read somewhere that cargo shells were used. Could the authority for saying so be given? Not such bunk like a artillery youngster said and all that....
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Umrao »

could they have rigged up rope/pulley kind of system to drag ( analogus to drawing water from a deep well) the equipment in stages to the final destination heights from deep crevices?

As to Mushy visit was it not admitted that the Kargil heights could not be monitored during winter and all positions were abandoned?

what if he (Mushy) wanted to show bravado as kammando and did something (equally) foolish to go there (to Mushkoh) as being said here?

The fact remains that they were very well entrenched, undetected for considerable time, it took great courage and a heavy price in terms of men material to dislodge them is sufficient evidence they were equiped, aided, agumented for a tacticle reasons. Finally it took IAF PGMs to blast them is enough evidence that some sort of semi permenant structures were errected to lodge them in those heights.

Future Historians would also conjecture that Bofors were made in Saichen since so many were found in acheological digings. SOme RT kind might even say Saichen was a flour_ishing place of Aryans as some 'Chapati Atta' was found there.

As they could not visualize the air droping of CKDs of Bofors gun being dropped from air to be assembled and used in that glacier!!
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Cybaru »

Originally posted by aditya.g:
(5) The "bunkers", which are intentionally called sangars by the IA, infact did use cement and steel in many places for construction. If the lines were under so much pressure, how could they possibly transport cement till those points?
Nice post Ray..

Aditya,

If you are saying they used cement and steel to construct bunkers, its no small feet.

Not only do you need cement and steel, but you also need khadi, raati, pathar etc ..

Even a small non-reinforced thing like a water pump shed in a civilian bldg takes about 20-30 days to finish. At that height doing manual labor and finishing lot of such structures is going to be difficult task ( not impossible ). If you add re-enforced concrete for roofing too, then you need plates and wooden ferma's, bamboos and other things to create such a structure. It is possible they used stone and cement, but then they would have to carry stone up there as well. Now you could argue that it is a rocky area and stones could be easily be procured locally. Dressing stones to fit your need is a time consuming process when using manual labor. Add a couple of months for such a pump room above (given about 8-15 resources) even then with possibly wooden beams for supporting the roof of such a structure.
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Umrao »

cy_baru>> Things have changed a lot in cementing technologies.

Pre mixed is good enough. second if the sub zero temps kick in water is good enough to bond and freeze. with out even cement, All you need pre cast briquettes.

Dis claimer, I have not been to Kargil nor did I fight anywhere except at my middle school water tap during lunch. :)
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Re: Kargil Revisited

Post by Cybaru »

Originally posted by John Umrao:
cy_baru>> Things have changed a lot in cementing technologies.

Pre mixed is good enough. second if the sub zero temps kick in water is good enough to bond and freeze. with out even cement, All you need pre cast briquettes.

Dis claimer, I have not been to Kargil nor did I fight anywhere except at my middle school water tap during lunch. :)
Yeah . if they got pre-fab stuff then they don;t even need pre-mixed. Get pre fab structures all the way, couple of cans of bonding material and bricks and you are all set to have a kitty party. BTW pre-mixed and pre-fab stuff is heavy

The point is .. you have to make it avaliable up there.
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