The Rand Corporation, a US Think Tank, carried out an analytical study on the Kargil war which was published in the year 2001. The study was conducted by Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair and Jamison Jo Medby. The authors used Indian and Pakistani sources for trying to understand what lessons the two countries may have drawn from this war, limited to one vast district of Jammu & Kashmir. Incidentally, Kargil is now a district of the Union Territory (UT) of Ladakh which came into being on October 31, 2019.
This decision to not allow the war to expand and spill over beyond Kargil has essentially to be attributed in a very large measure to Atal Behari Vajpayee. As Prime Minister of India in 1999, Vajpayee very astutely judged correctly that world opinion will turn against Pakistan for its transgressions. During those days, he said on every available opportunity that the Indian troops were just trying to dislodge Pakistanis from positions they had captured by stealth.
As part of this decision, Vajpayee imposed a tough condition on the fighting Indian troops: Don’t cross Line of Control (LoC). The LoC that had come into being in January 1949, after the bloody war between the two neighbours in late 1947 and 1948. This condition of treating the LoC as sacrosanct proved to be masterstroke as many world leaders agreed that Pakistan’s violation has turned it into a Line of Crisis.
This policy of “strategic restraint of not crossing LoC’’ gave rich dividends and thus the blame for creating the Kargil crisis was entirely laid on Pakistan’s doors. Of course, it created its own problems at the operational level, perhaps far more for the Indian Air Force (IAF) aircraft involved in the Kargil war.
Pakistan grabbed Indian positions by stealth and forced India to retaliate to get back land it had held for 50 years is the narrative that Atal successfully built, and projected all over. On its part, Pakistan said it was mujahideen from Kashmir which had grabbed the icy heights in Kargil. It refused to acknowledge that regulars from Northern Light Infantry (NLI), a part of the Pakistani Army, were there in Kargil. Or that the Pakistani Army was involved at every step of the way in execution of plans to capture Indian posts.
Incidentally, Pakistan disowning its own soldiers and using them as cannon fodder is its consistent policy. Right since October 1947 when it claimed that the attacks on Jammu & Kashmir were the handiwork of kabailis (tribals). The Gulf war between two neighbouring nations of Iraq and Kuwait late in 1990 was the first televised war. Closer home, Kargil was the first war images from which were available in affluent offices, homes and even private clubs via cable TVs.
The media’s televised depiction of India’s war dead helped in galvanizing domestic support against Pakistan. “This was watched with interest in Pakistan, according to our interlocutors, who read these depictions as a deliberate effort to instigate a frenzied consensus in favour of attacking Pakistan,’’ the study says.
At one place, the study points out that the “Kargil conflict has shaped Pakistan’s and India’s conceptions of their future choices’’. Pakistan now knows the costs it had to endure as a result of Kargil: Economic vulnerability, politically instability and international isolation. At present, it is widely viewed as a “precarious, decaying, and increasingly Islamist state’’.
The study made an interesting point as it said that “many in the political classes (in Pakistan) have come to recognize that they must decide among themselves what kind of a state they want to become: 1. Jinnah’s Pakistan 2. Jamaat-e-Islami’s Pakistan or 3. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s (LeT) Pakistan’’. Apparently, Pakistan continues to tread along this path of eternal confusion and knows not whether it wants to be 1, 2 or 3.
“On its part, India is not likely to give Pakistan a chance to flirt with Kargil-like scenarios again. New Delhi will watch the border in J&K and elsewhere carefully. It will also redouble its efforts to prevent infiltration of the sort that occurred at Kargil. India understands that the most likely strategy for Pakistan will be increasing its support for insurgency and for terrorist attacks throughout India,’’ the study noted.
“New Delhi also appreciates that this strategy is to Pakistan’s own disadvantage and further confirms Islamabad as a sponsor of Islamist terrorism. Despite the episodic temptation to bloody the Pakistani nose, India will continue to exhibit restraint,’’ the study predicted. The “episodic temptation’’ the study pointed out to came to fore in “Surgical Strikes’’ (of late 2016 after Uri attack) and the Balakot strikes of Februay 2019.
These episodes of Indian retaliation contrast sharply with “strategic restraint’’ imposed by Vajpayee on the Indian troops.
The study concluded that “ugly stability”, the persistence of unconventional conflicts, will probably endure in the region. State-sponsored terrorism will remain an attractive mode of operation in large part because conventional conflicts remain risky. “Pakistan’s evaluation of Kargil’s consequences is still ambiguous … Nevertheless, Islamabad remains passionately focused on resolving Kashmir, and its support for the insurgency is unlikely to dissipate any time soon,’’ the study predicted correctly.
“The very nature of the jihadi activities besmirches Pakistan’s already poor reputation and reinforces the image of India as a front-line state against Islamic terrorism,’’ the study pointed out. “Pakistan’s reliance upon mujahideen and jihadi tanzeems to pursue its low-intensity war with India creates its own set of problems both domestically and abroad.’’ Even today, 25 years after the Kargil conflict, this 108-page study of the Rand Corporation can prove to be helpful in gaining insights into this limited conventional war.
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