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Pakistan revisits the Kargil war

“Kargil Ghazis,” they are sardonically called at officers’ messes across Pakistan: the warriors who received medals and promotions for fighting — and losing — a war Islamabad still refuses to admit it was involved in.

In order to legitimise the coup that brought him to power, President Pervez Musharraf insisted that the Kargil offensive he authored had been a success — and handed out sackloads of medals to prove it. In his version of events, the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif’s perfidy cost Pakistan a certain triumph.

But earlier this month, a soldier, who was one of the retired General Musharraf’s closest aides, set about demolishing his one-time mentor’s account of what happened in Kargil. In print and television interviews, Lieutenant-General Jamshed Gulzar Kiani candidly described Kargil as a “debacle.” Mr. Sharif, he said, was not properly briefed on an ill-conceived operation in which Pakistani soldiers were sent to certain death.

Gen. Kiani’s insider account blows apart Gen. Musharraf’s claim that the Kargil war had Mr. Sharif’s support. Gen. Musharraf’s autobiography, In the Line of Fire, asserts that Mr. Sharif was briefed on January 29, 1999 and February 5, 1999. “Subsequently,” Gen. Musharraf wrote, “the PM was also briefed on March 12.” Director-General of Military Operations Lieutenant-General Tauqir Zia presided over a Sharif briefing yet again on May 17, 1999. We now know from Gen. Kiani who gave this last briefing that it was perfunctory — even deceptive.

While Gen. Kiani’s revelations have provoked a furore in Pakistan, much of what he said has long been known in India — because the Research and Analysis Wing, in one of the great communications-intelligence coups of all time, succeeded in getting it from the horse’s mouth.

RAW intercepted the telephone calls made by Gen. Musharraf from Beijing to his Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant-General Muhammad Aziz. On May 26, 1999, the two discussed the briefing provided to Mr. Sharif by Kiani, who was then serving as a Major General at the ISI. General Aziz told Gen. Musharraf that Mr. Sharif said he had come to know of the operation “seven days back” — likely just before the May 17 briefing.

Writing in the Royal United Services Institute’s Journal in April 2002, Pakistani defence analyst Brigadier Shaukat Qadir offered a version which was not dissimilar. “While preparations for executing the plan began in November/December 1999 [sic.; presumably 1998]”, Brigadier Qadir wrote, “the plan was casually broached with Prime Minister Sharif some time in December. He was presented with the same argument that the freedom struggle in Kashmir needed a fillip, which could be provided by an incursion into these (temporarily unoccupied) territories. Sharif, being the kind of person he is, accepted the statement at face value. The military leadership had not provided a complete analysis of the scale of the operation, nor had it set out its political aim and how it would be achieved”.

In Brigadier Qadir’s account of the story, Mr. Sharif, “who had been gloating over the drubbing that the Indians were getting, [later] began to feel uncomfortable. In all fairness to him, the military leadership had failed to apprise him of the politico-diplomatic fallout and he characteristically made no effort to analyse this aspect [himself]”.

If Gen. Kiani’s remarks aren’t in themselves revealing, they offer a useful prism through which we can examine the internal politics of the Pakistan army. In essence, his assault on President Musharraf is backed by a hardline, ISI-linked faction which is placing growing pressure on the army’s decision-making processes.

President Musharraf drew almost most of his close advisors from within the ranks of the military-led intelligence services. His chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Ghulam Ahmad, headed the political wing of the ISI in 1993. In the crucial days after September 11, 2001, Gen. Musharraf turned to ISI Deputy Director Lieutenant-General Iftikhar Husain Shah to be Governor of the sensitive North West Frontier Province. Lieutenant-General Javed Ashraf Qazi, who was made Education Minister with special charge of reforming madrasas, was a former ISI chief. So, too, was the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani.

Until the rise of General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and the anti-Soviet Union jihad in Afghanistan turned the ISI into the core of the Pakistan army’s institutional power, it had been a dumping ground for the worst officers. By President Musharraf’s time, it had become the repository of the armed forces’ institutional interests — and the ultimate protector of the state’s ideological identity. The present army chief, General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, notably, accepted charge of the ISI after serving as commander of a corps and Director-General of Military Operations — something that would traditionally have been seen as demotion.

Gen. Kiani — who then did not use the surname which identifies him as a member of the same Potohar-region clan to which the new army chief belongs — was among the many ISI-linked officers who benefited from the rise of President Musharraf. In 1999, when he deposed Mr. Sharif, Gen. Kiani was hand-picked to command the infamous Rawalpindi-based 111 Brigade, which has spearheaded each of the several coups in Pakistan’s unfortunate history. Just a month later, he was promoted and given command of the prestigious Rawalpindi-based X Corps. In the interview, he described himself as “totally loyal.”

Why, then, did General Kiani turn on his patron? Gen. Kiani’s war against President Musharraf seems driven, at least in part, by personal pique. On his retirement in March 2003, Gen. Kiani was appointed chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission. Problems soon arose, though, between him and his long-standing patron. For example, Gen. Kiani fought a running battle against an executive decision to give Post Office Director-General Major-General Masood Hassan an extension. In 2005, an irritated Gen. Musharraf summarily reduced General Kiani’s term from five years to three — and turned him into a bitter critic.

Gen. Kiani now joined hundreds of retired army officers who campaigned against President Musharraf earlier this year, soon after he handed over charge of the army to General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani. At a February 6 meeting in Rawalpindi, Gen. Kiani said the rest of Gen. Musharraf’s “eight-year rule is a complete mess-up of the country.” His own part in that rule, unsurprisingly, was not touched upon.

Among the issues Gen. Kiani raised was the welter of suicide bombings Pakistan saw in the wake of President Musharraf’s reluctant break with the jihadists last year. He urged President Musharraf to “please quit,” arguing that his policies were leading to “finger pointing at [the] Pakistan Army.” Interestingly, the meeting was called to discuss the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Gen. Musharraf was blamed by several speakers, including the former ISI chief, Gen. Durrani, for abandoning the Kashmir jihad.

Gen. Kiani’s interviews appear intended to help reverse Gen. Musharraf’s war against Islamists: a campaign he colourfully described as “using a hammer against an ant.” Many hardliners believe that Gen. Musharraf’s alliance with the United States and its counter-terrorism campaign in the NWFP exposed Pakistan to an existential threat similar to what it faced in 1971.

In his interview, Gen. Kiani argued that the wave of suicide bombings that followed the storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was a predictable consequence of President Musharraf’s decision to fight “an American war on Pakistani soil.” He went on to argue that the U.S. was an unreliable ally, which had “ditched us” in the India-Pakistan war of 1965. “We could have prolonged or even won the war,” he insisted. Gen. Kiani also took the opportunity to reassure his audience that “as a soldier, as a general, I am far, far superior to an Indian army general.”

Kargil is merely an instrument for discrediting President Musharraf’s anti-Islamist campaign. Many of the ‘Kargil Ghazis’ occupy important positions in Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and the al-Qaeda. Peshawar-based XI Corps commander Masud Aslam, for example, commanded 80 Brigade which was decimated in Kargil. He won a Sitara-e-Jurrat, or Star of Courage, for allowing the men he sent to be sent to their slaughter in an ill-conceived operation — a taint that hangs over his conduct of operations in the NWFP. Incidents like the destruction of the Spinkai town by the Pakistan Army’s 14th Division, which is reported to have displaced thousands, are represented by the army’s in-house hardliners as examples of just how little President Musharraf’s loyalists care for their own people.

Trapped in the web of lies he wove for himself on Kargil, Gen. Musharraf is in no position to evade the enemies now closing in on him. He is not the only one, though, caught in the trap. Pakistan’s army chief, the available evidence suggests, is yet to make up his mind on the pro-Islamist, anti-U.S. and, inevitably, anti-India posture the ISI ideologues would like to be put in place.

Signs are the hardliners are winning: Gen. Kayani has threatened to scale down the army’s counter-terrorism operations, and allowed jihadists operating against India greater freedom than in the past. Plenty of officers, though, believe that the battle against Islamists in the NWFP is in Pakistan’s own interests, and feel that the hardliners are courting disaster. The battle for the control of the army will be fought behind closed doors —but is certain to be bitter.

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