COVER STORY

Playing with fire in Kargil

New Delhi and Islamabad have embarked on a misadventure in Kargil. Their brinkmanship has an escalation potential built into it, hawkish propaganda and pious intentions notwithstanding.

PRAFUL BIDWAI

IT is not for nothing that strategic "experts" advising states have been called "Witch-doctors of the Twentieth Century". These worshippers of raw power, genuflectors before weapons of mass destruction, and paid priests of the death industry play a perni cious role in first transforming political problems into "security" issues and then goading governments to use force to resolve them. The witch-doctor's historic function is to provide expedient rationalisations, ex-post apologies and snake-oil remedies for the use of military force.

In India, most such "experts" are as shameless apologists for the Bomb who are unembarrassed by their own illogic, inconsistency or ignorance. They tailor and distort facts to suit predetermined ends and fill knowledge-gaps with ill-informed speculation. A stark example of such fact-free "expertise" is the smug prediction of a well-known hawk on the front page of a national daily on May 27 that the Kargil conflict cannot possibly escalate because Pakistan, aware of the "superiority of Indian air power", would not dare take on India, and because "any Pakistani intrusion will compound the violation of the Simla pact." That very day, within hours of appearance of this "analysis", Pakistan shot down two planes of the Indian Air Force.

Kargil thoroughly exposes the fallacies of this thinking. A dynamic of escalation was built into it from the start. Given the intelligence agencies' failure and the Defence Ministry's initial failure to vacate the claimed intrusion, progressively higher levels of force were deployed by the Army. The decisive change took place when New Delhi started to use air power on May 26 - for the first time in 27 years at that border.

This introduced a new element of speed and mobility - and hence reduced the room for control. When you have aircraft flying at the speed of sound, even a little deviation from the correct flight-path or target-line risks straying across the zig-zag borde r. The high scope for human error is compounded by the generic problem of low kill-rates of aircraft-launched rockets and bombs. The best of pilots in the best of air forces make mistakes. Given the fact that the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir is un demarcated on the ground, and that there is wide scope for ambiguity about airspace violations, air strikes greatly increase the probability of retaliation and counter-retaliation.

A second element driving escalation was the military raising its own weight in decision-making and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government allowing purely military calculations greater play. This happened at the instance of Defence Minister George Fern andes, according to insiders in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). The transition to the rhetoric of "war", "war-like" situations, "enemy" calculation, and so on, was quick.

At work in the Kargil conflict is a complex dynamic driven by mutual India-Pakistan suspicion and distrust on a range of issues, unresolved, deep, differences over Kashmir, insecurities about each other's military capacities and intentions, opacity in st rategic and foreign policy-making and in sharing pertinent information with each other and with the public, and above all, domestic political factors, particularly the severe crisis of legitimacy which both governments face.

Apart from exposing the BJP-led coalition's incompetence and its inept and ad hoc decision-making, the Kargil crisis further highlights three issues: the perils of the crossing of the nuclear threshold in South Asia exactly one year ago; the BJP's reckle ss action in internationalising the Kashmir issue; and the fragility of the Lahore process, in particular of the extremely limited agreements signed on February 21.

WHAT is special about the Kargil crisis? This confrontation began in early May when the Indian Army first detected the presence of what it called armed "infiltrators", or Mujahideen guerillas allegedly backed by Pakistan, near Kargil and Drass. Such cros s-border forays have been routine for years, as are exchanges of heavy artillery fire. More than 350 such exchanges were reported in less than six months after the nuclear tests. What is new about the present case is the large number of guerillas crossin g the border (officially estimated first at 300 and later at 680, and unofficially at 1,000) and their success in penetrating 7 km into Indian territory and establishing relatively well-equipped camps over an area reportedly as large as 150-200 sq km. Ap parently, the Army's routine operations failed to dislodge the militants.

PANKAJ RISHI KUMAR
An Indian artillery gun booms in the Kargil sector. The Kargil crisis has exposed the recklessness of the BJP's action of internationalising the Kashmir issue in May 1998.

Army sources say that this is the first time in 50 years that India faced a virtual occupation of its territory near its western border, however small. Why the Army allowed the situation to aggravate and reach this point remains unexplained. There is ver y little transparency in the way Indian officialdom has behaved. It refuses to share full information with the public, give convincing evidence in support of its claims, or provide an explanation as to why intelligence failures occurred and who was respo nsible for them. There is little evidence that the government really thought through the implications of the air strikes. The decision was taken on the same day when an Army spokesman was talking about a three-month-long ground operation.

In the absence of full and verifiable information, the only inference that can be drawn is that the decision was taken in an ad hoc fashion before the government had fully exhausted the available diplomatic and political options. If, as The Indian Exp ress alleges (May 28), the Border Security Force had warned it of incursions from across the border as early as January, it passes comprehension why it did nothing to defuse the crisis. Why was a special emissary not sent to Pakistan? Why did Prime M inister A.B. Vajpayee delay calling Nawaz Sharif till the very end? Why were efforts not made to alert other states of the claimed incursions?

Now that an opportunity has opened up for diplomacy through Sartaj Aziz's likely visit, New Delhi must do all it can to rectify this error and pursue all non-military avenues to vacate the incursion in Kargil.

No responsible government could have launched a large-scale Kargil operation without taking into consideration the scope for strategic misperception and miscalculation, besides the probability of escalation. The history of India-Pakistan rivalry is reple te with miscalculation. In 1965, for instance, Ayub Khan thought that merely parachuting troops into Kashmir would trigger a popular rebellion against India. This started a bitter war which Pakistan did not win.

In 1986-87, a routine Indian military exercise ("Operation Brasstacks") went out of control. Pakistan's Generals read some of its manoeuvres as threatening and deeply offensive. An eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation ensued.

The most serious such crisis occurred in 1990 when another military exercise spun out of control. Islamabad apparently felt threatened enough to want to "brandish the nuclear sword" in an indirect and oblique fashion. It reportedly lined up trucks at the Kahuta enrichment plant to indicate demonstratively its willingness to escalate the confrontation to the nuclear level. The crisis was defused only when the United States sent Robert Gates to New Delhi and Islamabad, urging restraint.

If Vajpayee, Fernandes, Advani & Co. thought they would somehow defeat Pakistan's effort to put Kashmir on the global agenda by launching air strikes, they were mistaken. The strikes have only added visibility to the confrontation and left a powerful imp ression of the volatility of the Kashmir issue through global media coverage. The pictures of wretchedly poor refugees fleeing the bombed-out moonscapes of Kargil and Drass are unlikely to go away from the viewer's memory: they are more disturbing in som e ways than similar footage from parts of Kosovo. A year ago, the BJP with its machismo had succeeded in internationalising the Kashmir issue by explicitly linking it with nuclear weapons - in Advani's famous May 18 speech.

THE present stand-off raises three serious questions: Was the Pakistan Army or its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency involved in the "infiltration"? If so, did it act independently or with the civilian administration's concurrence? Why did all the mutual-consultation and confidence-building measures agreed upon by India and Pakistan to avoid conflict fail? And what determined the timing of the Indian air strikes?

If the Pakistani Army or the ISI was indeed involved, that would cast doubts both over the viability of limited "good faith" agreements such as those reached at Lahore and the ability of the Sharif government to prevail over the Army which is considered the final arbiter of all decisions in Pakistan. Fernandes made (on May 28) a curious distinction between Nawaz Sharif and the ISI, on the one hand, and the Army, on the other, and virtually exonerated the former. It is hard to say if Fernandes had eviden ce on which to base this rather bizarre demarcation, or whether he was following his own devious agenda in giving a clean chit to the ISI, of all agencies. In any case, given the multiplicity of power centres in Pakistan, it is conceivable that agreement s such as the one at Lahore could be sabotaged by one or the other of them. They may not have lasting value in and of themselves, unless they are given concrete, specific expression.

Secondly, the crisis exposes the limitations, even flimsiness, of the substantive (as distinct from symbolic) aspect of the Lahore process. The Lahore accords were not really about serious arms restraint and control. They were at best about the intent to improve relations and about transparency of a very limited kind - transparency through a very dirty looking glass.

For instance, India and Pakistan did not agree to bilateral measures to reduce the danger of nuclear war, but only to (unspecified) "national measures" to reduce "accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons." They agreed not to suspend their nuclea r and missile programmes, but only to inform each other of test flights, and so on. India and Pakistan did not sign a no-test pact either. They agreed "to continue to abide by their respective unilateral moratorium on conducting further nuclear test expl osions - unless either side decides that extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests." This is taking back with the left hand what is given out with the right hand.

Thirdly, it is plausible that the timing of the Indian decision to bring air power had something to do either with the temptation of the Vajpayee government (which has itself lost Parliament's confidence) to outmanoeuvre domestic opponents, or with inter nal rivalries in the Cabinet over Kashmir, which date back to the time when Advani demanded - and got - the Jammu and Kashmir portfolio transferred from the PMO to his Ministry.

PANKAJ RISHI KUMAR
In Kargil town, waiting to be transported to safer areas.

The ruling coalition is in deep trouble as it faces elections. The Congress(I) is on the upswing with the return of Sonia Gandhi as president. Although the ruling coalition did not will the Kargil crisis or bring about the infiltration, it probably recko ned that its escalation might yield it some short-run dividends.

Such considerations have played a role in the past - in 1986-87 and in the early 1990s. They also explain why the Opposition in India is not unconditionally supporting the government on Kargil and criticises it for mishandling the issue. This is partly c ompounded by the lack of transparency of official policy and action, and partly by glaring intelligence failures and bungling by the Defence Ministry.

In Pakistan, the Sharif government has brutally cracked down on critical journalists and public-spirited non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and women's groups as it desperately seeks a figleaf of legitimacy through Islam to cover up its monumental cor ruption and misgovernance.

Kargil totally undermines the assumption that nuclearisation has imparted stability or maturity to India-Pakistan relations, or reduced the danger of conventional conflict. The assumption flowed in the first place from a dogma in Cold War thinking - an a rticle of faith that invests nuclear weapons with attributes which they simply do not possess. More nuclear weapons and weapon-states make nuclear war more likely. Possession of nuclear weapons does not prevent states from going to conventional war with one another. The former Soviet Union and China, both nuclear states, fought a bitter conventional war across the Ussuri for many years. Nuclear deterrence is itself flawed and fallible. As Gen. Lee Butler, who commanded the U.S. nuclear arsenal for long years, says, it is not nuclear deterrence, nor the "rational" calculation by hard-headed generals of "mutually assured destruction", that prevented a catastrophe in the Cold War. It was pure luck, "the Grace of God".

Will India and Pakistan be blessed by such grace? The Kargil crisis puts a big question-mark over this. It should also put paid to the dangerous delusion that India and Pakistan have become more secure after nuclearisation.