A new book written by a retired Pakistan Army General indicates that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif might not have been completely in the dark about the ‘Kargil misadventure’ orchestrated by then Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf along with three other generals.
According to a report in The Dawn newspaper, the author, Lieutenant General (retired) Shahid Aziz, recalls in his book a general telling him that Mr. Sharif asked “when are you giving us Kashmir” during an informal discussion. “This suggests that Mr. Sharif was not completely in the dark,” Lt. Gen. (retd) Aziz said. Mr. Sharif has always held that he had never been informed about the Kargil operation.
Lt. Gen. (retd) Aziz, who was the Director-General of the ISI’s Analysis Wing in 1999, maintains the Kargil operation was known only to Gen. Musharraf; Chief of General Staff Mohammad Aziz; Force Command Northern Areas Commander Javed Hassan; and 10 Corps commander Mahmud Ahmad. “Even the then Director General Military Operations came to know about it later,” he has said in the book written in Urdu.
He also describes Kargil as a major intelligence failure for India, adding that he himself discovered that something was up when he came across wireless communication intercepts from which he could tell that something was making the Indian forces panic.
