It was on May 3, 1999, that Tashi Namgyal, a shepherd looking for a missing yak, saw Pakistan army personnel atop the Batalik mountain range in Ladakh on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC). Namgyal – who died in December last year – informed the Indian Army and it kicked off ‘Operation Vijay’. The Kargil conflict lasted from May to July.
Air reconnaissance by Indian surveillance agencies in February that year – around the same time Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was making his famous bus trip to Lahore — had filmed the Pakistan army activity. The extent of the threat dawned on India only after May 3, 1999.
Between the 1971 Indo-Pak war and Kargil, an interim of 28 years, technology had progressed while geo-strategic alignments had been reworked after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. India and Pakistan were facing sanctions from the US in the aftermath of their respective nuclear tests in May 1998. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden were still not on the hit list of the US. Satellite imagery was just making its debut in the Indian military lexicon.
Multi-pronged plan
During winter, 140 Indian posts at altitudes between 15,000 feet and 19,000 feet used to be vacated. Pakistan used this ‘winter’ window’ to launch ‘Operation Koh-e- Paima’ in October 1998 to occupy these posts.
Gen Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistan army chief, planned to cut off the two road approaches to Siachen and slice away territory in Ladakh. Islamabad believed international intervention would be quick, asking the nuke-carrying nations to stop.
One road to Siachen passes through Srinagar-Dras-Kargil. The second is via Manali and traverses north of Khardung La and reaches Turtuk valley area, which abuts the south-western edge of the Siachen glacial belt. Pakistan planned to establish a base at Turtuk to threaten the road to the glacier’s base.
Lt Gen Shahid Aziz, who worked in Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, authored a book ‘Putting our Children in Line of Fire’, in which he says: “Our clearly expressed intent was to cut the supply line to Siachen and force the Indians to pull out.”
How Pak plan failed
Militarily, the Pakistani plan was questionable. Col Ashfaq Hussain (retd), who was in the Pakistan army’s media arm, in his book ‘Witness to Blunder: Kargil Story Unfolds’, questions Gen Musharraf. “The plan was a success only till Pakistani forces came face to face with the enemy. Our troops crossed the LoC at a time when the enemy (India from his perspective) was not present.”
Pakistan’s perception that ‘a bold strike to capture areas in J&K may go unchallenged by New Delhi’ proved to be wrong.
India’s directive to the military was to ‘evict the pockets of intrusion and restore the sanctity of the LoC’. No time-frame was given. The military strategy was based on three objectives: contain intrusion and prevent further build-up; evict the intruders and restore the LoC; and finally, hold ground.
Diplomatically, India managed to separate the intrusion from what Pakistan calls the ‘Kashmir issue’. US President Bill Clinton and Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif met in Washington DC on July 4. The statement called upon Pakistan (and not India) to take steps to restore the LoC and without linking it with the Kashmir dispute.
