Free The Longest August by Dilip Hiro

professing a peaceful use, a facade that would crack in 1987.
    In December 1986 Gandhi gave a green light to the Indian Army chief, Lieutenant General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan, to stage the war game code-named Brasstacks to test his innovative concept of combining mechanization, mobility, and air support. The operation involved mobilizing nearly three-quarters of the Indian army in Rajasthan and putting them on high alert. As a model for a full-scale invasion, it revived Pakistani leaders’ long-held nightmare that their country would be annihilated by India.
    In retaliation, Zia ul Haq, as army chief, extended the military’s winter exercises in Punjab, mobilized the army in Karachi and the Southern Air Command, and deployed armored and artillery divisions as part of a pincer to squeeze Indian Punjab, where the Sikh insurgency had revived.
    In an astutely planned maneuver, Qadeer Khan gave an interview to Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar on January 28, 1987, in Islamabad. If India pushed Pakistan into a corner, “we will use the bomb,” he told Nayar. “We won’t waste time with conventional weapons.” 9 While Nayar’s scoop was held up by the London-based Observer , a Sunday newspaper, awaiting authentication by different sources, the story leaked.
    To defuse the festering crisis, Gandhi invited Zia ul Haq to witness the second day’s play in the five-day cricket match in Jaipur on February 22. He accepted the invitation. Sitting next to Gandhi, he reportedly whispered that if India’s forces crossed the border, Indian cities would be “annihilated.” A pro forma denial of the statement by Islamabad followed.All the same, from then on the media in India routinely said that Pakistan was “within a few turns of a screwdriver” of assembling an atom bomb.
    In short, after four decades of living in fear of India’s overwhelming military superiority, Pakistan achieved parity with its rival in nuclear deterrence. Nevertheless, it did not lay to rest Pakistani leaders’ fears of India becoming the unchallenged regional power in South Asia.
    Initially, Gandhi and the democratically elected Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto got along well. On the sidelines of the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Islamabad in late December 1988, Bhutto had a meeting with Gandhi. She pledged to choke off Pakistan’s aid to Sikh separatists. In return, Gandhi promised to withdraw Indian troops from the contested Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, which he failed to do because of his party’s defeat in the 1989 general election.
    On the last day of 1988 the two leaders signed the “Agreement on Prohibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations and Facilities” to become effective beginning January 27, 1991. Earlier in 1988, sticking to the practice of following underhanded policies, common to both rivals, Gandhi had ordered the upgrading of the nuclear testing site in Pokhran, Rajasthan, first used in 1974, to make it suitable for detonation on short notice.
    Indo-Pakistan relations soured as the separatist insurgency in Kashmir intensified from 1989 onward and Delhi resorted to brutish methods to squash it. Bhutto and her successor, Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, protested, but to no avail.
    Following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991, the leadership of the Congress Party passed to P. V. Narasimha Rao. During his five years in office, the international scene changed radically. The Soviet Union’s disintegration in December 1991 signaled US victory in the forty-five-year-long Cold War.
    Delhi strengthened its ties with Washington, which saw no need to downgrade its historic links with Pakistan.
    Once India had established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, at a time when the Islamist insurgency in Kashmir had risen sharply, that small but militarily powerful nation with long experience in tackling terrorism