Free The Longest August by Dilip Hiro Page B

informing Sharif, Army Chief Pervez Musharraf violated the Shimla Agreement by attempting to change the status quo in Kashmir by using force in the Kargil region. The initial claims of Islamabad that the fighting there was being done by local Kashmiri mujahedin collapsed when intercepts of conversations between Musharraf, then visiting Beijing, and the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Muhammad Aziz Khan, in Rawalpindi were released by the Indian authorities.
    On June 13 Vajpayee told Sharif that only when Pakistan had withdrawn its troops would he be ready to talk. Clinton intervened. He advised Vajpayee not to open a new front in Kashmir. Remarkably, China called for the withdrawal of Pakistan’s forces to the LoC and settling its border issues with India peacefully.
    India declared that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but on June 23 Pakistan’s information minister Mushahid Hussain, appearing on a BBC program, refused to give the same guarantee. 14
    On the battlefront, Indians started expelling Pakistanis from their occupied outposts in Kargil. Facing an imminent defeat, Musharraf wouldmost likely open new fronts in Kashmir, Sharif calculated. The resulting strong response by India would lead to a full-scale war, a calamitous prospect. In Washington, Clinton fretted when his study of the National Security Agency’s intercepts of satellite images showed the unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles at Sargodha Air Force Base, ordered by Musharraf for possible use in an outright war with India.
    Eager to prevent a nuclear holocaust in South Asia, Clinton summoned Sharif and Vajpayee to Washington. Vajpayee declined, aware that attending a tripartite meeting on Kargil would violate India’s position that Kashmir was a bilateral issue.
    After tense negotiations on America’s Independence Day, 1999, Sharif signed a joint statement with Clinton. It specified an agreement to restore the LoC, thus facilitating a cease-fire, seen as a preamble to the resumption of bilateral talks to resolve all Indo-Pakistan disputes. Sharif doubted that his army would see the statement as “the right thing for Pakistan and the world.”
    His hunch proved prescient. He was toppled by Musharraf in October. As in the case of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War in Kashmir, which led to the overthrow of General Ayub Khan, the Kargil conflict produced a similar upset, the only difference being the army chief (Yahya Khan) replacing military president Ayub Khan, and not a popularly elected politician.
    As before with military dictators, once Musharraf had consolidated his power, he tried to tackle the Kashmir issue. He displayed flexibility by inviting solutions other than a plebiscite in his talks with Vajpayee in Agra in July 2001, only to find him and his senior BJP cabinet ministers insisting on Musharraf stopping cross-border terrorism and illegal infiltration into Indian Kashmir.
    The 9/11 attacks strengthened the hands of BJP leaders in Delhi at the expense of Musharraf. The daring terrorist assault on the Parliament House in Delhi in December raised India’s moral high ground further. Yet it required relentless pressure by President George W. Bush and the mobilization of the Indian army to get Musharraf to ban five extremist organizations in mid-January 2002. While so doing, he agreed to offer Kashmiris nothing more than “moral, political and diplomatic support.”
    As in the past, the resulting thaw in Delhi-Islamabad relations proved transitory. An audacious terrorist attack on May 14, 2002, on the army camp at Kaluchak in Kashmir, killing thirty men, women, and children, roiled Indian leaders as never before.
    Vajpayee authorized the bombing of training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. But the air force lacked enough laser-guided bombs and night-vision pods to accomplish the task. By the time these arrived from Israel, it was June 5. In the interim, Army Chief General Sundararajan