by Bruce Riedel
The forlorn hope of the Talbott team was to offer Sharif billions in new economic and military aid, a promise to get the F-16s released from Pressler prison, international support, and a state visit to the White House with all the panoply possible. Sharif asked for American arbitration of the Kashmir dispute and a promise that Clinton would visit only Pakistan, not India. Before we had left Islamabad for the flight back to Tampa, he had told the army and scientists to test. They did so on May 28 and 30, after briefly floating a warning that Israel and India were planning a surprise attack on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. That was just smokescreen for what Sharif announced as a “New Clear Vision” for Pakistan!
THE TALBOTT MISSION
What came next was the most serious and substantive American engagement with South Asia to that point. For the next two years, South Asia, especially India but also Pakistan, went to the top of the American presidential agenda as never before or since. The effort failed to achieve its stated goals; it did not implement Resolution 1172, for example. But what it did do was to transform American-Indian relations profoundly. Clinton got what he wanted, a new day in America’s relations with India, though not the way that he wanted it.
Strobe Talbott led the Clinton effort. As an old friend, he had a direct line to the president, but he worked carefully to keep Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fully in the loop. Over the course of the next two and a half years, Strobe met with his Indian counterpart, Jaswant Singh, fourteen times at ten locations in seven countries on three continents. As he has written in his artful memoir, the dialogue added up to “the most intense and prolonged set of exchanges ever between American and Indian officials.”28 There was a parallel effort with Pakistan, but, as events unfolded, it never gained the same traction. The Indians had initiated the dialogue through an indirect approach to me by an American expert on nuclear issues, George Perkovich, who had traveled to India after the tests as part of the research for his masterful study on Indian nuclear decisionmaking. He interviewed Singh, who stressed that now that India had tested its nuclear capability, it would observe a unilateral moratorium on further tests and wanted to talk to the White House about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Perkovich asked me whether Singh would be received positively; I replied that he would. Tempers were still hot, but Clinton wanted to get back to business. Singh came to Washington shortly afterward for the first round of talks, right after Resolution 1172 was adopted. The two diplomats found each other to be not just counterparts but intriguing partners. They set a tone for the dialogue that followed that was serious and straightforward and that also emphasized trying to understand each country’s individual needs and policies. Lectures were kept to a minimum; conversation was encouraged. After the June meeting in Washington, the two diplomats and their teams met in Frankfurt, Germany, on July 9, 1998, and then in New Delhi on July 20.
Strobe pocketed the unilateral moratorium and pressed India to take several steps to underscore its restraint in the nuclear field. Some were relatively easy, such as taking steps to ensure that Indian nuclear technology did not end up in the hands of third parties. That was a huge problem with Pakistan, which was selling its expertise to almost any buyer, from North Korea to Iran. India had a much better, almost perfect, track record. On this issue, Strobe was pushing on an open door, but the effort to get India to sign and ratify the CTBT would be much harder. To do so would look like an admission of error on India’s part, and it would prevent India from conducting further tests to develop more sophisticated bombs. Neither the United States nor any of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council could claim the moral high ground on this issue. The United States had conducted 1,054 nuclear tests, using 1,151 devices (some tests used multiple devices), before halting; Russia had done so 715 times; France, 210 times; and China and the United Kingdom, 45 times each. (France and the United Kingdom had tested in countries other than their own—France in Algeria, and Britain in Australia.) India argued that the P5 were guilty of gross hypocrisy, but Jaswant said that Vajpayee wanted to find a way for India to sign and adhere to the treaty. He repeatedly suggested that it was primarily a problem of timing and domestic sensitivities, but it was hard to tell whether he was stalling or genuinely trying. He probably was doing both.
In August 1998 the whole issue was transformed. On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda terrorists simultaneously exploded truck bombs at the American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. In Tanzania 212 died and 4,000 were wounded; in Kenya 11 died and 85 were wounded. The majority of the casualties were Africans, but twelve Americans died. In just one morning, al Qaeda went to the top of the American national security agenda. The trail led directly to Pakistan.
Literally, “al Qaeda” means “the base” in Arabic. It can refer to a physical facility, such as a camp, or it can refer to a concept, a narrative, or an idea that is the basis of something else. In this case, it refers to all of those things, but especially to the basis of global jihad. Founded by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy scion of one of the richest families in the world, al Qaeda has been based in Afghanistan and Pakistan since its foundation. The world’s first truly global terrorist organization, it still commits acts of violence around the globe. Its first big assault on America took place at the U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Bin Laden had been an early recruit in the war against the Soviet Union; he first traveled to Pakistan in 1980. From the beginning of his jihad he was a known quantity to the ISI. He had helped found Lashkar-e-Tayyiba with the ISI, and he worked closely with it in the 1980s to help the mujahedin. As discussed, the ISI was preoccupied with keeping control of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan; it did not let anything happen in the mujahedin camps that it did not want to happen. When the siege of Jalalabad failed in 1989, bin Laden went home to Saudi Arabia. He returned in 1996 from self-imposed exile in the Sudan. The ISI introduced bin Laden to its new proxy in Afghanistan, the Taliban, which provided him a safe haven. By 1998, al Qaeda was a state within a state in Afghanistan, a guest of the Taliban.29 It operated its own training bases and a special entry and exit facility at Kabul airport, and its members traveled the country with distinctive license plates and identification papers.
The Indians were quick to connect the dots. Jaswant Singh came to Washington in August after the embassy bombings in Africa. He reminded Strobe that India had warned America in the 1980s that the war in Afghanistan was creating a “Frankenstein monster” composed of Afghan Pashtun Islamists, Muslim extremists from around the world, and the ISI. America needed to recognize that “the United States and India were on the same side in the war on terrorism—by which he meant that we should be allies against Pakistan.”30 Clinton and Talbott resisted the idea of ganging up on Pakistan, and Singh was probably not all that eager for a showdown either. But America’s priority with Pakistan changed profoundly in August 1998, from counterproliferation to counterterrorism. The key to eliminating al Qaeda was shutting down its base in Afghanistan. The United States had tried to get the Taliban to do that when the Richardson team traveled to Islamabad, Kabul, and Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan to persuade the Taliban to hand bin Laden over to the Saudis or to the United States. In Islamabad they had pressed Nawaz Sharif to use Pakistan’s leverage to get the Taliban to restrain bin Laden and shut down his terror gang, but Sharif offered only to help arrange meetings in Kabul with the Taliban. When Richardson met with the Taliban’s second in command at the presidential palace in Kabul, he asked that bin Laden be turned over to the Saudis and pressed to have the al Qaeda state within a state shut down. The Taliban leadership was entirely negative. So, after the embassy bombings, the president tried two approaches, military and diplomatic.
A cruise missile strike, part of the military response, narrowly missed killing bin Laden on August 21, 1998, at a training camp in Afghanistan; a group of ISI officers were killed instead. The fact that the ISI was at a camp where bin Laden was visiting two weeks after the twin embassy bo
mbings confirmed U.S. suspicions of the close links between Pakistani intelligence and al Qaeda.31 Pakistan was not given any advance knowledge of the strike, although it was arranged for the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Joe Ralston, to be in Rawalpindi as the missiles entered Pakistani territory en route to Afghanistan so that he could tell General Karamat that they were not incoming Indian missiles and so avoid inadvertently causing a war with India.
Diplomatic efforts included getting the United Nations, which had immediately condemned the embassy attacks, to demand that the Taliban take action to halt terrorist activity from its territory. In December 1998 the UN passed Resolution 1214, demanding that the Taliban take action to bring bin Laden to justice and close down al Qaeda. All states were encouraged to press the Taliban to act—a clear message to Pakistan, which provided the Taliban with free oil, thousands of recruits, and hundreds of ISI and army advisers for its military. To add to the pressure on Pakistan, Clinton invited Sharif to the United States. They met first in September 1998 at the UN General Assembly in New York and then again on December 3 at the White House. In both meetings Clinton pressed hard for Pakistan to get the Taliban to act against bin Laden. During the Oval Office visit, he had a sweetener: after eight years, the Department of Justice had concluded that Pakistan was right about the F-16s and that America should return the money that Pakistan had paid for them. The Department of Justice provided $324 million from a claims fund, and the Department of Agriculture provided $140 million in free wheat over two years to make up the difference. It was not an elegant solution to the F-16 imbroglio, but Sharif took it. He did nothing to bring the Taliban to shut down al Qaeda.
Talbott made another trip to India and Pakistan in January 1999. In India, the CTBT was still top priority; in Pakistan, it took back seat to al Qaeda. It was an unproductive trip. The crisis in Kosovo soon overwhelmed U.S. diplomacy for the next six months. Strobe and Jaswant had only one meeting in this period, in Moscow in May 1999, which was entirely unproductive. Just as the Talbott effort looked to be out of gas, Pakistan took the subcontinent to the brink of catastrophe.
THE KARGIL WAR
Bill Clinton had another encounter with Nawaz Sharif in February 1999. Both were in Amman, Jordan, for the funeral of King Hussein, one of the great men of the twentieth century. The king had been a good friend of America and Pakistan. I engineered a meeting between Clinton and Sharif in a stairwell just outside the kitchen during a reception hosted by Hussein’s son, King Abdullah II. Again the president pressed Sharif on al Qaeda, but Sharif was more focused on an upcoming visit to Pakistan by Indian prime minister Vajpayee, who was going to take a bus from India to Lahore to open a new direct transportation link across the border—and possibly a new beginning in relations between India and Pakistan.
The Lahore dialogue between Sharif and Vajpayee brought a bright moment of hope to South Asia. The BJP leader talked of the “spirit of Lahore” as the beginning of a new day for the two rivals. In Amman, Clinton had encouraged Sharif to be receptive and to do all he could to make the visit a success, and Sharif did indeed play the role of a welcoming and encouraging host. The Lahore meeting was a significant step forward, and it seemed to open the door to further dialogue and expansion of trade and transit links. However, Sharif’s new chief of army staff, General Pervez Musharraf, was not on the same track. Musharraf had come to Pakistan from New Delhi in the great migration following partition. In the army, he was a hawk’s hawk on India. Like General Rodrigues, Musharraf graduated from Britain’s prestigious Royal College of Defence Studies, its premier military academy. At the academy Musharraf was remembered for being full of plans for how to win Pakistan’s next war with India. In 1999 he tried, taking the subcontinent to the edge of Armageddon.
Musharraf’s plan was to exploit a traditional stand-down in operations along the northern front line of divided Kashmir province to create a fait accompli that would force India to the bargaining table on Pakistani terms. Just north of the town of Kargil, the line of control, or cease-fire line, between the two armies is located in high mountains and ridges. In what had been the practice for half a century, every winter the armies pulled their frontline troops back from their advance posts to avoid placing the men in extreme weather conditions; in the spring, the troops returned. Musharraf chose to cheat instead, sending his troops under the command of 10th Corps commander Mahmud Ahmed into the empty Indian positions. They moved deeper and deeper, undiscovered, and ended up taking 500 square miles of Indian-occupied Kashmir. The Pakistani troops moved sufficiently forward that they were overlooking a crucial highway, Route 1, which linked the capital, Srinagar, to the easternmost parts of Kashmir, including the disputed Siachen Glacier. By controlling the heights overlooking the highway, Pakistan not only gained territory but also could cut the supply line for much of India’s army in Kashmir. Musharraf apparently gambled that India would sue for peace and agree to negotiations on the status of the province. He was much influenced by India’s successful grab of Siachen fifteen years before, which he regarded as a humiliation requiring redress and as a precedent for his own action.
The problem was that Musharraf did not have a plan B or a fall-back option if India refused to give in. If the Indians decided not to talk and to fight instead, they could try to storm the occupied heights or open a new front somewhere else to take pressure off their Kargil positions. In short, India could widen the war. If it did, then Pakistan would find itself facing a broader military campaign and blamed for starting a dangerous new conflict. And that is what happened.
Former Pakistani heads of state, including Zia and Benazir, had previously rejected such risky plans for precisely that reason. A big unknown about the 1999 Kargil war is how much Prime Minister Sharif knew about Musharraf’s plans before General Ahmed implemented them. After the fact, Sharif and Musharraf, who came to despise each other, disagreed about what the prime minister was told. It is unlikely that Musharraf told him nothing but equally unlikely that he expressed concern about the possibility that the plan would end in disaster since Musharraf fully expected a glorious success. Even today he still argues that it could have worked out fine if Sharif had not lost his nerve. The full truth may never be known.
Part of the Pakistani plan was to use a cover for the attack, claiming that the advancing forces north of Kargil were Kashmiri mujahedin fighting for their rights. That was pure propaganda. If there were any mujahedin at Kargil, they were not in the lead. Pakistani troops from the Northern Light Infantry, a regiment composed of natives of the area, were the main combatants. A thorough study of the battle by a team of experts from the United States, India, and Pakistan concluded in 2009 that the Pakistani forces were not mujahedin and that Pakistan was supremely confident of victory. Their conclusion is that “the false optimism of the architects of the Kargil intrusion, colored by the illusion of a cheap victory, was not only the main driver of the operation and hence the crisis; it was also the cause of Pakistan’s most damaging military defeat since the loss of East Pakistan in December 1971.”32
The Indians were caught completely by surprise, and so were the CIA and the U.S. government. The success of the Lahore meeting had created an unwarranted sense of optimism. Musharraf used what became a false dawn of a new day to cover his preparations. But he had completely miscalculated the Indian response. Once the Vajpayee government was fully briefed on the military situation by the commander of the army, General V. P. Malik, it ordered a counteroffensive at the point of the attack. Malik organized a brilliant series of assaults on the Pakistani position. He also brought in air power, and Indian jets began attacking the Pakistani position, a move that Musharraf and Ahmed had not properly anticipated. Malik also prepared to broaden the war. He ordered his forces elsewhere in Kashmir and along the border with Pakistan itself to be ready to expand the conflict if his assaults did not produce results. According to his memoir of the war, in mid-June 1999 he told Vajpayee that if “we could not throw the intruders out fro
m Kargil, the military would have no alternative but to cross the international border or the LoC.” Malik visited every corps headquarters along the border with Pakistan to prepare them all. On June 18 he warned all of his commanders to “be prepared for escalation—sudden or gradual—along the LoC or the international border and be prepared to go to declared war at short notice.”33
The Indians took other measures as well. The Indian brigade usually deployed in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal was moved to the west coast of India and prepared for an amphibious landing in Pakistan. The Indian navy concentrated in the Arabian Sea and began aggressive patrols that threatened to blockade the port of Karachi and cut off Pakistan’s oil imports. The navy was so aggressive that Pakistan’s navy began providing escorts for oil tankers, and Malik had to caution the admirals “not to start a full-scale conventional war before all three services were ready.” As Malik recounts it in his memoirs, “the juggernaut was moving steadily.”34
In Washington, Clinton followed the war with alarm. Talbott and his team went from shuttle negotiations to crisis management. Naturally, given the tests in 1998, the nuclear issue and the risk of a broader war were uppermost on the president’s mind. Some have suggested after the fact that Washington was too fixated on the nuclear issue. Perhaps that was true, but Clinton would have been justifiably worried about the risk of escalation. He was reminded of how World War I had escalated from a terrorist attack in the Balkans into a global war in less than a month, and he worried, of course, that the Kargil war could go nuclear. On June 16 Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, met with his Indian counterpart, Brajesh Mishra. According to Malik, Mishra informed Berger that “India would not be able to continue with its policy of ‘restraint’ for long and that our military forces could not be kept on a leash any longer.”35 Berger got the message. Washington went on full alert. The administration’s public statements, which made it clear from the beginning that Clinton blamed Pakistan for starting a dangerous conflict, now demanded an unconditional Pakistani withdrawal to the line of control.