The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

The White House was monitoring the battle between the nuclear-armed neighbors closely. Just as India prepared to launch a three-pronged offensive to capture the mountaintops in Kargil on July 2, a nervous Sharif telephoned Clinton appealing for “American intervention immediately to stop the fighting and to resolve the Kashmir issue.” Clinton was equivocal. So Sharif used his Saudi card. He made an urgent call to Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States since 1983, to help. Bandar intervened on behalf of Sharif, who made yet another call to the White House.45

  In Washington, Clinton had been alarmed to read the intercepts of satellite overheads obtained by the NSA showing that Musharraf had ordered the unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles at Sargodha Air Force Base for possible use in a wider war with India, most likely without the knowledge of Nawaz Sharif.46 This was confirmed by Bruce Riedel, then senior director at the National Security Council and special assistant to Clinton on South Asia, in a policy paper he presented almost three years later.47

  Eager to prevent a nuclear holocaust in South Asia, Clinton summoned Sharif and Vajpayee to Washington for talks. Mentioning previous commitments, Vajpayee declined, aware that a tripartite meeting in the United States on Kargil would compromise the long-held Indian position that Kashmir was a bilateral, not an international, issue. He had his eye fixed unflinchingly on the general election in September.

  At Rawalpindi’s Chaklala airport, Sharif was seen off by Musharraf, implying that the prime minister’s mission had the backing of the military. TV viewers had no idea that Sharif was traveling to Washington with his family. When they arrived at Dulles Airport on July 3, they were picked up by Prince Bandar. On his way to the prince’s electronically guarded, sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Washington, Sharif reportedly told his host that he was worried about his life and that he had brought his family along because he was not sure whether he would be the prime minister by the end of his mission.

  Fourth of July 1999 at Blair House like None Before

  “Gentlemen, thank you very much for gracing our Independence Day.” This is how Clinton, straining to smile, greeted Sharif and his team at Blair House, the presidential guest house, on July 4, 1999.48 Neither Clinton nor any of his team, which included National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Bruce Riedel, was pleased by having had to tackle urgently a war-and-peace issue in South Asia on the most celebrated secular holiday in the American calendar.

  Progress was slow because the counterparty—Vajpayee—was missing. Without his say-so, a cease-fire—the ultimate objective of the Blair House meeting—could not be achieved. So fax machines were put to work. As the draft of a joint communiqué by Clinton and Sharif went through several stages, heavy fax traffic ensued between Blair House and the Indian prime minister’s office.

  As Riedel noted:

  The Prime Minister [Sharif] told Clinton that he wanted desperately to find a solution that would allow Pakistan to withdraw with some cover. Without something to point to, Sharif warned ominously, the fundamentalists in Pakistan would move against him and this meeting would be his last with Clinton. . . . Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was? Did Sharif know his military was preparing their nuclear tipped missiles? Sharif seemed taken aback and said only that India was probably doing the same. The President reminded Sharif how close the US and the Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba. Did Sharif realize that if even one bomb was dropped . . . Sharif finished his [Clinton’s] sentence and said it would be a catastrophe.

  (This warranted a pause for everyone in the room to digest the ghastly consequences.)

  The President was getting angry. He told Sharif that he had asked repeatedly for Pakistani help to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan. Sharif had promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorism. [Clinton’s] draft statement would also mention Pakistan’s role in supporting terrorists in Afghanistan and India. Was that what Sharif wanted, Clinton asked? Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action? Did he realize how crazy that was? You’ve put me in the middle today, set the US up to fail and I won’t let it happen. Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.49

  During the session, as the drafting of the communiqué inched forward with continued inputs from Delhi, Sharif whispered to Clinton, “They will get me, Mr President.” Clinton was unmoved. “Yours is a rogue army,” he rejoined. “Keep them under civilian oversight.” To which came a quick response from Sharif: “It is not the army. It is [a] few dirty eggs. They will meddle to cover up the Kargil debacle.”50 These “dirty eggs” were the so-called Dirty Five: Musharraf; Aziz Khan; Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, a broad-shouldered man with a walrus mustache who commanded the Tenth Corps in Rawalpindi; and Aziz Khan’s immediate subordinates, Lieutenant General Aziz, director-general (DG) of Operations, and Major General Ehsan ul Haq, DG of Military Intelligence (MI).

  The negotiating teams broke for lunch and rest. While Clinton stayed at Blair House, Sharif went to his hotel. That gave Clinton a chance to have a proper conversation with Vajpayee over the phone.51

  When the two principals met again, Clinton placed a statement on the table. Sharif left the room to consult his advisers. He agreed to his troops’ withdrawal to the LoC. “The mood changed in a nanosecond,” recalled Riedel. “Clinton told Sharif that they had tested their personal relationship hard that day but they had reached the right ending.”52 Later they posed for photographs at the White House.

  The Clinton-Sharif statement said that steps would be taken to restore the unspecified LoC, thus facilitating a cease-fire that would follow as a preamble to the resumption of bilateral talks as the best forum to resolve all Indo-Pakistan disputes. Sharif parted with Clinton saying he felt he had done “the right thing for Pakistan and the world,” but he was not certain “the Army would see it that way.”53 His hunch would prove prescient, leading to his overthrow three months later.

  There was of course no mention of the secret deal struck between Clinton and Sharif during their separate one-on-one parley after the formal talks. Clinton agreed to ease US economic sanctions against Islamabad and recommend to the IMF not to withhold its next loan to Pakistan. In return, Sharif promised to actively cooperate with Washington in apprehending bin Laden.54

  On his return home, Sharif announced the Pakistan Army’s withdrawal from Kargil while justifying Operation Badr, which, he argued, had drawn the attention of the international community to the Kashmir dispute. The pullback started on July 11, when the cease-fire became effective. Three days later Vajpayee declared Operation Vijay a success. The Kargil Way war consumed the lives of 527 Indian soldiers (versus Pakistan’s claim of 1,600) and 450 Pakistani troops (versus India’s claim of 700). The loss of one Indian aircraft was puny.

  All along Vajpayee was fixated on the general election, when he wanted to present himself as a resolute leader committed to having peaceful relations but only on India’s terms. In the final analysis, Pakistan’s withdrawal to the LoC was achieved through the intervention of a US president. But Vajpayee and his defense and foreign ministers attributed it exclusively to Delhi’s strong military response to the occupation of Kargil, combined with secret diplomacy conducted through the confidantes of the two prime ministers. Breaking with protocol, Vajpayee revealed that on June 27 he had told Sharif’s emissary Naik in Delhi that “unless Pakistani forces leave Kargil, no discussions on any matter can take place.”55 These tactics ramped up the electoral chances of the BJP-led NDA.

  A Spate of Popular War Dramas in India

  In India, the public perception of the latest fight with Pakistan was formed differently from the earlier armed conflicts. In the past it was shaped exclusively by the broadcasting media run by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. But following the Supreme Court’s ruling ending the state monopoly in broadcasting in 1995, this changed. The
subsequent competition between several private Indian radio and TV channels, specializing in news and comment, led to the sensationalizing of war news. As a consequence, Vajpayee’s announcement of Operation Vijay defeating Pakistan’s Operation Badr received thunderous coverage.

  The situation in Pakistan was starkly different. With its monopoly over the broadcasting media, the government controlled the news about the Kargil upheaval, attributing the fighting there to the mujahedin of Kashmir, who had taken up arms. But given the arrival of satellite and cable television in their country, Pakistanis had the option of seeking news from non-Pakistani sources. Their choices covered not only the BBC and All India Radio but also privately run Indian TV channels. Besides the accuracy (or otherwise) of the reports from the frontline, their presentation was far more engaging than the staid fare being offered by the state-controlled electronic media of Pakistan. With the complicity of Pakistani forces in Kargil becoming public knowledge, and Sharif agreeing to military withdrawal to the LoC, the credibility of Pakistan’s media fell steeply.

  Commenting on the media coverage of the Kargil War a decade later, Major General Muhammad Azam Asif lamented the fact that the Pakistani media gave up without putting up a fight against enemy media invasion. The Indian media created war hysteria using cricketers, film actors, and popular personalities to boost the morale of their troops. “Pakistan decided to withdraw due to low morale of troop’s heavy causalities and mounting international pressure,” he added. “It [Pakistani media] lacked offensive posture and well coordinated and planned themes to raise the morale of the troops or to shield them against Indian propaganda.”56

  In India, the Kargil conflict led to a spate of songs, documentaries, movies, and stage dramas. Within months of the war’s end, the five-year-old, Mumbai-based, foursome rock band Pentagram released India’s first exclusive-to-Internet song, “The Price of Bullets,” about the conflict. It featured famous Muslim poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar. Sahara TV aired a series, titled Mission Fateh: Real Stories of Kargil Heroes, chronicling the Indian Army’s missions in a triumphalist mode.

  In February 2002, Mumbai was the venue of Fifty Day War, a 15 million rupees ($330,000) gigantic theatrical production with one hundred performers, about the Kargil conflict. It was presented in a six-hundred-seat outdoor theatre-in-the round, with seats that revolved 360 degrees around the action of the play. Directed by Aamir Raza Husain, the play featured vast sets along with brilliant lighting, thundering sound, and the smell of gunpowder produced by actual explosions, and recreated the frontlines of the Kargil war in three dimensions—an extraordinary feat in the history of theater. “The play tries to break the conventional paradigms of time and space by transposing audiences from one set to another,” Husain told the Financial Express.57

  As before, Bollywood producers tried to capitalize on India’s successful military venture. In 2003, LoC Kargil, a four-hour-long Bollywood film, recreating many events of the war, set another record.

  Unlike earlier war movies, which were in essence recruitment tools for the Indian Army, the fictionalized account of the Kargil conflict, as depicted in the expensively produced Vaishya (Hindi: Aim), released on the fifth anniversary of the Kargil War, broke new ground. Its protagonist was a wayward young man, Karan Shergill—played by superstar Hrithik Roshan—who realizes that the aim of his life is to join the army and retake a post captured by Pakistan-backed Kashmiri freedom fighters in the strategic heights of the Indian Kashmir. “All this is quite well done, without the usual excessive jingoism,” noted Ihsan Aslam, a Cambridge-based Pakistani historian, after seeing the movie. “There is, of course, a certain feel-good factor for the Indian viewers, but the Pakistanis don’t come out entirely bad. . . . The latter part of the film has a very newsy feel because of [the lead female] Priety Zinta’s role as a TV war reporter. The war scenes, all shot in the dark, are realistic as is the depiction of death and injury.”58 The script was written by the renowned Javed Akhtar and directed by his son, Farhan. It was a box office hit, making a profit of almost $1 million, a colossal sum in India.

  There was nothing comparative produced in Pakistan. All that happened was that the actor-director-producer Abdul Rauf Khalid devoted the last of the twenty-seven episodes in the state-run Pakistan TV’s Laag (Urdu: Roaming) series (1998–2000), centered on the trials and tribulations of the Kashmiris living in India-held Kashmir, to the Kargil War.59 This was partly because, unlike in India, there was no unanimity in Pakistan about the end result of the Kargil War. Far more importantly, that conflict heralded a new chapter in the rocky history of democracy in Pakistan.

  The Sharif-Musharraf Battle

  While Sharif was on his way back home on July 5, 1999, after several hours of tense talks with Clinton, Musharraf expressed his disapproval of “the surrender” by Sharif in his comments to leading newspapers. What had been gained on the military front had been lost on the political front, he claimed, without providing incontestable evidence to that effect.

  Overall, though, Sharif’s agreement to withdraw the Pakistani forces from Kargil without consulting the military high command angered the generals. He thus violated the cardinal principle guiding Pakistan since the deaths of its founding figures—Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan—that the ultimate authority for forming and implementing national security policies lay exclusively with the corps commanders. This paved the way for his downfall. In the words of an unnamed high military officer, “Sharif brought disgrace to the Pakistani army by bowing down before the US administration for an abrupt pullout from Kargil. In the aftermath of the Kargil crisis we went through almost a revolt in the army as the rank and file thought that the government had betrayed them.”60

  In a way this was a repeat of what had happened after the 1971 Bangladesh War. The only difference was that whereas the Pakistani commander in East Pakistan signed the surrender document in the Indian-occupied Dacca, this time the DGs of Military Operations of the two sides signed the cease-fire agreement at the Attari border post in Indian Punjab.

  Sharif could do little to counter the prevailing feeling in the army ranks that he had let them down. And his promise to Clinton to pressure the Taliban, whose government in Kabul had been recognized by Pakistan, had not gone down well with Musharraf and other generals.

  On August 7, 1999, huge bombs exploding at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 227 people. Washington blamed bin Laden, then living in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as the mastermind. On the night of August 8 two planeloads of teams from the CIA’s Special Activities Division arrived in Peshawar and Quetta to infiltrate Afghanistan, with the help of ISI agents, to capture bin Laden. But when Al Jazeera leaked the story on television, the project was aborted.

  On August 20 Clinton ordered strikes at six terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, a landlocked country. Executing that order from the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea required firing cruise missile through Pakistani airspace. Since bin Laden was not present at any of these venues, the strikes missed their prime target. Washington’s action upset Sharif. “Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told President Clinton that the unilateral US action constituted violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of independent states,” said an official Pakistani statement. “This attack has caused anguish and indignation in Pakistan.”61 The casualties caused by the American attack on a training camp near Khost included members of the ISI-backed Harkat ul Mujahedin, a militant Kashmiri group. This evidence of the ISI’s indirect links with Al Qaida deeply embarrassed Sharif.62

  To placate Clinton, for whom capturing or killing bin Laden was top priority, Sharif dispatched ISI chief Lieutenant General Ziauddin Butt to Washington in early October 1999 to coordinate the next move to seize the Al Qaida chief. And to contradict the rumors of a falling-out between him and Musharraf, on September 30 he confirmed the remaining two years of Musharraf’s term as the COAS and also appointed him the chairman of the Joi
nt Chiefs of Staff Committee, amid much fanfare. This was meant to signify a truce between the two protagonists. Sharif capped this by inviting Musharraf and his wife, Sehba, to dinner, where the prime minister’s father, Muhammad Sharif, welcomed Musharraf as “my third son,” his second son being Shahbaz, the chief minister of Punjab.

  Several earlier narratives of the run-up to the October 12 coup have to be revised in light of the revelations made by the coplotter Lieutenant General Aziz in his book published in October 2013. According to Aziz, during the last days of September Musharraf chaired meetings at the Army House in Rawalpindi to decide the right moment to oust Sharif’s government in order to preempt the prime minister’s anticipated move to replace the general as the COAS. The pivotal role was played by the MI’s Ehsan ul Haq, who provided Musharraf and others close to him with up-to-date information on Sharif’s plans.

  It was vital for the two rivals to show that it was “business as usual.” But before departing for Colombo to attend the October 9 celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Sri Lankan Army, he told Lieutenant Generals Aziz Khan, Mehmood Ahmed, and Aziz: “All three of you would be individually authorized to issue orders for the removal of the government. I hold you three responsible for this [to act and remove the government].”63 As the DG for Military Operations, Aziz issued written orders to the commander of the Rawalpindi-based Brigade 111 to be ready for the critical operation.

  Musharraf’s return flight from Colombo by the Pakistan International Airline (PIA) got delayed—twice. In Islamabad, Sharif realized that his words and deeds were being monitored by the military’s intelligence apparatus. Therefore, accompanied by one of his sons and Lieutenant General Butt dressed in civilian clothes, he flew to Abu Dhabi on October 10 to confer with Butt in an espionage-free environment. After a courtesy call on the UAE ruler, Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, followed by the fine-tuning of Butt’s rise to the COAS, Sharif’s team returned home the same day. This vital information was conveyed to Musharraf in Colombo by Ehsan ul Haq.