The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Anglo-American Exodus: An Effective Damper

  Washington feared that India’s impending cross-border attacks on the extremists’ training camps in Pakistani Kashmiri would escalate to an exchange of nuclear missiles by the warring neighbors. Its fears were justified. The leaders of these sparring nations lacked reliable, comprehensive knowledge of each other’s nuclear doctrine—that is, under what circumstances the highest official would unleash atom bombs. Soon after the attack on India’s Parliament House in December 2001, John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, informed Bush’s War Cabinet that intelligence analysts believed that given the confusion among decision makers in Delhi and Islamabad as to when and how a conventional war could escalate to nuclear confrontation, there was a serious risk of the first nuclear strike since August 1945.5

  The statements made so far by Indian and Pakistani leaders did not add up to a coherent, comprehensive nuclear doctrine. “We have formally announced a policy of Non-First-Use,” Vajpayee said in December 1998. “We are also not going to enter into an arms race with any country. Ours will be a minimum credible deterrent, which will safeguard India’s security, the security of one-sixth of humanity, now and into the future.”6 This was in contrast to the stance taken by Pakistan during the May–July 1999 Kargil War, when its spokesmen refused to give the same guarantee.7

  On August 17, 1999, the National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, appointed by Vajpayee, issued a draft doctrine. “The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons by any State or entity against India and its forces,” it stated. “India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.” The comprehensive document covered nuclear forces, credibility and survivability, command and control, and security and safety.8 But in his interview to the Hindu on November 29, foreign minister Jaswant Singh said that it was “not a policy document” of the government because the advisory board’s authority was legally nebulous. All the same, he went on to explain that “minimum credible deterrence” mentioned in it was a question of “adequacy,” not numbers. He described the concept as “dynamic,” which was “firmly rooted in strategic environment, technical imperatives and national security needs.”9

  On his part, Musharraf tried to project a moderate stance on nuclear arms. “Pakistan, unlike India, does not have any pretensions to regional or global power status,” he said in May 2000. Three months earlier he had established the Strategic Plan Division in the National Command Authority and appointed Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai its director-general. Kidwai became the official spokesman on Islamabad’s nuclear policy. In October 2001 he outlined its nuclear doctrine with the preamble that “It is well known that Pakistan does not have a ‘No First Use Policy.’” Nuclear weapons were aimed solely at India, he declared. In case that deterrence failed, they would be used if India attacked Pakistan and conquered a large part of its territory (spatial threshold); or it destroyed a large part of either its land or air forces (military threshold); or it proceeded to strangle Pakistan economically (economic threshold); or it pushed Pakistan into political destabilization or created a large-scale internal subversion (domestic destabilization threshold).10 Among these scenarios, the most likely was the spatial threshold. This situation was open to wide-ranging speculation, and the uncertainty caused as much anxiety in Delhi as it did in Washington.

  A report by Washington’s Defense Intelligence Agency in early May 2000 estimated that in the worst-case scenario, an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war could result in eight to twelve million fatalities initially, followed by many more millions later from radiation poisoning.11 Alarmed by this scenario, the United States and Britain advised around sixty thousand Americans and twenty thousand Britons, including many thousands of business executives, to start leaving India beginning on May 31. Most diplomats and their families departed for home. The American embassy and the British high commission in Islamabad gave the same advice to their nationals in Pakistan.

  The prospect of Delhi being hit by a Pakistani atom bomb was considered so plausible that the aides of US ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in the embassy compound to survive a nuclear strike. But when they realized that those in the bunker would be killed by the effects of the nuclear blast, they abandoned the idea.12

  As Vajpayee flew to Almaty, Kazakhstan, on June 3 to attend the first summit Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the Defense Ministry in Delhi said, “India does not believe in the use of nuclear weapons.” That day, answering questions by reporters in Almaty on whether he would rule out the first use of nuclear arms, Musharraf said that “the possession of nuclear weapons by any state implies that they will be used under some circumstances.” He failed to spell out these circumstances. At the summit, exchanging stony stares across a table, Vajpayee and Musharraf angrily blamed each other for five-and-a-half decades of conflict between their countries. “Nuclear powers should not use nuclear blackmail,” remarked Vajpayee stiffly. Concerted efforts by Russian president Vladimir Putin and Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev to bring about a meeting between the feuding protagonists failed, with the Indian leader insisting that Pakistan had to end its sponsorship of cross-border terrorism first.13

  The acute gravity of the crisis was summed up by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Progress is going to be measured day by day,” he said on June 5. “In a tense situation, lack of war is the goal. Reduction of tension is the goal. And while it remains tense, it remains delicate. War is not inevitable.”14

  That day the United States and Britain urged their citizens to leave India and Pakistan immediately. The raised travel alert came in the wake of Islamabad rejecting Delhi’s offer of joint border patrols in Kashmir. Stock markets in India and Pakistan fell precipitately. That shook the two governments, more so the one in Delhi. The pro-business, center-right cabinet led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wanted very much to propel the country beyond the sluggish GDP expansion rates of the past. The abrupt loss of Western confidence in the improving health of the Indian economy gave Vajpayee pause.

  Later, Brajesh Mishra, a Vajpayee loyalist who served as the national security adviser, put a spin on the premier’s retreat from starting an armed conflict with Pakistan: “We almost went [to war] in May 2002, but Prime Minister Vajpayee, when he faced the final step, concluded that, at the end of a long political career, he wanted to be remembered as a man of peace.” For many Pakistani senior commanders, Vajpayee’s decision offered cast-iron evidence that nuclear deterrence works. “Suppose Pakistan had been non-nuclear in 2002,” a Pakistani general told Steve Coll of the New Yorker. “There might have been a war.”15

  On June 6, Jaswant Singh said that his country would not use nuclear weapons first, whereas Musharraf reiterated that he would not renounce Pakistan’s right to use nuclear weapons first. For India and other nations, the crucial unknown was the spatial threshold that would trigger Pakistan’s activation of its atom bombs. Many defense experts surmised it would be the impending loss of Lahore, only fifteen miles from the Indian border. Others put the red line for the spatial threshold at Pakistan’s sprawling Indus River basin.

  Back from the Nuclear Brink

  On June 15 Delhi accepted Musharraf’s public pledge to end militant infiltration into India. It did so after the intercepts by its intelligence agencies showed that the Rawalpindi-based army general headquarters had ordered the Tenth Corps commander to stop infiltration across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. There were confirmed reports of the Musharraf government closing some militant training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. In return, India ordered its warships to sail away from the Pakistani shoreline and started reducing the presence of its army troops along its international border with Pakistan. On June 26 Washington officially announced that the high tension of late May and early June
had subsided.16

  Since then, no threat of armed conflict on such a grand scale has emerged again, even though the underlying causes of the 2001–2002 eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation—jihadist terrorism, abiding mutual distrust, and an ill-defined system of mutual nuclear deterrence—remain in place.

  Those who put a positive spin on this frightening episode argued that the 2001–2002 war scare was a rerun of the three-week Cuban missile crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962. Just as in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis period, the two superpowers ground nuclear deterrence into a mix of military restraint, diplomatic patience, and negotiations about underlying differences, so too did the nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after the Kaluchak crisis. In other words, Indian leaders learned to react defensively, by nonmilitary means, when faced with continuing jihadist terrorist strikes.

  There was a major difference between the events in October 1962 and May–June 2002. In the earlier case President John F. Kennedy negotiated directly by a hotline with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. But in the confrontation between the nuclear-armed Delhi and Islamabad, the negotiations between the rivals were channeled through Washington.

  The United States enjoyed the goodwill of both—albeit for diverse reasons. Pakistan was an almost indispensable member of Bush’s coalition to defeat global terror, which stemmed from Afghanistan and the tribal belt along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, whereas India was a long-time victim of terrorism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in early May India and America carried out a weeklong joint naval exercise code-named Exercise Malabar in the Arabian Sea off the southern seaport of Kochi, far away from Pakistan.17

  In the Bush team, Colin Powell played the lead role in defusing the near-combustible relations between the two leading South Asian nations. This became clear when at his press conference in Delhi on July 28 he referred to his third trip to the city in ten months. “I take note that the situation has improved considerably over the past month,” he said. “We have been able on the US side, to return our families who had temporarily moved back and we have also been able to change our alert levels or caution levels to a point where we are now hopeful that more American tourists will return to India and more businessmen and women will come and find ways to enhance trade between the United States and India.” At the same time he noted that both armies remained mobilized. “So we look to India to take further de-escalatory actions as Pakistan makes good on its pledges to permanently cease support for infiltration.” However, he conceded that though the infiltration had declined, it had not ended.18

  In his subsequent meeting with Musharraf in Islamabad, Powell found him “more positive” about his commitment to ending all infiltration. But when he raised the closing of the camps training terrorists, Musharraf’s response was “they will be dealt with in due course.” Powell expressed Washington’s inability to independently verify the state of infiltration. And yet America’s role remained pivotal. “It took US intervention for Pakistan to leave Kargil,” said an unnamed State Department official in Washington. “And don’t forget, Musharraf’s pledge [to end cross-border terrorism] was made to the US and not to India. So we have to guarantee it.”19

  However, India’s leaders were realistic enough to realize that it was in Pakistan’s interest to create fear in India-held Kashmir during the run-up to the elections from September 19 to October 9. As before, the secessionists in Kashmir were opposed to the exercise. Infiltrations from Pakistan continued. As a result, during the electoral campaign, over eight hundred militants, civilians, election candidates, and security personnel were killed.

  Despite the allegations of vote rigging and low turnout of 43 percent, the election produced an astonishing result. The Delhi-loyalist National Conference was reduced to 28 seats, followed by the Congress Party at 20. The newly launched People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of Mufti Muhammad Sayeed—calling on India to have “an unconditional dialogue” with Kashmiris to end the long-running crisis—won 16 seats, and the People’s Democratic Forum (PDF), opposed to the National Conference, 7. The coalition of the Congress and the PDP, backed by the PDF, formed the government in mid-October, turning the National Conference into the opposition for the first time.20 This invested the coalition government with some legitimacy among Kashmiris.

  Two days later Delhi announced that it would withdraw troops from its international border with Pakistan. Islamabad reciprocated. On the eve of the first anniversary of the December 13, 2001, attack on the Parliament House, the Vajpayee government decided to end the high-alert state of its military. Pakistan followed suit.

  The yearlong mobilization of its armed forces cost India Rs 75 billion ($1.63 billion), including Rs 10 billion ($0.21 billion) for deploying and redeploying the navy, coast guard, and air force. It was an important contributory factor to produce the low GDP growth of 4.3 percent in fiscal 2002. The corresponding buildup of the Pakistani forces consumed $1.4 billion, a much higher percentage of its budget than India’s.21

  This nail-biting episode taught India’s politicians and military a lesson to make certain basic changes to the composition and equipment of its land forces to cope with similar challenges in the future. After Padmanabhan’s retirement at the end of 2002, his successor, General Nirmal Chandar Vij, implemented an ambitious modernization of the ground troops with new weapons systems, enabling each corps a limited offensive capability of its own. And the reequipment of the special forces augmented their ability to operate behind enemy lines for a considerable time.22 These changes were to be incorporated into a new armed forces doctrine that the Vajpayee government instructed military leaders to formulate.

  Meanwhile, on January 4, 2003, India’s Cabinet Committee on Security summarized the nuclear doctrine. While reiterating the “No First Use” of nuclear weapons, it said that “nuclear retaliation to a first strike [by the enemy] will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” In the case of “a major attack against India, or Indian forces anywhere, by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons.” It stated that the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) comprised a Political Council and an Executive Council. The Political Council, chaired by the prime minister, was the only body to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The function of the Executive Council, headed by the national security advisor, was to provide inputs for decision making by the NCA and implement the orders given to it by the Political Council.23

  Politicized Musharraf Turns Pragmatic

  A succession of major Indo-Pakistan dramas in Kargil (May–July 1999), the hijacking of the Indian airliner by Pakistan-based jihadists (December 1999), and the terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi (December 2001) were covered widely and engagingly by privately owned Indian electronic media. Over time these TV channels had garnered a large audience among Pakistanis with access to satellite and cable television and bored by the bland, sanitized fare offered by the state-owned Pakistan television, PTV. Given tens of thousands of cable operators, it was impossible for the Musharraf government to enforce its ban on accessing Indian TV channels.

  To counter the inexorably growing input of the Indian media in molding public opinion in Pakistan, Musharraf decided to liberalize the electronic media while making sure to set the political agenda and regulate private outlets on the sensitive subject of national security. On January 16, 2002, his government established the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to license privately owned radio and TV stations.

  Pakistanis with subscriptions to cable or satellite services were already receiving two private channels in Urdu. These were ARY, set up by Pakistani businessman Abdul Razzak Yaqoob in Dubai in 1997, and Geo TV,24 run by the Karachi-based Independent Media Corporation, broadcasting from Dubai and London.25

  The Geo TV channel, established in Karachi in May 2002, did its test transmission on Independence Day, August 14. Its regular transmission s
tarted on October 1, nine days ahead of the general election held by the Musharraf government as ordered by the Supreme Court. It broke new ground by airing debates between candidates and giving ample time to opposition parties—in contrast to state-run television. Geo TV would astonish its viewers by announcing election results hours before PTV. Over the years, however, the fiercely competing Urdu language channels tried to outdo one another in their biased reporting and analysis of India as well as America, perceived to be empathizing with its rival because of the shared feeling of being a victim of extremist Islamist terrorism.

  Musharraf had prepared well for the electoral contest. Following his instructions, the loyalist Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul Haq, set out to create a pro-Musharraf party. His starting point was to cause a serious split in the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif)—PML (N). The defectors were then led to coalesce with pro-Musharraf groups and independents. The end result was the birth of the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam)—PML (Q)—on July 20, 2002. Its leader was Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a bland Baluchi tribal chief. In exchange for the Islamist camp’s backing of Musharraf to remain the COAS while serving as president, he encouraged the formation of a six-party coalition of six Islamist parties, called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (Urdu: United Council of Action; MMA).

  On September 1 the authorities allowed the election campaign to start with a ban on street rallies and use of loudspeakers. Besides the PML (Q), those who entered the race included the PML (N), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and the MMA. For the PML (Q), the campaign did not go as well as the Musharraf government had wanted. It became nervous. “Pakistani journalists are of two categories,” said Lieutenant General Javed Ashraf Qazi, the minister of communications and a former head of the ISI. “The left-wing, liberal journalist can be bought by India for two bottles of whisky while the right-wing journalists are patriotic. The job of the ‘purchased’ journalist is to pick up disinformation published in India and print it in Pakistan as his own investigative work.”26 India came in handy as the ultimate malevolent player in denying Musharraf unfettered power.