The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Any ill will that Zia ul Haq had generated for his military dictatorship in the United States evaporated when Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 to bolster the twenty-month-old Marxist regime in Kabul. Whereas India had recognized the leftist regime in Afghanistan, Pakistan had not. When President Jimmy Carter offered $400 million in aid to Islamabad to shore up armed Islamist resistance to the Afghan government, Zia ul Haq called it “peanuts”6 and rejected it.

  His prospect brightened when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981. Washington poured funds and weapons for the Afghan mujahedin through Pakistani army’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate. Reagan persuaded Congress to sanction $3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over the next six years, arguing that arming Pakistan with modern US weaponry would reduce the chance of its pursuing the nuclear option. In practice, Pakistan forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and nuclear.

  Shaken by India’s detonation of a “nuclear device” in May 1974, Pakistan had initiated a clandestine program to catch up with its arch rival in this regard. Given Beijing’s overarching aim to deprive India of becoming the hegemonic power in South Asia, it surreptitiously aided Islamabad in its nuclear arms program. To this quadrilateral linkage was added another actor: Israel. Committed to thwarting the nuclear weapons ambition of any Muslim country, Israel offered to work with Delhi to bomb the Kahuta nuclear facility, located twenty miles from Islamabad and run by Abdul Qadeer Khan. By late 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan to raid Kahuta was hatched. During their clandestine trip to Tel Aviv in early 1983, Indian military officers purchased electronic equipment to jam Kahuta’s air defenses.

  On the surface, Gandhi and Zia ul Haq maintained cordial relations. On the margins of the seventh Non-Aligned Movement summit in Delhi in March 1983, they agreed to set up the Joint Indo-Pakistan Commission, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and travel. This double-dealing became an abiding feature of Delhi-Islamabad relations.

  The Indo-Israeli plot against Pakistan did not remain secret from the ISI for long. In the autumn of 1983 its chief sent a message to its counterparts in India’s Research and Analysis Wing foreign intelligence agency. This brought about a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Raja Ramanna, head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, in a Vienna hotel. Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or in collusion with Israel, attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India’s nuclear facility in Trombay on the outskirts of Mumbai.7 This compelled Gandhi to hesitate. In addition, Pakistan’s ambassador in Delhi conveyed the same message to India’s Ministry of External Affairs.8

  This maneuver helped Zia ul Haq achieve his twin objectives of signaling that Islamabad’s nuclear program was unstoppable, thus gaining international acceptance by stealth, and issuing a stern warning to Gandhi. She revoked her earlier go-ahead to Israel’s hawkish defense minister Ariel Sharon.

  Militant Sikhs’ violent agitation for an independent homeland, called Khalistan, appealed to Zia ul Haq since it was based on religious grounds. At his behest, the ISI aided the extremist Sikhs with training and weapons. The activists of the Khalistan movement turned the Sikhs’ holiest complex, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, into an armed fortress. To destroy this base, Gandhi ordered the storming of the Golden Temple by the army in June 1984. The military succeeded at the cost of shedding much blood and alienating the Sikh community nationwide. In retaliation, two of Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in October.

  She thus became the second Indian leader to fall victim to violence stemming from religious fanaticism, the earlier example being that of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu supremacist for urging the Indian government to meet its financial obligations to Pakistan.

  The Race for Nuclear Arms

  Rajiv Gandhi, the only surviving son of Indira, who succeeded her as prime minister, was untutored in politics or administration. Nonetheless, after his meeting with Zia ul Haq in December 1985 in Delhi, they agreed not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities as a confidence-building measure. Crucially, though, they disagreed on the nature of their nuclear programs, both of them 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 became a factor in determining Delhi’s relations with Islamabad.

  In sum,
within half a century of their establishment, India and Pakistan found their bilateral relations being forged by multiple factors, involving the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Israel, and Afghanistan.

  In 1995 Narasimha Rao decided to conduct underground tests on nuclear weapons. Preparations built up to a climax in early December. These were picked up by four powerful American spy satellites. President Bill Clinton urged him to abandon the plan. He did so, but instructed nuclear scientists to be ready for tests within a month of receiving an executive order.10 By radically altering their pattern of work—such as laboring only at night—at Pokhran, the Indians managed to defeat US spy satellites.

  In March 1998, when Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJP) leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister as head of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance with a slim majority, he ordered nuclear tests to consolidate the loyalty of the non-BJP members of the alliance.

  On May 11, he announced three underground nuclear tests, including one involving a thermonuclear device. Two more tests of smaller bombs followed on May 13. These explosions were received with widespread enthusiasm, making Indians feel proud of their scientists and engineers for their mastery of high technology.

  Across the border, prime minister Sharif faced a quandary. Given the dire state of Pakistan’s economy, he was vulnerable to US sanctions, and Clinton urged him to refrain from testing a nuclear bomb. But once the Islamist parties mounted pro–nuclear test demonstrations on May 15, Sharif had no choice but to fall in line with popular sentiment.

  Two days later, he ordered the PAEC chair, Ishfaq Ahmed, to “conduct the explosions!”11 These were conducted in the Ras Koh mountain range in Baluchistan on May 28. “We have settled a score and have carried out five successful nuclear tests,” he declared on Pakistan TV. To beat India, he ordered one more test on May 30.

  Friendly Signs Blossom—Briefly

  These explosions boosted both Sharif’s and Vajpayee’s popular standing, giving them the confidence to stop flexing their muscles and start mending fences. At their meeting on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York they decided to resume bus service between Delhi and Lahore to encourage people-to-people contact.

  The star passenger on the inaugural bus trip on February 20, 1999, was Vajpayee. He was received at the Wagah border crossing by Nawaz Sharif and senior cabinet ministers in the full glare of the international media. The high point of his stay in Lahore was the laying of a wreath at the Minar-e Pakistan, at the site where on March 23, 1940, the All India Muslim League passed its resolution for a homeland for the Muslims of India. In the visitors’ book, Vajpayee wrote: “A stable, secure and prosperous Pakistan is in India’s interest. Let no one in Pakistan be in doubt. India sincerely wishes Pakistan well.”12 Coming from a Hindu nationalist leader, such a statement was received with a full-throated cheer by Pakistani politicians and media.

  The two prime ministers signed the Lahore Declaration. It stated that the possession of nuclear weapons by both nations required additional responsibility to avoid conflict and promote confidence-building measures. To avoid accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, the signatories agreed to give each other advance notice of ballistic missile flight tests and accidental or unexplained use of nuclear arms in order to stave off nuclear conflict. They also agreed to discuss their nuclear doctrines and related security issues.13

  But Sharif’s hope that Pakistan and India would be able to live as friendly neighbors like America and Canada would prove wildly optimistic barely three months later.

  On the Brink of a Nuclear Clash, Twice

  Without even 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 would most 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 Padmanabhan had moved eight of the ten strike divisions of the army to jumping-off points near the Pakistani border. His Pakistani counterpart, Musharraf, moved an attack force of armored and motorized infantry divisions into combat readiness positions.

  Alarm bells rang in Washington and London. The CIA chief informed Bush’s War Cabinet that his analysts believed that given the confusion among decision makers in Delhi and Islamabad as to when and how a conventional war could escalate to a nuclear confrontation, there was a serious risk of the first nuclear strike since World War II.15 Washington and London advised around sixty thousand Americans and twenty thousand Britons to start leaving Indi
a beginning on May 31.

  Stock markets in India and Pakistan plunged. That shook the two governments, more so the one in Delhi. The pro-business, BJP-led cabinet wanted to propel India beyond the sluggish GDP growth rates of the past. The abrupt loss of Western confidence in India’s fast-expanding economy gave Vajpayee pause.

  The threat of an imminent nuclear clash between the neighbors passed. But the two armies remained battle-ready. Feeling the economic pain of maintaining its forces across the LoC on high alert, Musharraf saw merit in pragmatism. On December 17, 2003, he said his government was prepared to drop its long-standing demands for a plebiscite on Kashmir to end the fifty-six-year-old dispute. This required both sides to be flexible.

  The slow process of bilateral talks gathered pace after the return of the Congress-led government in Delhi in May 2004, under the premiership of Manmohan Singh. Musharraf and Singh set up a backchannel to resolve the Kashmir conundrum away from the prying eyes of the media.

  After many meetings in hotels around the world, their envoys—Tariq Aziz and Satinder Lambah—agreed on a plan. Musharraf gave an inkling of it in his December 2006 interview with Delhi-based NDTV. Pakistan, controlling more than one-third of Kashmir, would give up its claim to Indian-administered Kashmir, occupying about half of the original princely state,16 if people from both regions had freedom of movement through open borders. There would be phased withdrawal of troops from both sides of the LoC.17

  Since this formula did not require a change in the border, it interested Indian leaders, but they feared that the withdrawal of their army from their region would allow separatists to thrive. They were also not sure Musharraf had the consent of senior generals on a subject that was the defining element in the history of Pakistan’s military. They had to weigh the chances of Musharraf being elbowed out by the armed forces’ high command, as it had Ayub Khan. Lastly, would any deal agreed to by the Musharraf government remain intact in the post-Musharraf era?