COVER STORY

High stakes, hardening positions

Diplomacy fails to make any significant headway on the Kargil front.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

FEW people expected the meeting between Jaswant Singh and Sartaj Aziz, Foreign Ministers of neighbouring countries which stood on the brink of full-scale hostilities, to produce any dramatic initiatives. And the outcome in New Delhi on June 12 was very m uch as expected. There were no efforts to contrive a scene of cordiality for the media, none of the customary exchange of courtesies. The atmosphere bristled with hostility as the two Ministers stated their respective positions and parted ways, each to b rief the media separately on what had clearly been a futile effort at dialogue.

Earlier, India had rebuffed repeated suggestions from Pakistan that talks represented the only means to defuse the sharpening conflict in the Kargil region. An initial offer from Sartaj Aziz to visit on June 7 was spurned, before the Indian government in dicated that June 12 would be a convenient date. The acerbic tone was unmistakable. India's official spokesman was at pains to underline that there was neither a request being made nor an invitation being extended. Rather, the intimation was only of Indi a's "convenience".

Pakistan's ardour for negotiations was transparent in its motivations - to broaden the terrain of discussions, to utilise the vantage heights it had gained in the mountains around Kargil to prise open the long-settled question of the disposition of Jammu and Kashmir. India's disdain was in these terms entirely predictable and understandable. The early reckoning was that international public opinion had tilted India's way quite decisively, giving it the moral ascendancy in diplomatic engagements with its truculent neighbour.

The U.S. State Department spokesman had early on recognised that the Kargil events spoke of a qualitatively new type of military engagement by Pakistan-aided insurgents. Infiltration through the porous terrain along the Line of Control (LoC)had been a co mmon occurrence, but for the insurgents to take a position and seek to hold it on the Indian side was entirely new. Posed in this fashion, the problem admitted of only one solution - that the Pakistan-aided intruders should fall back where they came from .

V. SUDERSHAN
External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh with visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz in New Delhi on June 12.

The U.S. Ambassador in India then proceeded to quash all thoughts of international mediation in the issue, insisting that it was for India and Pakistan to resolve the matter between themselves. With no effort at subtlety, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary was then quoted as saying that the country would feel free to use "any weapon" in its arsenal in order to defend territory that it legitimately regarded as its own. Although the government subsequently insisted that this had been a wrongful attribution, the dimensions of the Pakistani strategy were clear enough by then.

In the Pakistani narration, the events in Kargil were of a piece with a 10-year long history of insurgency in the State of Kashmir. India alone bore responsibility for the escalation of the conflict by bringing in its Air Force and heavy artillery. The l ogic of the conflict meant inevitably that the newly acquired nuclear expertise in the region would become a factor to reckon with at some point of time. This made it incumbent on the international community to intervene to cool down matters first and th en address the underlying causes of tension in the region.

The global response to this rather crude move was tepid at best. Nuclear weapons have gone so far beyond the pale of legitimacy that defence analysts worldwide have not as yet begun to factor it into calculations on the potential scope of the current con flict.

Rather, what has been accepted as the legitimate basis for negotiations in the current context is the military line of control between India and Pakistan. In this respect, Pakistan's initial effort was to question the clarity of demarcation of the LoC. W hen this manoeuvre failed, Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz entered the qualification that there was a difficulty in reconciling the demarcation on the map with the actual realities of a terrain dominated by sheer peaks and ridges.

By early June, Pakistan's international standing had clearly taken a beating. All hopes of a favourable response were scuppered when Bruce Reidel, the U.S. President's special assistant for national security with responsibility for the region, lent his a uthority to the demand that Pakistan pull back its raiders before any further progress could be achieved.

The conspicuous tilt in international public opinion stiffened India's determination not to open negotiations without its minimum condition being met. By June 8, there was a slight relaxation in this posture. That this was more formal than substantive wa s underlined by Jaswant Singh's own intervention in the matter on June 11.

RARELY has a government engaged in border skirmishes that threaten to explode into full-scale hostilities released sensitive intelligence material in its possession, least of all when it involves the chief of staff of the opposing army and one of his pri ncipal aides. Questions remain about the source of the transcripts that Jaswant Singh released on June 11, documenting two telephone conversations between the Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army, General Pervez Musharraf, and his Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant-General Mohammad Aziz. But apart from a rather feeble effort by Pakistan's Information Minister Mushahid Hussain and the fine technical point drawn by Sartaj Aziz about the inadmissibility of tape-recordings as evidence, there has been no conv incing rebuttal of their authenticity.

On the face of things, the two transcripts seem to lend support to the early reading put forward by Defence Minister George Fernandes that the Pakistan Government and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate are innocent of culpability in the Kargil affair. But in Jaswant Singh's hands, the evidence that Fernandes had enigmatically referred to on occasion acquired a whole new thrust. While Fernandes had used it to absolve the civilian establishment, Jaswant Singh used it as an accusation: "Th is establishes beyond doubt the involvement and complicity of the Pakistani establishment in this misadventure... It raises doubts about the brief that Minister (Sartaj) Aziz carries and at whose dictates he is actually working."

Jaswant Singh's references were clearly to the directions that Lt-Gen. Aziz thought it appropriate to convey to the Foreign Minister, as revealed in the transcript of his conversation with General Musharraf on May 29: "...in short, the recommendation for Sartaj Aziz Saheb is that he should make no commitment in the first meeting on military situation. And he should not even accept ceasefire, because if there is ceasefire then vehicles will be moving..."

Public utterances from the Pakistan military command hierarchy have revealed that the strategic purpose behind the Kargil incursion may be to cut off logistical support for Indian troops stationed in the Siachen region. Lt-Gen. Aziz's rather blunt "recom mendation" to his government underlines these provocative statements by Brigadier Rashid Quereshi of Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

CURIOUSLY, the Kargil operations have led to some public disquiet in Pakistan over the army seeking to dictate terms to the civilian government. Asad Durrani, a retired Lieutenant-General and former ISI Director-General, sought to set at rest these appre hensions in an article in The Nation (July 12): "We must have faith in our military brass, that they would not land the political leadership in lasting trouble for temporary gains. And by the way, it is time that we started believing that the mili tary in Pakistan (is) firmly under political control... Frankly, does it really matter 'whodunit' in Kargil, as long as it serves our purpose; and as long as we can get away with saying what suits us the best?"

Jaswant Singh's dramatic disclosures of June 11 focussed attention rather ruthlessly on this cleavage in Pakistan's apparatus of governance between the military command and the elected civilian establishment. They also served as advance intimation that t he Foreign Minister of Pakistan as also the government he represented enjoyed little freedom to negotiate with India.

In making these points Jaswant Singh also went further. The bodies of six Indian Army personnel who had disappeared while on a patrol mission on May 14 were returned to India on June 9. Initial examination revealed that all the bodies bore torture marks. On June 11, Jaswant Singh had the autopsy reports with him, which confirmed in his words, "that the soldiers were tortured and then shot at close quarters". "Such conduct," said the Indian Foreign Minister, "is not simply a breach of established norms, or a violation of international agreements; it is a civilisational crime against all humanity; it is a reversion to barbaric medievalism."

ISPR in Pakistan was quick with its denials. It was simply inconceivable, said a military spokesman, that the Pakistan Army would return the bodies of soldiers killed in action if they bore the incriminating evidence of torture. But in the heightened cli mate of suspicion and unease about the Pakistan Army's determination to set the agenda in the neighbourhood, these proved rather unconvincing. Rather, the impression only gained ground that the Pakistan Army had provocatively chosen the moment to subvert the process of dialogue between the governments.

At his media conference in Delhi, Sartaj Aziz repeated the denials that the ISPR had issued. But the Indian Foreign Minister provided a different construction: the issue of torture had been raised in discussions and there were no denials from the Pakista ni side.

Facts were clearly being tailored to suit conflicting agendas. Sartaj Aziz insisted that he had provided concrete proposals to the Indian government to defuse the tension in Kargil. Jaswant Singh claimed that no such suggestions had come. On landing in I slamabad, the Pakistan Foreign Minister spelt out the nature of these proposals: that India should stop its air-strikes and artillery firing. The Indian side, however, had only one point to make: that the incursions across the LoC should be reversed.

IN the reading across the border, these incursions are a natural outcome of a 10-year-long insurgency in the State of Kashmir, which the Pakistan government has little control over. While responding to questions in English, Sartaj Aziz used the term "fr eedom struggle", though in his native tongue he chose the more provocative characterisation of jehad , to describe the Kashmir insurgency. These are imbedded features of the official discourse in Pakistan which it would be a folly for any Ministe r to depart from. But they convey rather starkly what precisely is at stake in the Kargil offensive.

Afghanistan is the theatre where the Pakistani Army and the ISI most recently lent their muscle to the cause of jehad. Even there, the fatal consequences of rivalry between different wings of the military establishment and the political dispensation were always apparent. The ISI, for instance, was committed, till very late, to supporting the Mujahideen fac tion headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, even when it launched a campaign of devastation against the civilian population of Kabul and the regime headed by a rival grouping of 'holy' warriors. In the mid-1990s, over the objections of the ISI, the Pakistan Army switched its patronage to a little known cabal of Islamic radicals called the Taliban. The ISI resisted for a while but then gave in. The consequences, in terms of the complete collapse of the Afghan state and the reversion of the entire country into th e brutish conditions of medieval barbarism are today apparent to even the Western powers which sponsored the Taliban's rise.

It is this rather baneful record of meddling in neighbouring states that underpins Pakistan's international isolation today. And Afghanistan is a monitory warning for Kashmir and the entire region of what is at stake in the Kargil conflict.