COVER STORY

The final assault, and the withdrawal

As Pakistan retreats from its Kargil misadventure, India's spectacular military successes against the odds could turn into an uncertain political victory.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in Batalik

A MACABRE graveyard marked the summit of the majestic Jubbar heights. More than 30 bodies of Pakistani troops and irregulars had been dumped in shallow graves on the 4,924-metre peak by a retreating unit. With just a few stones to cover them, the bodies had decomposed beyond recognition. The summit was enveloped in an indescribable miasma of death. On reaching the Jubbar summit, the first thing the Indian soldiers did was to ask for disinfecting and deodorising chemicals to be sent up as fast as possible, rather than celebrate its recapture. There was no joy at the sight of rotting bodies. "While a man is firing at you, he is your enemy. A dead man is nobody's enemy," said one officer involved in the assault.

Two months into the Kargil war, its end has begun with a United States-authored withdrawal of Pakistani troops and irregulars. The withdrawal began after the capture of several important features in the Batalik sub-sector, where the intrusion by Pakistan was first detected on May 3. Progress had been made in the Mushkoh Valley, another major area of concentration of Pakistani troops, while Drass has almost been cleared.

India's spectacular military triumphs came in the face of overwhelming odds. Several people believed that the campaign to evict Pakistani positions, carried out at heights above 5,000m, was doomed to failure.

But if the Indian Army again established its military competence and resolve, the Kargil campaign's outcome could in a broader political sense prove to be an uncertain victory. The military success could be undermined in the years to come by the U.S.' emergence as a central player in the larger war over the future of Jammu and Kashmir.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Indian Army personnel with the body of Capt. Imtiaz Malik of Pakistan's 165 Mortar Regiment. The body was brought down from Tiger Hills to Srinagar on July 11.

India's progress in the Batalik area began in early July when soldiers from the Garhwal Rifles, the Bihar Regiment, the Gurkha Rifles and the Grenadiers began pushing their way along the flanks of the Batalik heights. The 5,287-m summit of Khalubar, east of Yaldor, fell on July 2 and the entire mountain was cleared within three days by the Gurkhas. West of the Urdas Langpa (stream), Peak 4,812, which the Indian soldiers call Dog Hill, followed rapidly. Holding these flanks, the troops could now begin to cut off Pakistani reinforcements making their way down from their rear base at Muntho Dalo, which had been hit by successive waves of air strikes through the previous fortnight.

Fortune played a big role in the final assault. Troops had succeeded in making their way up the Urdas Langpa to Banju, the minor peak, which guards the Jubbar ridge line. The assault up the ridge would have been murderous had a shell not hit a massive Pakistani ammunition dump near the Jubbar peak. An officer involved in the assault recalls: "It (the ammunition dump fire) was the most amazing display of fireworks I have ever seen. It was a like a hundred Diwali nights at once." The Pakistani troops were forced to retreat and the route up Jubbar to Peaks 4,924 and 4,927 was now clear.

Progress was rapid on the eastern side of the Garkhun Langpa as well. The Garkhun Langpa is flanked by Jubbar to its west and the Kukerthang and Tharu heights to its east. The push from the village of Yaldor on the Yaldor Langpa to Peak 4,821 on Kukerthang was a protracted one and claimed heavy casualties. But the mountain was taken and the 5,103-m Tharu fell next. With the heights intact, the troops could now dominate the Garkhun Langpa and the villages of Baroro and Kha Baroro. Further, Pakistani troop movement down the Gargurdu, Garkhun and Yadlor Langpas, the three major streams that trisect the Batalik area from west to east, is now near-impossible.

KAMAL NARANG
Bombardment by an artillery gun in the Batalik sector. It was here that the first indications of a Pakistani intrusion became evident. Massive air and ground strikes resulted in the recapture of some important peaks held by Pakistani troops.

AMONG the most important realisation of the Batalik campaign is that the Pakistan Army has direct complicity in events in the area. The interrogation of Naik Inayat Ali of the 5 Northern Light Infantry, captured on the night of July 2, proved that the heights were occupied by his battalion and that no irregulars were present there. Inayat Ali told his captors that his entire unit of 200 had been wiped out in sustained Indian ground and air fire. One of the soldiers involved in his capture told Frontline that having exhausted his ammunition, Ali continued to throw stones down the mountain at Indian soldiers. "We had to send someone around and finally pin him down," he said.

However, contrary to official claims, the battle for Batalik was not over at the time Pakistan announced on July 11 the withdrawal of its troops. The retreating Pakistan troops had been reinforcing at two heights - Peaks 5,121 and 5,327 - over a kilometre inside the Line of Control (LoC) from where their pull-out appears to have commenced. Reaching these heights would have involved a further assault, which could have proved costly. To the east of Yadlor lies Muntho Dal, the 5,065-m pyramid which has acted as Pakistan's principal supply base for the Batalik sector. Although Muntho Dalo has come under sustained air attack, and 105-millimetre field guns and multi-barrelled Pinaka rocket launchers have been pounding the position from the Silmoo Langpa, until July 9, the final physical occupation could again have taken time.

AP
Militants belonging to the Al Badr group on a snow-covered hilltop in Kargil, in a hand-out photo released by the group at a press conference in Rawalpindi on July 10.

Pakistan's movement out of the Drass area also prevented what could have been a series of small but bitter skirmishes along the Tiger Hills sector. At least one Pakistani position on the western face of Tiger Hills remained intact until the withdrawal, and there have been concerted counter-attacks on Peaks 5,100 and 4,875. Interestingly, the Tiger Hills area also appears to have received significant reinforcements of Pakistani irregulars until July 8. On that day, the bodies of three Pakistani soldiers, Major Iqbal and Captain Imtiaz Malik of the 12 Northern Light Infantry (NLI) and Captain Karnal Sher of the 165 Mortar Regiment, were recovered from the hills. But there is little doubt that the early withdrawal helped India retake positions such as the Marpo La pass. Intriguingly, Army Public Relations had claimed in a letter to Frontline that the area had already been recaptured.

But it is in the Mushkoh Valley and Kaksar that Pakistan's retreat is likely to have the most significant impact. The assault down the Mushkoh Valley, which began on July 7, claimed 23 soldiers the next day. More casualties were reported subsequently. Much of the fighting came along the Mun Thang, the stream that drains Peak 4,342 above the Valley. The fighting is at an air-distance of between 5 and 6 km from the LoC, but Pakistani troops were not likely to be present in strength in the region since the temperature in the glacial north of the Mushkoh Valley would rule out holding positions for any length of time. The counter-attacks on Tiger Hills and Peak 5,100 appeared designed to ease the pressure on the Pakistani positions in Mushkoh.

KAKSAR was also certain to see bitter fighting. At least three attempts to storm the Pakistan-occupied Bajrang Post and Peak 5,299, which dominates the Kaksar stream, have been beaten back since the fighting began. A major offensive that began on June 6 showed few results until the withdrawal began. While the Indian troops had been engaged in virtual hand-to-hand combat a fortnight ago, Pakistan succeeded in reinforcing its positions. Officials had been desperately petitioning New Delhi for a limited retaliatory incursion across the LoC in this area since the only local ridge line route to Peak 5,299 lies from the other side. The only option would have been a succession of near-suicidal assaults up the mountain face.

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Soldiers patrolling the Batalik sector. The Indian progress in the area began soon after the summit of Khalubar fell on July 2. The soldiers of Gurkha Rifles cleared the entire mountain within three days.

Indian field commanders and troops were preparing for these final assaults when the Pakistani withdrawal began. Despite the rhetoric emanating from terrorist groups in Islamabad, there is little doubt that the retreating forces were more than delighted to be on their way. Deserted by their officers, having lost well over half their numbers, short of food and ammunition and subjected to eight weeks of sustained air and ground bombardment, wireless intercepts made clear that what remained of Pakistan's forces on the mountains were dispirited and in disarray. An Indian military success had become inevitable as Pakistan announced its withdrawal.

There is more than a little confusion about the time that would be taken for the withdrawal and its physical manifestations. Even as officials in New Delhi announced that preliminary evidence of a pullout had been noticed, 15 Corps Brigadier (General Staff) A.K. Chopra told journalists in Srinagar that nothing of the kind had happened. It is likely that some pockets of resistance will remain for a few weeks although there has been a marked decline in cross-border fire since July 9. Informed sources told Frontline that the Ministry of Defence had passed on instructions to field artillery formations only to fire in defence. This would allow relatively safe movement back across the LoC, which was perhaps one of the issues discussed by the Directors-General of Military Operations of India and Pakistan on July 11.

More important, the time has now come for a transparent examination of the strategic misjudgments that led to the enormous costs inflicted on India on the Kargil heights. Despite denials by the Army that it knew of plans of an armed intrusion, sources told Frontline that two officers attached to the 121 Brigade in Kargil had sent up warnings in September and November 1998 to the 3 Infantry Division's headquarters at Leh, the 15 Corps Headquarters in Srinagar and the Army Headquarters in New Delhi. Major Bhupinder Singh and Major K.B.S. Khurana of the 121 Brigade's Intelligence Team and Intelligence and Field Security Unit had warned of an intrusion in April; they filed reports similar to those issued by the Intelligence Bureau's Kargil field officer to his Leh station. The first of the Singh-Khurana reports classified the information as non-reliable and the second as highly reliable.

Pakistani soldier Naik Inayat Ali of 5 Northern Light Infantry, who was captured by the Indian forces in Batalik on July 2. His entire unit of 200 men was wiped out in sustained Indian attack.

Senior officials were presumably too busy or too taken in with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government's Lahore Bus diplomacy to pay attention. No cogent account of deployments through the winter has yet been offered, but some guesses are possible. The first snow in the Kargil area fell on October 16, just a day after the formal deadline for the movement of civilian winter supplies across the Zoji La pass. But after two days of snowfall, no more fell until the night of January 4; January and February saw only light snowfall, not enough to drive posts off the mountain heights; March 8 saw a sudden heavy snowfall, after which positions such as Bajrang Post in Kaksar probably moved down. With supplies running low and the threat perception being minimal, officials probably believed it would be safer to move downhill and return in June.

WHAT the Indian Army achieved at Kargil was to ensure that Pakistani intruders were evicted from large areas of occupied territory well within the 12-week time-frame senior officials had privately suggested at the beginning of the campaign. In an inversion of the conventional play of mountain war, the defenders of fortified positions, by most estimates, suffered twice as many casualties as India. Yet Pakistan's retreating forces succeeded in inflicting enormous military and economic costs on India, tying down five Indian brigades but losing only expendable and poorly paid infantry soldiers and irregulars. Secondly, even if the international reaction to its adventure did not play quite the way in which Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and General Pervez Musharraf may have expected, Pakistan has secured the U.S.' emergence as a key player in Jammu and Kashmir.

K.M. CHOUDHARY / AP
Indian soldiers take up position on a hill in the Mushkoh Valley region on July 10.

In the years to come, Pakistan is certain to look to these twin outcomes of the Kargil conflict and see what opportunities may be found in them. There are already disturbing signs that an escalation of violence could be imminent in Jammu and Kashmir, a development which could open the way for renewed Western intervention. Incidentally, Western backing for India was greeted with cries of delight by the Union Government. In the absence of serious reflection by the security establishment, the victory the Indian soldiers have built at enormous cost could be subverted.

WITH an election campaign just round the corner, spurious triumphalism is almost certain to black out the disturbing possibilities that have emerged with the end of the conflict. Indian soldiers have held their ground against the most concerted attempt to transfigure Jammu and Kashmir since the war of 1965. Whether the BJP-led government will be able to do the same remains to be seen.