INDIA & PAKISTAN

An Army caught napping

The minutes of a crucial meeting of the Unified Headquarters, the apex body of organisations managing security in Jammu and Kashmir, show why the initial stages of India's response to events in Kargil were confused and directionless.

PRAVEEN SWAMI

THE truth, like murder, will out, goes the maxim. Through the three months since the Kargil war began, military officials have insisted that they were prepared for Pakistan's aggression and that the campaign was conducted to a well-thought-through plan f rom its early stages. 15 Corps Commander Lieutenant-General Krishan Pal had, in an interview, even described the campaign as an example of "generalship unparalleled in the history of warfare". Now documents obtained by Frontline have disproved su ch claims. The Army knew next to nothing about the scale and character of the intrusion, even less about the structure of the war that was to follow, and it was entirely unprepared for a full-scale conflagration involving the Pakistan Army in Kargil.

The minutes of the crucial first meeting on the Kargil war of the Unified Headquarters (UHQ), the apex body of organisations managing security in Jammu and Kashmir, cast light on events in the weeks that followed the detection on May 3 of Pakistan's aggr ession. Disturbed by the blase reaction of the Army at that meeting to the occupation of some 1,500 sq km of Indian territory by Pakistani regulars, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah flew to New Delhi on May 24, accompanied by Chief Secretary Ashok Jaitley and Director-General of Police Gurbachan Jagat. There he discovered that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and top government officials were unaware of the events unfolding on the Kargil heights. It was a day of desperate pleading before the Cabinet Co mmittee on Security met on May 25. (This sequence of events was reported in Frontline's July 2 issue.)

On May 19, a fortnight after Pakistan's intrusion was detected on the Batalik heights, the UHQ met in Srinagar. The emergency meeting was called to discuss the intrusion and, its minutes record, the "emerging security scenario". The UHQ is chaired by the Chief Minister. His Security Adviser, the 15 Corps Commander, could by custom chair UHQ meetings in the Chief Minister's absence, and thus he played a special role in its deliberations. That this meeting was an unusual one is evident from the fact that almost the entire security establishment in Srinagar attended it.

Farooq Abdullah was accompanied by Minister of State for Home Mushtaq Ahmed Lone, Chief Secretary Jaitley, Principal Secretary B.R. Singh, Principal Secretary (Home) C. Phunsog, Information Director S. Pandey, Divisional Commissioner Khurshid Ahmed Ganie and Srinagar Deputy Commissioner Tanveer Jahan. The Border Security Force sent two Inspectors-General, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police two Deputy Inspectors-General and the Central Reserve Police Force a Deputy Inspector-General and an Additional Deputy Inspector-General. The Director-General of Police led a team consisting of Additional Director-General R. Tikoo, three Inspectors-General and a Senior Superintendent of Police. The Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) Joint Director was present, as were a Commissi oner and a Deputy Commissioner from the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

A.K. Chopra, Brigadier-General (Staff) of the 15 Corps, initiated the proceedings with a general briefing on the events in Kargil. The contents of the briefing are not recorded in the minutes, but officials who attended the meeting say that it was a sket chy account lasting only a few minutes, of the presence of infiltrators in the sector. Pal then took over from his subordinate. Paragraph 4 of the minutes record that he made six observations. The first two were routine. "The areas of infiltration were u nheld ones," Pal said, "by both India and Pakistan and dominated by patrols and aerial surveillance by both sides, due to the rugged and extremely difficult high altitude terrain conditions." He then proceeded to outline the "sequence of infiltration in various sub-sectors and actions taken by the Army."

SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Brigadier-General A.K. Chopra of the 15 Corps displays weapons seized from Pakistani infiltrators in June.

The term "dominated by patrols and aerial surveillance" passed unchallenged: no one at the UHQ apparently saw it fit to ask how thousands of infiltrators could thus enter and hold such an area. Pal proceeded to make four assertions that proved even more damning. First, he insisted that "no voids were created in the CI (counter-insurgency) grid due to the movement of troops in Kargil Sector and deployment in the valley was fully balanced." The remark was intended to reassure security officials in the Sta te who were disturbed by the gaps created in counter-insurgency deployments by the movements of troops to the borders. The Army, Pal's remarks make it clear, did not expect that events in Kargil would suck in larger numbers of troops from security duties in the State. This was a massive error of judgment, for by the end of the Kargil war, 58 battalions had been moved to guard the borders vacated by troops headed for Kargil.

But this error was the outcome of even larger errors of judgment. Paragraph 4(iv) of the minutes record Pal asserting that there was "no concentration of troops on the Pakistani side and no battle indicators of war or even limited skirmishes." The langua ge used make at least two things clear. For one, the Army did not realise that there was already a concentration of Pakistani troops, from the Northern Light Infantry and Gilgit Scouts, pushing soldiers into Indian territory. Several additional brigades were to be used in the weeks to come. Pal himself is on record as claiming that Pakistan used upwards of 10 battalions, including units of its elite Special Services Group, in the Kargil War. Clearly, at this stage the Army had no idea of these deploymen ts.

Even more serious, Paragraph 4(iv) leaves little room for doubt that the Kargil intrusion was not seen as a conventional military engagement at all. Pal's remark that there were "no battle indicators of war or even limited skirmishes" now seems absurd. T he massive artillery exchanges that were under way through the Kargil sector, from the Mushkoh Valley in the west to Turtok in the east, were evidently misinterpreted as routine duels. By this time, Pakistan was funnelling entire brigades into Kargil, an ticipating a massive Indian retaliation across the Line of Control. India, too, was to prepare for such a possibility, but at this stage its Army clearly had little idea of where the Kargil engagement was headed. The UHQ reports explain just why the ini tial stages of India's response to events in Kargil were confused and directionless.

NISSAR AHMED
Lt.- Gen. Krishan Pal, Commander of the 15 Corps.

Pal proceeded to underline his thesis that the intrusion would be contained with ease. Paragraph 4(v) notes his claim that the "situation was local and would be defeated locally". At least five brigades of the Indian Army, made up largely of troops from outside Jammu and Kashmir, had to be shipped in before containment was achieved. As such, Pal's assertion at the UHQ meeting illustrates a complete failure of comprehension. The 15 Corps Commander even seemed unaware of the threat to troop movements from Pakistan artillery fire on the Srinagar-Leh highway, directed by observation posts set up by infiltrators above Drass, notably on Tiger Hill and Tololing. "The Army convoys were moving unhindered," he noted, "and soon the civil convoy would also commenc e." It only started after the Pakistani withdrawal was near-complete.

HOW does one account for a spectacular misjudgment of the military character of the Kargil intrusion? It is important to note that these judgments were not just made by Pal, but the Army as a whole. Chief of the Army Staff General V.P. Malik, for one, sa w no reason to cut short his week-long visit to Poland in May when he received news of the intrusion. One obvious possibility is that the Army did not have, as on May 19, a cogent picture of what was going on. But Pal himself has, in a tape-recorded inte rview to Frontline, ruled out that possibility. "Our final assessments were made when our frontline contacts and photo surveillance provided detailed inputs that tallied," he said. Those assessments were presumably made by May 17, when Pal claimed to have "a good degree of clarity about just what was going on." He added: "I distinctly remember making it clear when I first briefed the press in Srinagar on May 19 that the depth, extent, logistic support, fire support and magnitude left no doubt in my mind that it was a Pakistan Army-backed operation" (Frontline, August 27).

"Pakistan Army-backed operation" is the crucial phrase here. Army officials, the UHQ minutes make clear, may have understood that their Pakistani adversaries were supporting the intrusion, as they do through the Line of Control and the western internatio nal border. But the Kargil intrusion was clearly not understood as an Army-led conventional engagement. Others at the UHQ meeting disagreed, notably Farooq Abdullah. Paragraph 8(i) records his strong intervention. The Chief Minister argued that the "rece nt infiltration was not a short-term plan but a sinister design of Pakistan aimed to isolate certain areas and cut off Kargil-Leh from the valley as (was) being done in Rajouri-Poonch areas...He opined that these were not mere militants but supported by some Pakistani regulars too."

Farooq Abdullah's sources of information were presumably from his police force, whose warnings from mid-May about the presence of Gilgit Scouts and the Northern Light Infantry had generally been dismissed. Certainly, neither the Intelligence Bureau nor R AW did anything to dispel Pal's notions at the UHQ meeting. Paragraph 6 of the minutes record thus: "On being asked by the Chief Secretary about the intelligence input, Joint Director IB stated that since January this year it was reported that approximat e(ly) 200 Al-Badr militants waiting in Kotli and Kel could not infiltrate due to effective counter-infiltration posture by the Army...'Accordingly, frustration had built up and thus possibly infiltration was effected in Kargil sector." Paragraph 7 notes that the RAW focussed, somewhat mystifyingly given the context of the meeting, on "activation of infiltration routes through Nepal and other areas".

Just why the I.B., in particular, chose to remain silent at the meeting is unclear. Its Joint Director must have been aware of reports coming from his Leh station since last October, reports which were made available to Frontline, warning that gro ups of Pakistani irregulars were being trained in Olthingthang with the express purpose of launching a thrust into Kargil this April. One possibility is that the I.B. chose to remain silent, leaving the job of engaging the 15 Corps Commander in argument to the Chief Minister. A second possibility is that his position, and for that matter Pal's stance, were not fully reflected in the minutes. But neither officer appears to have written to the UHQ Secretariat asking for the minutes to be modified, for no corrections were circulated to its members. As such, the minutes appear to be a plausible narration of the meeting.

Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah.

Interestingly, Pal's assessment of Pakistan's objectives in Kargil was remarkably coherent. "On being asked the main objective behind this infiltration," Paragraph 5 of the UHQ minutes records, "the Advisor Security remarked that the possible aim of Paki stan at the macro-level could be to internationalise the situation, create war-like hysteria and attempt to strengthen their case for third party intervention." But he appeared unable to comprehend that Pakistan could act not only by creating a war-like hysteria but actually going to war. The infiltrators' tactics were interpreted firmly in the light of the experience of insurgent tactics in Jammu and Kashmir. "At the operational level, these infiltrators would possibly aim at disrupting the vital lines of communication in this sector to Khalsi and Leh, as also create disturbances in the depth areas."

This position reflected institutional myopia born of the belief that nuclear weaponisation in South Asia precludes the possibility of conventional engagement. As Pal recently argued, the Army continues to believe, along with the Bharatiya Janata Party's defence establishment, that after "nuclear status was acquired, it stood to reason, both military and strategic reason, that any possibility of a conventional conflict will decline." From this premise, he proceeded to argue that the Kargil conflict had " nothing to do with the nuclear scenario". "Perhaps," Pal concluded, "the linkages are more with the proxy war it is waging in Kashmir... That seems to me to be more plausible. What has happened seems similar to what Pakistan did in 1947 and 1965 when it used the facade of Mujahideens and Kabailis. The tactics are identical, too, with what was done in Afghanistan."

This politically driven sundering of events in Jammu and Kashmir from those events set off by Pokhran-II and the entirely ahistorical comprehension of how the Kargil war came about may well force India to pay for the mistakes with the lives of its soldie rs. Interestingly, Farooq Abdullah seems more perceptive than the party he supports in Parliament. Paragraph 8(ii) of the minutes outlines his belief that "as soon as the Kosavo (sic) problem would be over, Pakistan would attempt to bring Kashmir into th e international limelight...He added that the additional aim could also be to keep the Army committed in such inhospitable terrain conditions and extend the areas of their employment by opening up new fronts." The use of the plural form "fronts" is obvio usly relevant. The UHQ minutes expose the dishonesty of the Army leadership on its conduct of the Kargil war, and that of the political establishment which has sought to shield the Army leadership from public scrutiny.

Even more disturbing, it makes evident the poverty of the Indian defence establishment's conceptual and doctrinal thought.