Former Pakistani General Shahid Aziz has come out with a bizarre disclosure about Kargil war. The retired senior officer has categorically stated that there were no mujahideen deployed by Pakistan army or terrorist organizations to fight Kargil war as is usually claimed by official media of Pakistan and also by the former President General Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan has all along denied any involvement of her regular troops in the Kargil action and has projected the “Kashmiri freedom fighters” as the main moving force behind Kargil operations.
Pakistan intended to internationalize Kashmir issue by undertaking Kargil misadventure. Whether it succeeded in mobilizing international opinion in her favour through Kargil war or not is a debatable proposition. Later events showed that instead of winning world opinion, it lost its face on a number of international fora like the European Union. At the same time international community was appreciative of India for maintaining restraint and not escalating the war on the frontier which could have resulted in nuclear flare up.
One clear damage that Pakistan’s misadventure did to that country was that its long time ally the US made some subtle moves during and after the Kargil episode that indicated deep change in the US State Department’s Kashmir policy. For example, when the then Pak Premier Mian Nawaz Sharif visited the White House, President Clinton rebuffed him and told him to withdraw his men fighting inside the LoC on Indian side. It was a clear recognition that Pakistan had violated the Shimla Agreement, intruded into Indian side in Kargil and was asked to withdraw so as to show respect to LoC which had a vital role in stabilizing peace in the region.
General Musharraf had deployed the battalions of Northern areas in Kargil war. The Northern Light Infantry soldiers were under the command of Pakistan army but only for training and deployment and not for all the perks which regular troops receive. By equipping them only shabbily, they were not well prepared to fight regular Indian troops. Therefore making them the cannon of Indian guns suited General Musharraf in two ways. One was to get the Shia youth done to wastage under the fire of Indian guns and second was to see that it resulted in the demonstrations of pro-GB factions of Northern areas melting down. The strange thing is that after Pakistan withdrew from Kargil heights and peace was restored in the region, it refused to take the dead bodies of the killed personnel of Northern Light Infantry on Kargil front. Thus the dead soldiers of NLI were buried in their respective villages by their relatives and all the way from Askardu to Gilgit today is lined with the graves of the soldiers killed in Kargil wars.
It is a fact that soon after Kargil war, questions began to be raised in Pakistan about the wisdom of making such a disastrous adventure in Kargil in which according to some sources more than 4,000 Pakistani soldiers lost their lives. This number is being contested by various agencies and General Musharraf has said that only 367 Pakistani soldiers lost their lives in the war. Other reports emanating from Pakistani sources, have confirmed that the loss was above three thousand by a conservative estimate.
It is a trend with Pakistani Generals to speak the truth only when they are retired and their pension and other perks are secured. This is what happened about the tribal attack in 1947, and other wars that followed. In the case of Kargil war, one interesting fact that came to surface was that the Pakistan Army could do anything and even go to any length to carry forward its strategic and tactical agenda without taking into account whether that agenda suited national interests as was represented by the Parliament of that country. Pakistani civil society and its intelligentsia are increasingly critical of the role of army in broader sense of term. On-going serious economic crunch and escalating domestic violence are strong compulsions for Pakistani civil society to re-evaluate the damages that martial law regimes carry with it for the broad masses of people. Pakistan army has mastered the art of hiding the truth from public notice. That is what happened in the case of Kargil war and that is what retired General Shahid Aziz is now lamenting about. There are millions among Pakistan’s civil society who will endorse the observations of retired General. But as the saying goes, the taste of pudding lies in eating, Pakistani civil society must rise to the occasion and stop further erosion of credibility of Pakistan in the eyes of international community. Even more important for them to do is to educate the masses of people on how Pakistan is obsessed with hate India syndrome something that has been eating into her vitals and little or no damage to Indian polity. Pakistani society needs to take Lt Gen. Shahid Aziz’s statement in positive and instructive aspects and bring pressure on her civil society to ground Pakistan’s Indian policy in international norms of relationship and not in hate syndrome. That is a lesson to be drawn from the write-up of Shahid Aziz and others like him.
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