Beyond the Lines | Road to Ruin: Why Pakistani premiers pursue unwinnable wars against India

Around 2006, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was on a visit to the US. On a cold, blustery morning the General stood up to deliver his address at an event in New York. Full of archetypal swagger and bombast, the general expounded how he had brought about peace in the region amidst a rampaging Islamist terrorism that threatened the region in the 1980s and 1990s. He spoke of the burden of radical baggage that his predecessors had left him with, and the humongous task he had had to undertake.

After he had finished speaking, a young student challenged him with a question about his claims. Musharraf’s misadventure had led to Pakistan’s defeat in the Kargil war against India, and cost many lives. The President was questioned about his mindless Kargil misadventure. The student highlighted a point about Pakistan refusing to take back the bodies of its own soldiers. The student also asked the President about overturning an elected national government through a military coup. Which peace was he talking about? The question irked the president, since he did not have an appropriate response.

Musharraf, the quintessential master of bluff and sleight, had an uncanny knack of sensing danger and jumping ship, jettisoning allies or embracing foes as the occasion suited him. As a politician, those traits often serve as positive attributes; but the barefaced dexterity with which he executed his flip-flops betrayed his slippery brazenness, even by the criterion of a seasoned opportunist.

That morning, his response showed him up as the unscrupulous architect of Kargil and military coup, who had forsaken his Jihadist allies, post the 9/11 terror attacks, since he was now seeking America’s help to keep himself safe. And alive.

Kargil Misadventure

The Kargil war in 1999, in which Pakistan occupied lightly held Indian positions in an attempt to cut off the highway connecting Srinagar and Leh, saw astounding tales of valour involving Indian soldiers, mostly young officers and jawans in their twenties and thirties, but there is a question that often goes abegging. No, the question is not about the contentious opinions doing the rounds currently among military generals and analysts on whether there was an element of surprise that caught the Indian intelligence agencies and the army off-guard in Kargil, or was it a lack of immediate action and initiative at the highest levels despite the intelligence? In a world of divided opinions, this contention has occupied much space in the year of remembering Kargil. Instead, let us address an issue that has popped up its head every now and then.

Historically, Pakistan waged wars which it was never going to win. Politicians in Pakistan repeatedly invoked the past glories of Muslim rulers and raised the spectre of an Indian threat to keep alive their political relevance and by consequence, argued in favour of a central role for its army, the threat to an Islamic country and the need for continued aid from the US.

This worked well for Pakistan as long as such an argument was not translated into outright war. In fact, in 1965, Pakistan was one of the early Asian tigers with a high economic growth rate under President Ayub Khan. In came Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto armed with a bruised ego and personal grudge towards India, which he nursed by foisting a war upon the neighbour – with the aim of annexing Kashmir. Bhutto, arguably the worst and most cowardly politician Pakistan has ever had, fired the gun from Ayub Khan’s shoulder.

Using the pretext of Kashmir and an Indian threat, Bhutto argued about waging a necessary war. His personal agenda overrode every other military rationale as a gullible Ayub fell for it.

Zia Understands the Imbalance: Changes Course

To compensate for the strategic imbalance in military capabilities, Pakistan used the shoot and scoot philosophy and engaged India through a two-pronged campaign. In 1965, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar, which involved an infiltration by military officers along with tribals in an attempt to disembowel Kashmir internally by creating a rebellion within the state. It was followed by a conventional form of war campaign.

Neither of the plans worked but Pakistan could argue that though it did not lose Lahore, it managed to keep India from winning outright.

In a conventional war with India in 1971, Pakistan’s worst nightmare came true: a comprehensive defeat by its rival. Pakistan was now convinced it did not have the military might to counter India. A heightened insecurity that kept alive the bogey of an Indian threat, influenced Pakistan’s domestic power politics, which was soon exploited by its army to continue to stay in power and thereby, drive the state down an economic abyss.

In the 1980s, General Zia-ul Haq found a way forward: he thought up a devious but effective plan of engaging vulnerable Indian states through low intensity conflicts. The approach served Pakistan well in Punjab and later, in Kashmir. During the cold war era, using insurgency in Punjab had kept India domestically occupied. In fact, when Gen Sundarji launched Brasstacks in the 1980s, with a possible plan to scythe Pakistan into two, Zia flew to Jaipur to discuss peace with Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi. Zia understood the benefits Pakistan could accrue through a low intensity war. Besides, Pakistan was not nuclear-ready then.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and political coronation of Taliban in Afghanistan in early 1990s, Pakistan could free up its jihadists to its west and launch them into Kashmir. It served the political cause well as India mostly had weak coalition governments in the 1990s and the US had lost interest in the region and instead, became more involved in the wars in Eastern Europe.

The American Hand

Years ago in New York, while in graduate school, I assisted former US Ambassador John Hirsch on research and was required to accompany guest speakers to the class. One day, the speaker happened to be a former senator from South Dakota. During our conversation en route, the guest speaker told me how he was looked up as a hero in India but was thought of as an enemy in Pakistan. Senator Larry Pressler, the guest that day, was referring to the well-known Pressler Amendment which he helped enforce in 1990.

The Pressler Amendment banned American economic and military assistance to Pakistan unless the president certified on an annual basis that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. In the midst of our conversation, Pressler regretted that America repealed the Amendment in the 1990s. A few years after the Amendment was tossed out, Pakistan exploded its nuclear device in 1998. A year later Kargil happened.

Why Pakistan Believed its Nuclear Status could Offset India’s Advantage

Bidanda Chengappa wrote in a piece for IDSA in 1999, “During the 1947-48 and 1965 Indo-Pakistani conflicts over Kashmir, Pakistan army planners had employed unconventional warfare in the initial phases of the war prior to the “hot” war stage… Clearly, the Kargil intrusions highlight a shift in Pakistan’s strategy from a low intensity conflict operation (LICO) to mounting an attack by infiltration undertaken by professional military personnel masquerading as mujahideen… (the) newly acquired nuclear weapon capability has altered the existing politico-military equations with India.”

Pakistan believed that acquiring a nuclear capability would deter India from waging a limited war. However, it did not account for the fact that the Indian army would hit back resolutely and possessed the will and wherewithal to take back territories. Years later, former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif admitted that Islamabad “violated” an “agreement” signed between him and India’s former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999. He referred to Musharraf’s Kargil misadventure as a violation of peace.

Political Suicide

At the end of the 1965 India-Pakistan war, at the truce meeting in Tashkent, Pakistani President Ayub Khan pleaded with India’s Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to help him save face when he returned to his country. When he returned home, Bhutto ensured that Ayub’s career was over. In 1971, the humiliation of defeat forced Yahya Khan into oblivion, with Bhutto ensuring the military was sent packing from power. In 1999, Musharraf, who had to weather the humiliation of a military defeat as a young officer in the 1971 war, dragged Nawaz Sharif into the Kargil war, just as Bhutto had goaded Ayub into waging one in 1965. After the Kargil war, Nawaz Sharif was pulled down by his scheming General, Pervez Musharraf. Each defeat over the decades has forced a change in the government in Pakistan.

Every now and then, a Pakistani leader has sought to mark his place in history by waging a war against India and winning, against the odds. In that context, Kargil might have finally sealed Pakistan’s perceived conventional capability vis-à-vis India. The loss damaged Pakistani confidence in fighting a successful conventional war against India. After Kargil, the state of Pakistan continued with the strategy of supporting cross border militancy, which the wily Zia-ul-Haq deployed earlier. The lessons from history cannot be more brutally unambiguous: in the last seven decades, each time a Pakistani premier has waged war against India, his career has met with a premature end.

The writer is the author of ‘Watershed 1967: India’s Forgotten Victory over China’ and ‘Camouflaged: Forgotten Stories From Battlefields’. His fortnightly column for FirstPost — ‘Beyond the Lines’ — covers military history, strategic issues, international affairs and policy-business challenges. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Tweets @iProbal