Musharraf is clearly engaged in a damage-control exercise. Incontrast to indications in the infamous Beijing tapes that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had been largely unaware of the military preparations for the Kargil escapade, Musharraf declared on Friday that Sharif was well-informed throughout, that "everyone has been on board". Is Musharraf now trying to deflect responsibility for the misadventure? One, reports indicate that there is a degree of bafflement among middle-rung armymen about the misadventure hatched by their bosses. Two, there is the ever-lurking danger of extremist groups and opposition parties whipping up popular frenzy over the Kargil turnaround. Accordingly, the army chief made the astounding claim that he had lost only 250 men in the conflict, in contrast to "1,500 to 1,700" Indians, whose government was doctoring the casualty figures to keep the nation's morale high. As for the statement that Pak army regulars crossed the LoC, albeit in response to an Indian offensive, an increasingly critical domestic press has begun to drop this long-maintainedfiction. As a columnist wrote recently in a Pak newspaper: "The LoC was crossed by some 500 men. By sending in 30,000 men, artillery and military planes to dislodge them, Pakistan claims that India escalated the situation. The world has failed to see the logic of this argument." If Musharraf was trying to establish a modicum of credibility in his interview to the BBC, he will have to admit to a few more uncomfortable truths, for at the moment he is not making much headway with even his own press.

That's not all that emerges from Musharraf's interview about Pakistani leaders' "one day we see it, one day we don't" traits. Just over a month ago, their foreign minister insisted that the LoC was not clearly demarcated; now their army chief veers around to its sanctity. Clearly, a deaf ear in Beijing and Washington and all the important capitals in between is responsible for this shift. More importantly, this highlights the need to demand of Islamabad a coherent account of its Kargil operation before bilateraltalks are resumed. Parleys are imperative, but they can hardly be constructive when one side merrily mixes fact and fiction.