The recommendations of intelligence agencies were against the appointment of Musharraf... In their opinion he was not an appropriate choice for the post of chief of army staff, because he was very impatient (jaldbaaz) and an agitated type of person (mushtaiil ho jaane wala banda). I am talking about the most directly concerned agencies and their view was that Musharraf should not be made chief of the army staff because he was not suitable for this post...

On Kargil

I have not been able to understand the logic as to why Kargil had been started, what we had to achieve in this and what were our targets. At least the political leadership should have a clear knowledge about what we were to achieve by this. I think it was not clear even to the army leadership... It is my personal view that the only target the army leadership had was that we would be able to highlight the Kashmir problem at the international level and it would get publicity. What happened with Kargil, instead, was that we subjected our country to added pressure from the world community...

Even if the objective of Kargil was to highlight this issue globally, what was the need for offering such great sacrifice, so much so that units after units of the Northern Light Infantry were perished. The number of our men martyred there was greater than the combined number of martyrs in the 1965 and 1971 wars...

At that time there was an opportunity when people were feeling that India was behaving unfairly with Pakistan and did not want to resolve the Kashmir issue either though negotiations or through any other means. The pressure was on them, and then nuclear explosions were conducted first by them. We did it subsequently in retaliation; we would not have done so ever otherwise. The responsibility for all this was on India. Kargil has put all that responsibility on our shoulders. Tell us, is this the wisdom of our generals?...

... contd.