After the end of the Kargil war, a veteran Pakistani journalist and confidante of Field-Marshal Ayub Khan wrote a series of four articles in the Pakistani daily Nation titled “Four wars, one assumption.” The four wars he referred to were the the Kashmir conflict 1947-48, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the war of 1971 and the Kargil war. He asserted: “The point is that all these operations were conceived and launched on the basis of one assumption: that the Indians are too cowardly and ill-organised to offer any effective military response which could pose a threat to Pakistan. Ayub Khan genuinely believed that as a general rule Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows at the right time and place.” Though Pakistan had lost the three earlier wars, that did not prevent them from attempting the Kargil adventure because they indulged in myth-making about all previous campaigns to condition themselves to believe that the 1971 war was lost due to Soviet help to India, and in the other two wars they did not lose but their political leaderships sold the military short. The same myth the Pakistani military has sought to advance in respect of Kargil as well. The assumption Altaf Gauhar has referred to also underlies their conviction that their jehadi terrorist campaign will ultimately win and India could be bled through a thousand cuts.

In the Kargil war, Pakistan presumably set out to test a number of its assumptions. After becoming a declared nuclear power, they wanted to try out what the US strategists termed in the fifties as “salami slicing” tactics, as holding good in the sub-continental context. When the US was excessively focusing on building up nuclear arsenals in the fifties, the then US army chief of staff, General Maxwell Taylor, raised the issue whether nuclear capability could succeed in preventing a similarly armed nuclear adversary to salami-slice one’s territory through limited actions under a mutually deterred nuclear situation, discouraging escalation on the part of the attacked nation. The Pakistanis were already committed to their basic assumption that India would be deterred from escalating once they had occupied the Kargil-Dras heights. They relied on their assessment that the NDA government in New Delhi was relatively inexperienced and in the previous few years, under Narasimha Rao, the defence budgets had been cut in real terms. They were already wedded to their basic assumption that the Indian response would be inadequate once presented with the fait-accompli. They expected the matter to go to the Security Council and with a consequent ceasefire leaving them in possession of the captured territory. Kashmir would also have been brought to the international agenda since the secretary-general was for removing Kashmir from the UN agenda as it had not figured in any discussion for decades. Lastly, even a nominal victory in terms of altering the line of control in their favour would have been a big morale booster for the jehadi terrorists in Kashmir.

... contd.