Kargil146;s ghost lives on

By a curious coincidence, two former elected prime ministers of Pakistan who had between them ruled the country for a decade8212;mostly und...

By a curious coincidence, two former elected prime ministers of Pakistan who had between them ruled the country for a decade8212;mostly under the patronage of the army leadership8212;have indicted General Pervez Musharraf in no uncertain terms, even while Musharraf concurrently seeks a road map to the Kashmir solution printed in the United States. Benazir Bhutto has asserted more clearly this time that she had denied permission to Musharraf, as the head of military operations, to launch a military offensive in the Kargil sector, a war plan put into practice when he became the army chief. The plan apparently had been in existence since 1987, when General Zia ul-Haq is believed to have vetoed it as militarily foolish and diplomatically disastrous.

Nawaz Sharif has also indicated that he, as the elected prime minister of Pakistan, had 8220;almost decided on a deadline for a peaceful resolution8221; of the Kashmir dispute, but it was sabotaged by the Kargil war. It needs to be recalled that Kashmir was not an issue during the election campaigns of either Nawaz Sharif in 1996 or that of Benazir Bhutto before that. The conclusion is inevitable: That the army in Pakistan purposely sought to derail any movement toward a solution to the Kashmir issue through its Kargil plan. In the process it sacrificed a lot of its brave soldiers who were also denied a honourable military burial, something that every professional military holds so dear as a tradition.

As regards Musharraf8217;s plea for a US-drawn road map for Kashmir, all he has to do is to remember the principle lying at the root of the road map for the Middle East: That of two sovereign states living peacefully side by side. This would naturally require the complete elimination of the use of terror as an instrument of policy that has been central to Islamabad8217;s strategy for two decades and its renunciation of its so-called moral and political-diplomatic support to separatism and violence. But if the revelations of Sharif and Bhutto were any indications, the army in Pakistan would be unlikely to seriously give up its preferred strategic vision that would also necessitate the army becoming a normal army.