The War That Should Never Have Been-1

Behind the much-feted victory in the India-Pakistan limited war of mid-1999 (in the Drass-Kargil-Batalik-Kaksar sectors of Jammu & Kashmir) lurks colossal blunders—bungles which had involved the top hierarchy of the Govt of India as well as the Indian Army (IA) and Indian Air Force (IAF). In a gist, had the political and IA/IAF leadership simply been more alert and alive to the situation, OP Koh-i-Paima (OP Mountain of Resolve)  need not have been launched at all by the Pakistan Army (PA). As it transpired, India plodded into a needless war costing Rs.19.84 billion, and bled itself in terms of sterling men and material, before eking out a redeeming, if costly, military triumph. It eventually took 11 weeks of bitter fighting by brave and under-equipped Indian soldiers at forbidding heights along craggy mountain ridgelines and peaks, and Washington’s considerable influence, to evict the PA intruders. More 1,200 combatants, including 519 IA soldiers, died; another 1,100 were injured, half of them permanently maimed. Yet, for all the to-do surrounding this definitive episode, it is a shame that no questions are being asked-or entertained-at the highest levels, and no answers being given even 20 years after the conduct by India’s military of OP Vijay (of the IA), OP Safed Saagar (of the IAF) and OP Talwar (of the Indian Navy), especially in terms of decision-making failures/deficiencies at the strategic-level, and lessons learnt at the operational and tactical levels. And it is due to this that India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) till this day desists from publishing the official history of this limited war (which ought to include not only detailed reports on the various AirLand battles/campaigns, but also archival records of India’s Ministry of External Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on national Security). 

Consequently, the 20th anniversary of the limited war will be remembered across India in a celebratory manner over three days (July 25-27), with the theme being “Remember, Rejoice and Renew”, instead of “Analyse, Introspect and Learn”. This was pretty much the case 19 years ago as well when the Kargil Committee Report (KCR) was collectively drafted by K Subrahmanyam, Lt Gen K K Hazari, B G Verghese and Satish Chandra. The KCR failed to include (intentionally or otherwise) the most important lesson, which was: past mistakes that are not acknowledged and corrected due to the political more expedient craving for mass euphoria and exhilaration, always tend to repeat themselves. As the following parts of the narrative will reveal below, it was the severely flawed and executed war campaign (as a direct consequence of strategically unsound higher directions of war laid down by the then ruling political establishment) on the western front in late 1971 and the refusal to officially acknowledge it (by not publishing till this day the MoD’s official history of the 1971 India-Pakistan war) that was responsible for sowing the seeds of the limited war in mid-1999.

The following slides reveal that between October and December 1971, there was considerable disagreement between within the military establishment about the operational priorities, this being largely due to the inability of the then political leadership leadership to clearly spell out the higher directions of war/war directives. For instance, there was no clarity on whether to accord greater priority to the capture of Pakistani territory across the International Boundary (IB) or whether to go for maximum territorial grab across the CeaseFire Line (CFL) and the Working Boundary (WB) along the Chicken’s Neck area.

The following slides reveal that back in 1971 there was no dearth of tactical intelligence, thanks to the several East Pakistani Bengalis who had defected from Pakistan’s military and had sought asylum in India. However, at the strategic-level, for inexplicable reasons, no heed was paid to information emanating from several East European Warsaw Pact member-countries (that had in turn acquired the information from sources in China) which had clearly indicated that: 1) Pakistan’s military, against which a 10-year arms embargo had been imposed by the US in 1965, did not possess the resources/hardware assets required for waging multi-front offensive land campaigns on the western front. 2) The PA and PAF would take a considerable time to master the usage of China-origin weapons that were being imported since 1968 as replacements for their US-origin counterparts. 3) Consequently, the PA and PAF would undertake only one offensive campaign, most probably across the CFL against Jammu & Kashmir. 4) The rest of the PA and PAF would hunker down and brace for a defensive war of attrition inside Pakistani territory in order to conserve their war-waging resources/assets and war wastage reserves. Consequently, the IA was forced into adopting an all-out defensive posture all along the IB, WB and CFL, which clearly prevented the IA and IAF from adopting limited and clear-cut offensive joint warfighting objectives that could be quickly achieved during an all-out but short conventional war.

Another reason that remains unexplained to date is why the IAF was denied permission to conduct tactical reconnaissance sorties till December 3, 1971 despite the PAF violating Indian airspace and conducting tactical air recce sorties over northern Punjab and southern Jammu since November 20, and commencing tactical air-strikes inside India out of East Pakistan since November 22. Consequently, the IA was denied vital intelligence inputs that would have possibly enabled it to checkmate the PA’s gamble in both Poonch and Chammb, and the Shakargarh Bulge.

As a result, the AirLand campaigns of the IA and IAF in both Chammb and the Shakargarh were nothing else but slugfest duels with no decisive outcomes on the battlefields, instead of the manoeuvre warfare originally envisaged by the IA's HQ Western Command.

As the evidence above indicates, placing greater emphasis on offensive land campaigns across the IB in 1971 (which produced only diminishing returns) resulted in the IA being forced to accord lesser importance to the mountain warfare campaigns that would have fetched over the following years highly value-added returns. For instance, had the IA HQ authorised its HQ Western Command to allocate greater warfighting resources to its XV Corps for the sake of realising all its envisaged tactical objectives—especially the capture of Olthingthang—then the PA in 1984 would not have been able to set up its firm logistics-support base in Goma for supporting its 323 Brigade along the Baltoro Glacier, and by 1999 would have denied the sprawling firm logistics-support base at Olthingthang from where OP Koh-i-Paima was launched and supported.

Battlefield Gains & Losses of 1971

Frittering Away The Military Gains At Shimla

The then Indian Prime Minister Smt.Indira Gandhi, from a position of strength, now really turned the screws on the dismal Pakistani delegation. She would not budge from her three main demands. First, to recognise the CFL as an International border. Second, to merge Azaad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan into the main body of Pakistan and bury the J & K issue forever, not to be brought up at any international forum. And third and most important: recognise Bangladesh, which would mean accepting the complete defeat of Pakistan and the Two-Nation Theory. Only then would she release the Pakistani POWs and return the captured and occupied territory of what was West Pakistan. Needless to say, the Pakistani delegation could not and would not accept these conditions. The Shimla meeting was, therefore, heading for a total failure. No joint statement or accord was released and the Pakistani delegation prepared to return empty-handed. It was then, at the very last minute, that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asked Indira for a one-on-one meeting—between only the two of them, behind closed doors. The two leaders were inside for an hour, and then a frowning Bhutto emerged and told the delegation to draw up a joint statement on all other matters like trade, cultural exchange etc. But to leave the main points out. The only one mentioned—and here he got a concession from Indira—was that the CFL would henceforth be termed the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC) for each side and he gave the concession that the J & K issue would not be raised by Pakistan in international forums. What had transpired inside came to light later. Bhutto told Indira that if he accepted her conditions, he would be publicly lynched when he returned to Pakistan. A vacuum would be created, a PA General would take over and start planning his revenge on India as well as the use of military force to release the PoWs. Did she really want that? Or did she prefer to deal with a democratically elected politician and popular leader? In the end he charmed her with his salesmanship and asked her to give him time, promising to recognise Bangladesh in his own way and time. He also got her to compromise on the J & K issue by renaming the CFL as the LoC (just an interim ceasefire line) rather than a permanent international border. He also committed to giving Pakistani Passports to Azaad Kashmiris, thus ending the region’s independent status and making it a de facto part of Pakistan. Now what remained was for Bhutto to make good on his promise to recognise Bangladesh.

(to be concluded)