The ghost of General Pervez Musharraf’s ill-fated adventure in Kargil, in the summer of 1999, has brazenly resurrected itself in Pakistan. It’s flinging a lot more dirt and trash around than the snow heaped by North America’s latest snowmageddon.
The whistle-blower on Musharraf’s Quixotic adventure, which ended up with a lot of mud on his face but more on that of Pakistan, is none other than his former colleague. Retired Lt General Shahid Aziz, an Urdu-speaking Mohajir is also, ironically, related to Musharraf. Unlike Musharraf, Aziz had an impeccable reputation of a clean and untainted soldier.
Aziz also held important assignments, including that of the chief of general staff when Musharraf was both chief of army staff and President of Pakistan. At one time, Shahid was touted to be in line to succeed Musharraf as army chief but was passed over, when the chips were down, in favour of General Ashfaq Kayani, the incumbent chief of Pakistan Army.
Aziz has, lately, taken himself out of the moth balls and in doing so taken the country by the storm with his no-holds-barred and tell-tale auto-biography of his life as a soldier.
Written in Urdu the memoirs, Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak rolled off the press last month and immediately opened a Pandora’s Box in Pakistan. The furore in Pakistan is centred on Aziz spilling the beans on the misadventure Musharraf and a secretive coterie of scheming generals like him had embarked upon in the summer of 1999 when then prime minister Nawaz Sharif was pursuing an optimistic policy of reconciliation and peace with India.
Aziz maintains that the Kargil undertaking was a mafia-like plan hatched by Musharraf, in his capacity as head of the army, and three other generals from his ‘kitchen cabinet.’ These were: Lt General Mohammad Aziz, then chief of general staff and Musharraf’s most trusted crony; Lt General Mehmood Ahmed, then commanding the 11 Corps at Kharian (this was the corps used by Musharraf, later that year, when he toppled Nawaz Sharif from power); and Major General Arif Hasan, who was then commanding the Mountain Division, whose officers and jawans were used as the cannon-fodder by these conspiratorial generals to infiltrate men they initially described as ‘volunteers’ across the Indian lines in Kashmir and occupy the heights of Kargil, left vacated by the Indians in summer.
Aziz is categorical that beyond this ‘gang-of-four’ there was no one else privy to the brazen, cloak-and-dagger, operation triggered to take the Indians in Kashmir by total surprise. Aziz himself happened to be in charge of the all-too-sensitive position of director-general of policy and planning in Pakistan’s ISI, but was kept out of the loop. Aziz insists that not even the head of ISI was taken into confidence, and came to know of it, in bits and pieces, only when the operation was already several days-old.
The most jarring and disturbing fragment of the Kargil conspiracy was that Nawaz Sharif was kept completely in the dark by Musharraf. Sharif was the man who’d elevated Musharraf to the military top slot despite a strong protest from his close confidants who were privy to Musharraf’s less-than-edifying record. It was said that Musharraf had more black marks on his dossier than there were holes in the Swiss cheese. Stories of his ribald flirtations with wives of his junior officers and colleagues still animate small-talk in the Pakistani elite’s drawing-room chatter. It begged the obvious question: what was Sharif’s compulsion for doing that?
Nawaz Sharif had his own compelling logic. Musharraf was a Mohajir, whose presence in the army, especially in its command structure and top echelons of power, was minuscule. Nawaz could be rest assured that Musharraf wouldn’t be able to turn the tables on him because there would be few in the Punjabi-Pathan-controlled military brass to become his co-conspirators.
Sharif couldn’t be more wrong. He just didn’t know Musharraf’s class for conspiracy and clique-building. Aziz confirms, in his recollections of what transpired in Kargil and before it, what quickly became known to the Pakistani intelligentsia soon after the debacle of Kargil.
Musharraf was deadly against Nawaz Sharif’s strategy to seek good relations with India. Musharraf and his Bonapartist cohorts thought peace and normalcy with India would rob the army of its trump card — perpetual hostility with India was the principal reason for Pakistan’s bloated army.
Musharraf was not there to greet Vajpayee in the reception line at Lahore; he and his cronies had boycotted the historic event and set about to dismantle the peace process.
Musharraf would be a hero if his diabolical venture turned out to be a success and all kudos would be his in a Pakistan obsessed with India. If it proved to be a fiasco, which it did, he could always unload its debris on Sharif’s skewed leadership. He did precisely that, thumped his chest over the military’s humiliation because of an inept political handling of Kargil, and brazenly toppled the government in a coup d’etat, in October of that same year.
When the tables turned on him in Kargil and casualties started mounting for Pakistan in the swift Indian riposte, Musharraf then took Nawaz Sharif into confidence and beseeched him to seek Washington’s help to sue for peace with India. Sharif went running to Washington and Bill Clinton obliged by receiving him on July 4. It was, there’s not a shred of doubt, Vajpayee agreeing to Clinton’s intercession and mediation that saved South Asia and the world from a potential nuclear holocaust.
Aziz has shown unusual candour for a Pakistan general to admit that Musharraf’s Kargil blunder authored the most shameful episode in the Pakistan army’s less-than-glorious history replete with many a similar debacles.
However, Musharraf remains unrepentant. From his plush exile in the West, he has denounced Aziz for alleged ‘perfidy’ and ‘treachery’. Sadly, in the cacophony of voices over his disclosure of facts, there are many clamouring for his head because their convoluted sense tells them he has committed treason by spilling the beans on a sordid episode that they would much rather keep under wraps. These are mostly those macho faux-intellectuals who have carved a career in India-hating. Collective lunacy is still the name of the game with Musharraf and his myopic partisans.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
E-mail: k_k_ghori@yahoo.com