‘Pakistan denies involvement,’ said Prabhu Purie, ‘although we have the wreckage of their helicopters all over Kargil. We have heard nothing from Hamid Khan directly, but I expect them to call for a UN Security Council meeting in the next few hours. Equally disturbingly, China is racking up pressure both bilaterally and through international institutions. I’m told its troop levels on the border are almost high enough to launch an invasion. Reddy could give more details on that. Beijing has launched official complaints against us to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.’
‘What on earth for?’ said Dixit.
‘Prison conditions,’ replied Purie. ‘We treat our prisoners inhumanely.’
‘They must be out of their minds.’
Zhongnanhai, Beijing, China
Local time: 0800 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0000 Saturday 5 May 2007
President Tao Jian had risen to become the leader of the world’s largest one-party state on a reputation for incorruptibility and hawkish nationalism. Having gained the support of the economists and diplomats within the Party, he finally won over the military in March 1996 when the United States sent an aircraft carrier into the Straits of Taiwan during China’s missile tests. It was Tao, then a vice-minister, who suggested that the then President Jiang Zemin and Foreign Minister, Qian Qichen, be summoned for a dressing down. From the viewpoint of the Chinese military, if the Americans had the nerve to threaten China with an aircraft carrier, China had clearly shown herself to be too forgiving of Taiwan’s democracy and too soft in response to international pressure.
On the rare occasions when he had to meet an American official, Tao made it unequivocally clear, albeit as part of a joke, that if the United States attempted such a show of force again China would attack. His favourite parting remark, which he had mastered in English, was: ‘We may not be able to hit the Pentagon, but we can vaporize Hollywood.’ He became a key liaison figure in pushing through the new policy to down-size the army, modernize it and invest in missiles and a blue-water navy.
Like most Chinese leaders, Tao was a pupil of the works of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. But he had also been influenced by the Prussian officer Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, whose work Vom Kriege or On War advocated that war should be seen as an extension of political policy and not as an end in itself. Years ago, when Tao first read Clausewitz, he discussed it with translators and military experts to ensure that he understood the meaning. He then blended Clausewitz with Sun Tzu’s teaching that the supreme art of war was to subdue the enemy without fighting. ‘War is a matter of vital importance for the state,’ wrote Sun Tzu in 500 BC, arguing that the military was the instrument which delivered the coup de grace to an enemy previously made vulnerable. While Sun Tzu argued that ‘there has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited’, Clausewitz insisted that ‘To introduce into the philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an act of absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.’
As Tao Jian contemplated his political objective with India, he thought about Hari Dixit. Dixit had offered to come to Beijing and had then cancelled without explanation. He had struck Pakistani positions across the LoC and emerged diplomatically unscathed.
The man might be a follower of neither Clausewitz nor Sun Tzu, but clearly he was a national leader of high brinkmanship and courage. The war about to be waged was not about Pakistan, but about India and China. Ultimately, it was the first skirmish in a fight for global leadership.
Prime Minister’s Office, South Block, New Delhi
Local time: 0600 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0030 Saturday 5 May 2007
‘How are we fixed militarily?’ asked Hari Dixit. The National Security Council had not left the room since convening overnight. Each time decisions were made, messages interrupted the meeting with new developments.
‘The Rajasthan and Punjab borders are in battle-ready positions, Prime Minister,’ said Chief of Army Staff, Unni Khrishnan. ‘We could move on Lahore any time you want. Fighting is still going on along the LoC. A counter-attack has begun to retake Kargil.’
‘Casualties?’
‘Not clear yet on their side. But we have more than fifty confirmed dead and about two hundred wounded so far. We have drawn up plans to create a buffer zone on the Pakistan side of the LoC, rather like the Israelis did in southern Lebanon. We’ve named it Operation Qabza-e-Zamin, or in English, Secure Ground.’
‘How would that go down at the UN and elsewhere?’ said Dixit.
‘Given what happened last night, if we went in now, we could get away with it,’ said Purie.
‘Can it be done?’ Dixit asked Khrishnan.
Khrishnan hesitated: ‘At a pinch, yes. It is high altitude and carries risk.’
‘What risk?’
‘The environment is the most hostile imaginable. Movement through the mountains is painfully slow. It takes an average of ten minutes to cover a hundred yards, five times longer than on the plains. It’s even slower with rations, ammunition, weapons, warm-weather protection and communications equipment.’
‘But it is the same for the enemy, is it not?’ said Dixit.
‘They are dug in, sir. I am not saying we cannot do it, because this is what the mountain troops are trained to do. What I am flagging up is the chances of failure and the reasons. The pathways, running along the mountain ledges, are narrow. The men have to walk in single file. If they slip and fall, it is certain death. If the enemy pins them down with machine-gun fire, there is nowhere to flee to. Once out there, each unit is often cut off without a radio link. The high-frequency VHF radios operate on line of sight, so we have to set up relay stations, visible to each other to make sure commanders can pass instructions through to the forward units. And finally there’s fatigue. The thin air saps the energy of the men.’
‘I assume each battle-front carries its own unique set of risks,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘and that Kashmir is worse than most. If we go in now we can argue our case on the international stage. Can you do it?’
‘If you accept the level of risk, sir, we can give it our best efforts.’
‘And the China border?’
‘We shouldn’t fight there, Prime Minister,’ replied Khrishnan, glancing towards Purie.
‘The Chinese have diplomatically shot themselves in the foot by breaking the Missile Technology Control Regime and nuclear proliferation agreements,’ said Purie. ‘They also have a record of backing losers. Cambodia, North Korea and Burma are not shining examples of success. We should persuade Beijing that Pakistan is only going one way and that is towards collapse.’
‘And let international sanctions do the rest of our fighting for us,’ said Dixit. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Khrishnanji, what do you think?’
‘I am not as convinced as the Foreign Minister, Prime Minister,’ said Unni Khrishnan. ‘If China launches a cross-border attack, we will have to respond. Already they have reinforced the border along the Thag La Ridge just west of Bhutan, which is where they made their first advances in the 1962 war. We now know they have sent Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines to the Andaman Sea. Two surfaced as they went through the shallow waters of the Malacca Straits and made themselves known to the satellite cameras.’
Dixit put his head in his hands. ‘What in Heaven’s name are they trying to achieve?’ he said.
‘They think they can threaten us and win, sir,’ said Khrishnan.
Mumbai/Bombay, Maharastra, southern India
Local time: 0600 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0030 Saturday 5 May 2007
Within an hour of the Kargil/Dras sector falling, explosions tore through cities all over India. The first was in Mumbai, the capital of Maharastra, where the state government was fervently Hindu nationalist. A massive car bomb went off on Madame Cama Road, outside the state government offices, near Horniman Circle on the edge of the main modern downtown business district. A security guard on duty was killed.
A second car bomb exploded in Delhi’s Connaught Place and over the next two hours there were bomb attacks in thirteen Indian states. The only significant city to escape was Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, for reasons which only became apparent much later.
The most concentrated violence was in the north-east. Two car bombs exploded in the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, Itanagar; one outside the town hall and the other close to the police station. Bomdi La, the southern town in the Kameng Division near Bhutan, was attacked by three timer bombs and grenades were thrown in the western town of Tawang, the closest major centre to the Bhutanese border.
In neighbouring Assam, guerrillas claiming to be from the once-defunct United Liberation Front of Assam fought running gun battles with police and troops in Dispur, the state capital, and in the second city, Narogong. When the fighting was finished, twenty-nine Indian security personnel were dead, together with more than fifty guerrillas.
Strategically, the most important target was the main trunk road heading north towards Sikkim from West Bengal, cutting across the smallest corridor of Indian territory. It was less than thirty kilometres across at its narrowest. Wedged between Nepal to the west and Bangladesh to the east, this was where the geographical cohesion of India was at its most vulnerable. It was known as the Siliguri corridor or Chicken’s Neck. The road, which linked Siliguri and Guwahati, was blown in three places and blocked with booby-trapped empty fuel trucks. Two hundred mujahedin fighters held the position, while Indian infantry and fighter planes tried to dislodge them. It was later discovered that the guerrillas had come over the border from Bangladesh, where they had been trained for the operation by Pakistani and Chinese specialists. Every man would die, but for a short time, Pakistan’s dream and India’s nightmare had come true. The seven states of the north-east were cut off from the rest of India.
Prime Minister’s Office, South Block, New Delhi, India
Local time: 0730 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0200 Saturday 5 May 2007
‘Let me get this clear, Prime Minister,’ said Unni Khrishnan, the Chief of Army Staff. ‘You believe that China and Pakistan have an agreement to sever the north-east militarily, and at the same time move in on Kashmir. But I am convinced China does not want war.’
‘No, perhaps it doesn’t. But it will go as far as it can by pushing it to the edge.’ Dixit put on his spectacles and looked down. ‘I think the answer might lie in this memo I have in front of me. It was written to Pakistani Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1966 by Zulfi Bhutto, who was then Foreign Minister. We should note the circumstances. Pakistan had just been defeated by us in the 1965 war. Bhutto considered the terms of the truce unacceptable and was quoted as saying that Pakistan needed complete victory over India. The only alternative would be Pakistan’s destruction as a self-respecting nation. He described the Tashkent Agreement which ended the hostilities as a national humiliation and diplomatic betrayal. Then he outlined his plan, and I am convinced that Hamid Khan has borrowed Bhutto’s strategy to use for his own foreign policy. Remember, of course, that Bangladesh was still East Pakistan.
‘“The defence of East Pakistan would need to be closely coordinated with Chinese actions both in the north-east of India and also possibly in the regions of Sikkim and Nepal. It would be necessary to provide the Chinese with a link-up with our forces in that sector. I envisage a lightning thrust across the narrow Indian territory that separates Pakistan” – or Bangladesh as it is now – “from Nepal.”’
Dixit looked up. ‘Bhutto was referring to the Chicken’s Neck, exactly the same area which the terrorists held this morning. “From our point of view, this would be highly desirable,” he wrote. “It would be to the advantage of Nepal to secure its freedom from isolation by India. It would solve the problem of Sikkim and Tibet.” ’
‘It would also deal with China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh,’ said Prabhu Purie, ‘and bring Bhutan and Nepal into the Chinese sphere of influence.’
‘In short, gentlemen,’ Dixit went on, ‘that is the price the Chinese dictatorship is asking us to pay for peace. We give Kashmir to Pakistan. Expel the Dalai Lama and much of the Tibetan community from India. Abandon our security obligations to Bhutan and Nepal and renegotiate our borders with a view to handing over Arunachal Pradesh and giving independence back to Sikkim. And it will go like that, chiselling away at us to make us the weaker power in Asia.’ He paused, lost in his own thoughts for a moment, then summed up: ‘It is not the road democratic India would seek to go down.’
Line of Control, Kashmir
Local time: 0830 Saturday 5 May 2007
GMT: 0300 Saturday 5 May 2007
Unni Khrishnan, Chief of Army Staff, and Ranjit Mansingh, Chief of Air Staff, monitored the operation from the underground command and control centre at the Ambala airbase just south of Chandigarh. Four hundred aircraft were used, including the ageing fighter and ground-attack MiG-21, the MiG-27 tactical strike fighter, the Mirage 2000–5 air-defence and multi-role fighter and the formidable SU-30. They flew from Ambala, from Srinagar in Kashmir itself, Jodhpur in Rajasthan, Hindon near Delhi and Agra, more famous for the Taj Mahal than for waging war.
The first strikes hit Pakistan’s Divisional Headquarters in Skardu, taking out air defences, radar and aircraft. The next waves concentrated on the artillery positions sixteen kilometres beyond the LoC, destroying the big guns which had laid siege to towns like Kargil and Dras over the years. Then the Indians laid down a withering array of firepower on Pakistani army bunkers, transport and fuel depots. When the airstrikes ended, India’s Bofors 155mm guns opened up to continue the pounding.
As the weather cleared at mid-morning under a bright blue Himalayan sky, the helicopters took off, in one of the most impressive sights of modern military warfare: the sky filled with rotary aircraft, in places blackening the sky like flocks of migrating birds. The plan for such an assault had been drawn up and reworked dozens of times since the first war with Pakistan in 1947. But never before had it been taken off the shelves, dusted down and implemented. At the centre of Operation Secure Ground were the Himalayan Eagles, the expert mountain squadron which had pioneered techniques in fixed- and rotary-wing high-altitude mountain flying. The squadron’s emblem depicted the snowcapped Himalayas over which its pilots flew every day of the year.
The terrain in Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir was among the most hostile in the world. The main airbase at Leh was at 3,200 metres. Others in the area were equally treacherous. Chushul was at 4,400 metres and Thoise at 3,000. Arrangements had been made to fly in the AN-32 and IL-76 transport aircraft as the only means of keeping these remote bases resupplied, even at night.
Ladakh itself was snowbound for up to nine months of the year and the AN-32 made routine drops to the men defending the Siachen glacier. Helicopters were the only way to get soldiers in and out.
India planned to take control of sections of the L-shaped piece of territory, 700 kilometres long, which stretched west and south from the Karakoram and Ladakh ranges close to the border with China. Dras and Kargil would be reclaimed, and the Indian flag, troops, supply bases and landing strips would be set up at points all the way to the Pakistani town of Muzafarabad, then further south, passing within eighty kilometres of Islamabad to where the LoC began fifty-five kilometres west of Jammu.
It was one of the most audacious airborne campaigns in military history. The attacking forces divided the LoC into five sectors, each identified by a colour. Red sector covered the area from the Chinese border near Gapsham in Indian territory taking in a triangle stretching up to Skardu and down to the Marol inside Pakistani territory, the next town north of Kargil along the Suru River. Yellow sector covered a much smaller, but more heavily fortified area, taking in Kargil and Dras and aiming to capture territory around the villages of Kakshar, Matiyal, Gultari and Karbos. Blue sector ran along a 160-kilometre stretch from Dras to Tithwal close to Muzafarabad. Orange sector covered the more politically sensitive area from Tithwal to Haj
ira directly east of Islamabad. White sector took in the final southerly stretch to the beginning of the LoC near Jammu.
To secure ground beyond the whole of the LoC would be too bold. The initial plan was to cordon off the area behind Kargil and Dras between Minimarg and Suru/Indus. A safe corridor was to be created in the Neelam Valley and the Haji Pir pass. Once that had been done, the third objective was territory west of Poonch up to Muzafarabad. Once heliborne troops had taken areas, they would be reinforced with a parachute drop from fixed-wing aircraft.
The first assaults were limited to the Yellow and Blue sectors, where most of the fighting had taken place in the battles over Kashmir and where Indians felt most vulnerable. An assault on the Red sector around the Siachen Glacier region of Ladakh would be pointless until the summer, and by then the dispute should be over. The southerly assault on the Orange and White sectors would be limited to artillery barrages. Unni Khrishnan was deterred from striking any harder there for fear that Pakistan would resort to threatening a nuclear strike. He hoped that there would be a ceasefire within forty-eight hours and that a deal could be reached on India’s terms.
The helicopters flew in formations of fifty, keeping to 135 k.p.h., contour flying along the valleys. With each formation was an Mi-26 workhorse, some carrying seventy combat-equipped troops, others up to twenty tonnes of ammunition, weapons, supplies and vehicles. Flanked out from the Mi-26s were the smaller Mi-17 medium transport helicopters. For this first sortie they were mainly carrying troops, with twenty-four in each aircraft. The more versatile assault and anti-armour Mi-25 kept to the outside of the formation, each with an eight-man Special Forces squad, which was to identify and neutralize those Pakistani positions which had survived the airstrikes and shelling.
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