'Pak lost Kargil war because it misjudged India'

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan lost the Kargil conflict because it "misjudged" India's "ability and will" to fight back besides failing to factor the reaction of major powers which declined to support Islamabad and ended up backing New Delhi, a former Pakistan foreign official has said.

"The operation also misjudged the Indian ability and the will to fight back and had assumed that India would never retaliate with an all-out offensive against Pakistan," Former Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad has said.

"In other words, it (Pakistan) was not prepared for what Musharraf describes (in his book In the Line of Fire) the unreasonably escalated Indian response," Ahmad said in an article published in Dawn on Sunday.

In the first part of his article called 'The truth about the Kargil episode,' Ahmad, in a detailed account to Musharraf's book which sparked off war of words between the President and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said "the biggest flaw of the plan was that it had not catered for the global environment."

"Indeed, it was an aberration to the global environment, and the international reaction soon left no doubt about it. In the given situation, no political leadership or diplomatic strategy could have changed the global perception of the crisis or reversed the deteriorating situation on the ground," he said.

Ahmad also said that in whatever way one looks at the Kargil events, the episode did mark a "watershed in India-Pakistan relations."

Indirectly supporting Sharif, Ahmad said "the government did its utmost on the political and diplomatic fronts to counter the adverse reaction from the world community. But the world saw it as a Pakistan-sponsored deliberate act of intrusion of the internationally acknowledged line of control."

"The major powers, with all the latest satellite monitoring means, blamed us for the intrusion and were getting restless over the prospect of a wider conflict in a nuclearised region," he said.

"With this ominous global dimension, it was no longer an India-Pakistan affair. The major powers were worried and asked us to back off. Even our friends publicly urged the need for de-escalation of the crisis and prevention of a wider war," he said.

"By any standard of world diplomacy, it was a very difficult and unusual diplomatic war in which we tried to convince the world that there would be eruption of more Kargils if the Kashmir dispute was not urgently addressed through a just and fair settlement.

"Whatever we may say, the world remained more sympathetic to India's position. In the ultimate analysis, the political leadership did play an appropriate role in defusing the situation and averting the risk of a larger conflict."

Without directly referring to Musharraf's criticism of Sharif where he accused him of surrendering in the face of military victory, Ahmad said the perception that "military victory" was turned into a "political surrender" will never be sustained by history.