The Kargil War: India and Pakistan 20 Years Later

In February 2019, the threat of war in South Asia appeared imminent for the first time in over a decade. For the first time since 1971, India and Pakistan traded cross-border airstrikes; they also engaged in conventional clashes not seen since the 1999 Kargil War.

The latest crisis was triggered by a vehicle-borne IED attack on a convoy of paramilitary forces in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir. India attributed the terrorist attack to the Pakistan-based group Jaish e-Mohammad (JeM) and on February 26, claimed to successfully conduct airstrikes on a JeM training camp in Pakistani territory around Balakot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The next day, Pakistan’s air force conducted a retaliatory strike across the Line of Control (LoC) that resulted in an air battle, with the downing of an Indian fighter jet and the capture of an Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot.

Exact details are still lost in the fog of crisis and several questions remain: How much of the Pulwama terrorist strike was planned out of Pakistan? What operational and intelligence security failures allowed India to fall prey to the attack in one of its most heavily guarded regions? What did India actually hit at Balakot and how long did they manage to fly in Pakistan airspace undetected? What was the intended target of Pakistan’s retaliatory strike and did it lose an F-16 in the process?

While the speedy return of the captured IAF pilot opened a path to de-escalation, Balakot became the latest addition to a growing list of India-Pakistan crises. The Balakot attack occurred in the lead-up to the Indian general elections, and at a time of growing uncertainty over how the two countries and the international community would react to escalation on the subcontinent. It also served as a timely reminder of instability in South Asia and the dangers of India and Pakistan’s tenuous relationship.

Poignantly, May marks the 20th anniversary of the Kargil War – the first actual hot war between nuclear powers – in which India and Pakistan fought each other for nearly three months in the Kargil Sector of the disputed Kashmir territory. This latest clash underscores the importance of closely reviewing what happened at Kargil in order to better understand and anticipate the contours of strategy and escalation in future India-Pakistan conflicts.

The 1999 Kargil War

Less than a year after India and Pakistan tested their nuclear weapons in 1998, the two countries fought a war in Indian-administered Kashmir that many observers feared would lead to nuclear escalation. For three months, the Indian Army engaged Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry (NLI), which had crossed the LOC to occupy posts near the town of Kargil. The conflict came to a close in late July 1999 after both sides lost hundreds of soldiers, and the Pakistani paramilitary troops had been pushed back into Pakistan.

The origins of Kargil can be traced to previous Pakistani attempts to take Indian territory in the area. In 1965, Pakistan made a similar land-grabbing infiltration into Kashmir named “Operation Gibraltar,” aimed at fomenting insurgency in Kashmir. In 1984, India seized the Siachen Glacier, and over the next decade and a half, the two countries worked to harden their tactical positions along the LOC. For Pakistan, Kargil was an opportunity to even the score on the embarrassing Siachen episode and to interdict Indian logistics and supply routes in Kashmir by capturing a critical node.

In January 1999 the leadership of Pakistan’s 10 Corps, responsible for the military’s Kashmir operations, requested permission to send NLI troops to occupy positions along the LOC (though some argue mobilization began prior to the onset of winter in October 1998). During the winter months, Indian forces typically retreated to locations with better conditions, leaving gaps in their LOC positions. The NLI troops successfully exploited many of these gaps, establishing surveillance and firing outposts while remaining largely undetected by Indian intelligence. These early NLI incursions paved the way for the Kargil conflict by challenging the status quo and capturing territory by fait accompli. Continuing to use the element of surprise to their advantage, Pakistani planners ordered more troops to infiltrate and take up tactical positions, mostly under the cover of night.

It was only in May 1999 that Indian officials recognized the severity of the infiltration. The initial Indian response to the incursion was delayed due to intelligence failures, a lack of preparedness, and the difficulty of the terrain. After a slow mobilization of forces, a request for air support was granted in late May and Indian troops began slowly pushing the Pakistani infiltrators back over the LOC. Two Indian air force planes and one helicopter were shot down in the first air offensive against Pakistan since the 1971 war.

Attribution played a significant role in the conflict. The fighting occurred in a mountainous and rugged area of Kashmir along the LOC, making it difficult for Indian military and intelligence operators in the area to determine who had infiltrated and when. At first, the international community, Indian authorities, and the publics in both countries believed that Kashmiri militants from Pakistan had crossed the LOC. Both countries had incentives to keep this mujahideen story going; labelling the Pakistani aggression as an insurgent effort rather than a deliberate act of war allowed for an easier path to de-escalation.

The conflict was forced to an end after three months of slow fighting, major Pakistani battlefield losses, and pressure from the United States. In July 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton met Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Washington, D.C. and demanded that Pakistani troops return to their pre-Kargil positions. According to some sources, Clinton leveraged U.S. evidence that Pakistan was readying its nuclear arsenal, which surprised Sharif, in order to pressure him into a commitment of withdrawal. (To this day, that evidence remains heavily contested.) Sharif committed to withdrawal and the conflict soon de-escalated, with no Indian incursions into Pakistani territory. By the end of July, the two nuclear powers managed to return to their status quo positions along the LOC.

The Consequences of Kargil

The Kargil conflict produced several domestic, regional, and geopolitical consequences of note.

At the domestic level, Kargil had a major effect on politics in Pakistan and a more subtle one in India. In Pakistan, the military was lionized for tactical successes, while Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was hounded for his decision to prematurely back down in response to U.S. pressure. This sentiment likely played a role in the domestic political shakeup that eventually led to General Pervez Musharraf’s military coup a few months later in October 1999.

Despite successfully weathering the Kargil conflict and emerging victorious, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India did not reap any electoral rewards and actually lost some points in its vote share. Nevertheless, some argue that Kargil propelled the subject of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian national consciousness, Hindu chauvinist discourse, and even communal clashes. Because India was taken by surprise in the Kargil episode – which some have referred to as “India’s Pearl Harbor” – several Indian national security agencies were skewered for their failures. The government-appointed Kargil Review Committee recommended significant organizational changes to improve intelligence, border management, military readiness, adequate equipment provision, and most importantly, national security systems and culture. Some changes were implemented but several have been stymied by political or bureaucratic inertia.

At the regional level, there were three clear impacts of Kargil on the conventional balance. First, it fully confirmed that a conventional asymmetry that had existed for at least 30 years would endure under the nuclear umbrella. Despite the lag in India’s response to the Pakistani incursions, India established its conventional superiority during the conflict, demonstrating that it could repulse Pakistan’s efforts to seize a portion of Kashmir by force, even with strategic or tactical surprise in Islamabad’s favor. India chose not to fend off Pakistan’s gambit through punishment or escalation dominance and instead gradually evicted the limited incursion to deny a fait accompli. Despite high costs, India was able to dislodge Pakistan from its positions through application of substantial manpower and superior firepower including howitzers, rocket launchers, helicopter gunships, and fighter-bombers. Put simply, even with the element of surprise, Pakistan military offensives could not apply enough pressure to drag India to the negotiating table, and after this, Pakistan – which had initiated three wars with India in 50 years – had to finally give up the idea that it would ever be able to redraw territorial boundaries through conventional force. 

Second, the conflict demonstrated that nuclear weapons – regardless of their role in conflict initiation – could potentially restrain or deter certain types of escalation. In contrast to prior wars, neither India nor Pakistan chose to escalate horizontally or vertically for fear of what that escalation might yield. In the 1965 war, Pakistan tried to bail out a failed surprise infiltration with a conventional operation, but after its 1999 action ended in a stalemate, it had no stomach for the risks that came with conventional escalation. Similarly, despite something of a modicum of conventional parity, India demonstrated its resolve to horizontally escalate and open a second front across the international border in the 1965 war. Despite its conventional superiority, New Delhi restrained itself from a cross-border ground offensive in 1999, with its aircraft studiously avoiding crossing the LOC – despite the costs incurred in both time and lives.

Third, the conflict taking place so soon after both countries became overt nuclear powers after their 1998 tests may have prompted what some term “nuclear learning.” After Kargil, both countries sought to think more seriously and deliberately about their nuclear posture, strategy, and organizational structures. India released its draft nuclear doctrine a month after Kargil in August 1999 while Pakistan formed the National Command Authority in February 2000 to oversee command and control of its nuclear arsenal.

Finally, at the international level, Kargil initiated two important dynamics. First, the conflict provided Pakistan a taste of greater isolation and quasi-pariah status. Most countries perceived Pakistan as the aggressor, focusing their attention on the nuclear risks it was courting rather than the plight of Kashmiris it was highlighting. No major powers came to Pakistan’s support; its isolation, which began when nonproliferation sanctions were imposed in 1990 and intensified after the 1998 nuclear test, only deepened. Even its all-weather friend, China, which had offered diplomatic support in 1965 and 1971, took a position of neutrality that benefited India, offered only its sympathies, and placed the onus of de-escalation on Pakistan. Second, Kargil may have also provided the impetus for the American tilt from neutrality in South Asia toward an alignment with India to pursue its balance of power interests in Asia.

Lessons and Implications

One major lesson drawn from the Kargil episode was the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation and the risky behavior of new nuclear powers.

In contrast to the narrative that nuclear weapons had afforded the Cold War some stability, in the aftermath of Kargil, scholars and policymakers began to coalesce around the idea that nuclear weapons would produce more instability on the subcontinent rather than neutralizing the potential for war between arch-rivals. If nuclear weapons encouraged more conflict between India and Pakistan, it raised the danger of actual nuclear use.

One line of argument contended that as both countries achieved a level of strategic parity or stability at the nuclear level, this would create perverse incentives to aggress or instigate conflict at lower levels – whether conventional or subconventional – under the nuclear shadow, knowing full well that the other would fear retaliation that could escalate into nuclear use.

A related argument posited that nuclear weapons had a uniquely destabilizing effect when acquired by weaker, revisionist states dissatisfied with the status quo. In these cases, acquirers of nuclear weapons would be emboldened to engage in risky aggression with impunity behind a shield of nuclear weapons. Pakistan has been described as a revisionist state because of its territorial and positional dissatisfaction revealed in its initiation of the 1947, 1965, and 1999 wars to recapture parts of the disputed Kashmir territory. The fact that Pakistan was willing to instigate the Kargil war against a much stronger Indian adversary just one year after it tested nuclear weapons provided compelling evidence of such nuclear emboldenment.

Many scholars and policymakers have forged something of a consensus on the emboldening effects of nuclear acquisition, a position that has intensified nonproliferation efforts against revisionist countries like Iran and North Korea that seek to obtain nuclear weapons. The risk of nuclear emboldenment has also motivated efforts to constrain the growth and expansion of Pakistan’s and North Korea’s arsenals because of their expected destabilizing effects. In all of these cases, policymakers often reference Kargil as the cautionary tale that proves the rule of emboldenment.

In the past decade, however, substantial evidence has emerged that discredits the Kargil conflict as a “smoking gun” for the emboldenment argument. Several scholars have suggested that the decision-making for and around Kargil was overdetermined by personalities at the helm of the Pakistan military as well as pathologies of Pakistan’s strategic assessment.

First, the personality of Musharraf himself shaped the operation. The much-respected Jehangir Karamat had been surprisingly dismissed as chief of the army staff (COAS) and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif elevated Musharraf to the post over several more senior officers because he was perceived to be a supplicant. Musharraf, who long harbored a desire for such an operation, is believed to have initiated Kargil within weeks of his new posting. In considering one counterfactual, if Karamat had stayed at the helm of the Army, he would likely have not authorized the incursions. Furthermore, if Musharraf had ascended to the head of the Army before 1998, he likely would have launched Kargil anyway without the benefit of nuclear weapons.

Second, several studies have revealed the military suffered from grave dysfunction in the planning process.This included siloed decision-making, a narrow cabal of planners, a lack of any serious red-team assessment, and a lack of good analytical input about domestic and international political and military responses.

Furthermore, a deep dive into the thinking of the Pakistan strategic command suggests that the condition of nuclear weapons did not play into the thinking behind Kargil. The operation had been essentially conceived of almost a decade before as a response to India’s capture of Siachen, and seizing emptied posts adhered to the traditional “finders, keepers” rule of the LOC. That the operation engaged in mission creep and expanded to provocative levels has been attributed to it being a victim of its own success. Evidence of Pakistan’s mobilization of nuclear weapons during the war has withered under much scrutiny, but as described earlier, there is also evidence to suggest nuclear weapons may have inhibited further escalation.

Nevertheless, what is concerning is that Pakistan’s leaders did not appreciate the new world they had entered into with the country’s newfound nuclear weapons. This new evidence does not absolve Pakistan of the risks it incurred during the conflict, but respecifies the source of risk from the nuclear weapons themselves to the strategic assessment and decision-making process that enabled false optimism in war.

Conclusion: Comparing Balakot to Kargil

The contemporary relevance of Kargil cannot be lost. Twenty years after India and Pakistan came to the brink, they did so again during Balakot, with similarities and differences that should raise concerns. Balakot bears a resemblance to Kargil in the role played by irregular assets, intelligence failures, and poor strategic assessment, but it diverges in the courting of purposeful escalation, absent third parties, and the fog of disinformation.

The parallels are noteworthy. First, whether the Pulwama attack was centrally planned or conducted by local agents, it revealed the Pakistani security establishment’s continued reliance on irregular capabilities and militants as a tactical asset or a hedge, and its continued underestimation of the reputational and strategic costs it pays for its support of terrorist organizations. Second, 20 years after the Kargil Review Committee, there have still not been sufficient improvements in Indian security to prevent conflict. Few paid attention to the intelligence and operational security lapses that allowed a Kashmiri teenager to drive a vehicle-borne IED into a convoy of paramilitary forces. Finally, persistent deficiencies in strategic assessment propel risky actions and destabilizing outcomes. This time, India displayed poor strategic coordination and structural competence, substantially overestimating their own capability, underestimating their adversary’s resolve, and discounting the fog and friction inherent in war.

Balakot’s notable divergences from Kargil should add more cause for concern than calm. While in Kargil both sides were hesitant to escalate – with India carefully avoiding crossing the LOC, and Pakistan not seeking greater conventional reinforcements or horizontal expansion – in Balakot, it appears both sides hazarded the risks of escalation less as a military strategy and more as a means of satisfying domestic audiences. The Indian government conducted airstrikes in Pakistan’s sovereign territory during an election period; while these airstrikes may not have hit anything, they likely bolstered the incumbent’s chances of victory. Pakistan aso conducted retaliatory strikes on empty Indian terrain without a clear mission objective except to bolster its military’s image and flex its air power capabilities for its own public.

The United States and international community exerted a heavy hand in winding down the Kargil crisis, but the relative absence of the international community in the Balakot affair suggests third-party crisis management may be absent because the great powers are disinterested, distracted, or kept at bay by India and Pakistan. Balakot showcased more evidence of good luck than successful bilateral de-escalation mechanisms. Pakistan effectively used the return of a captured IAF pilot as a gesture of magnanimity and a means of de-escalation, but the Indians did not appear to have satisfied their war aims after February 27. India exposed Pakistan’s air defenses but struck a target of questionable value, lost a fighter plane, and shot down their own transport helicopter, killing six soldiers and a civilian with an errant air defense missile. Had the pilot been killed in Pakistan’s custody, or ejected on the Indian side of the LOC, arguably India would have climbed the escalation ladder even further.

Finally, the fog of disinformation was thick throughout the conflict, and weeks later the details are still largely unclear. The ambiguity of what actually transpired (in terms of damage assessments) may have bolstered crisis stability because it allowed both sides to climb down while clinging to their own narratives of victory. Nevertheless, it may enhance deterrence instability in the long run if both sides think they prevailed and can do so again if they just escalate.