ABSTRACT
We observed in the preceding chapter that the Pakistani desire to internationalize the Kashmir dispute-that is (as Pakistanis understand the term) to offset India’s natural advantages in any bilateral diplomatic setting by securing an increase in international involvement-has been tagged by many observers as perhaps the key motive behind Pakistan’s Kargil project. After all, the argument goes, Pakistan’s repeated appeals for international support of its position on Kashmir had failed to make any headway in the decade of the 1990s in spite of a popular uprising of Kashmiri Muslims against Indian rule. The Pakistan government had finally decided to gamble that a major flare-up in fighting in Kashmir would trigger prompt intervention by an international community growing increasingly uneasy over the South Asian region’s steady slide toward nuclear weaponization. According to this view, the Pakistanis expected not only that internationalization would occur but that, yoked to world nuclear anxieties, it would work in Pakistan’s favor by pushing recalcitrant Indians to accept serious negotiation of the Kashmir territorial dispute. This formulation of the Kargil operation describes Pakistan’s objective as political rather than military. It implies that the abrupt vacating of Indian-occupied territory by Pakistani forces was no reason for shame. I noted in the earlier discussion my view that this argument reeked of alibi or rationalization-that its assertion, at least when made by Pakistani officials, was an effort to camouflage an outcome that bore the hallmarks of a military and diplomatic fiasco. In the face of virtually inevitable bewilderment, disap-
pointment, humiliation, and anger among Pakistan’s cognoscenti and within its armed forces about the government’s sudden about-face on the Kargil operation in early July, the “object-was-internationalization” spin on events had obvious practical utility.1
