There can be no dispute with Benjamin Lambeth, who authored the report when he points out that the IAF had not trained extensively for combat operations in the extraordinary altitudes of Kargil-Dras sector. The American scholar has no disagreement with the Indian claim that the IAF pilots met the challenge squarely even as the targets were hard to spot. The pilots creatively used air strikes to launch avalanches or rock slides to block Pakistani supply lines. By leveraging advances in navigation, surveillance, and targeting technology, India forced a Pakistani retreat.
Lambeth attributes much of India’s success in defeating Pakistan without provoking escalation to Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee’s directive not to cross the Kashmiri Line of Control. Pakistan was deterred from opening up additional fronts, according to him, is the fact that the significant asymmetry of conventional power favoured India at the time. He also credits IAF’s far-superior numbers with dissuading its Pakistani counterparts from any attempt to challenge its air superiority.
In his foreword, the old South Asia hand at the Carnegie, Ashley Tellis, makes the point that the Kargil conflict demonstrated the relevance and effectiveness of air power ‘even in the utterly demanding context of mountain warfare at high altitudes’. He offers justification for the study fourteen years after the Kargil war ´At a time when India is compelled to think seriously about the security challenges posed by China’s continuing military modernization—especially as it affects India’s ability to protect its equities along the formidable Himalayan borderlands—a critical assessment of the IAF’s contributions to the Kargil conflict is essential and in fact long overdue’.
There have been various analyses of the Kargil war that Pakistan inflicted on India in 1999. Ashley Tellis terms them as not full-fledged, partial in his words, though he agrees that ‘they are indispensable’. The combat capabilities above the mountain battlefields, constituted only the visible tip of the spear, he remarks and argues ‘a vast and often invisible system of organization and support involving everything from managing intra-theatre airlift to redeploying combat squadrons to planning and coordinating operations to improvising technical fixes amidst the pressure of combat were all implicated in airpower’s contribution to the Kargil War.
Now Lambeth’s monograph tells the reader the Kargil story ‘in depth’ and ‘with comprehensiveness and balance’ that was ‘never before told’. It sheds light on an important episode in Indian military history and its lessons have implications for managing the more demanding threats that India is confronted with in the Himalayas, according to Ashley Tellis.
Even a casual reading of the monograph shows that it is a serious scholarly effort marked by meticulousness research and by political detachment. He makes one interesting observation quite early in his study. “All things considered, the conflict was a poor test of India’s air warfare capability. Despite the happy ending of the Kargil experience for India, the IAF’s fighter pilots were restricted in their operations due to myriad challenges specific to this campaign. They were thus consigned to do what they could rather than what they might have done if they had more room for manoeuvre”. Well said.
Writing under the heading “Kargil and Today’s Threats” Benjamin Lambeth addresses the ‘still-unanswered question’: Does the Kargil experience offer an instructive prototype for the most probable near-term threats that may face the IAF along India’s borders with Pakistan and China in the decade ahead. He believes it does. He acknowledges that the Kargil War was the first serious border conflict of sustained duration between two nuclear armed antagonists that ended with a clear winner and loser at the conventional level.
What went wrong for Pakistan, which made the assault on Kargil? “Pakistan’s military leaders miscalculated badly in their apparent belief that the international community would press immediately for a cease-fire in Kashmir out of concern over a possible escalation of the fighting to the nuclear level, with the net result that Pakistan would be left with an easily acquired new slice of terrain on the Indian side of the LoC”.
Since the Vajpayee government scrupulously kept its combat operations confined to Indian controlled Kashmir, the international community had no compelling reason to intervene.
Pakistan also believed that India would not counter the provocation with an all-out conventional response that would risk either escalation or ending in a costly stalemate.
This assumption also proved unfounded.
The author goes on to say: “ …for Pakistan’s leaders, the unexpected—and unexpectedly sharp and intense—response that their provocation prompted from the Indian Army and IAF should make them think twice about the limits of their nuclear deterrent. More to the point, it should have had a tempering influence on their initial presumptions about the extent to which merely having a credible nuclear attack capability in and of itself empowered them to try conventional acts of territorial acquisition with impunity. To that extent, it should have instilled as well a healthy once-burned, twice-shy mindset among those leaders and their successors who might be tempted to undertake a reprise of that gambit some day in the future—particularly in light of the persistent regional imbalance of conventional airpower in India’s pronounced favour…”
The Kargil experience also suggested that if China and Pakistan came to appreciate that India possessed an overwhelming conventional force preponderance in the region, that presence could act as a deterrent against such provocations in the future, as the Carnegie monograph concludes.
