A second secret report on Kargil is said to have been submitted to the Prime Mi-nister, naming names and pinning responsibility on a number of people outside the intelligence community for India being caught flat-footed by Pakistan. If a second report did not exist it would have to be invented to explain the worrying gaps and imbalance in the published report of the Kargil Review Committee KRC, which concentrates its fire primarily on the intelligence agencies and avoids citing errors of judgment and inaction by the political executive and army. No one reading its report would suppose that the Vajpayee government does in fact bear overall responsibility for being taken totally by surprise by Pakistan’s “blatant invasion whose conceptual daring… was matched by its brazen deception”.

There is confusion about Pakistan’s objectives. What was “essentially a limited military exercise designed to internationalise the Kashmir issue” nevertheless gave the enemy important mi- litary gains, putting it “on the commanding heights above the strategic National Highway IA” and in a position to sever Leh from Srinagar. It is important to clarify Pakistani objectives in the context of the committee’s advice that the government move away “from a Maginot-Line, siege mentality of holding every inch of territory’ irrespective of strategic value… The alternative is to assert… that the sanctity of the LoC/border will be maintained… and aggression will be punished at a time and place of India’s choosing”. On the nuclear factor there is denial and didacticism. A tendentious narrative of decisions by previous governments serves as an apologia for nuclear miscalculations by the present one.

As for intelligence failures, intelligence gathering and assessment were poor and so were the demands from and supervision by the political executive and the National Security Council/Adviser. It has been a complaint as long as anyone can remember that Joint Intelligence Committee reports are scarcely read at senior political and bureaucratic levels. Nothing has changed.

The unsolved mystery is RAW’s semi-annual report in September 1998 which speaks of a possible swift strike by Pakistan. The army thought this piece of information was out of context and ignored it. Six months later RAW dropped the swift strike from its report. Stra-ngely, the KRC leaves it at that, not bothering to explain whether RAW’s first assessment was ba-sed on reliable inputs or not or why RAW fell silent later on. One is left to speculate about the one piece of information that came closest to foretelling subsequent events. Does RAW tend to tell politicians what they want to hear and therefore sanitised its second report which was submitted after Lahore? Was RAW’s own view blurred by dust from the bus ride? If a simpler explanation holds that the first RAW report was a shot in the dark the government’s concerns in the post-nuclear tests scenario will be redoubled; it should worry not only about getting too little information, it should worry about getting misleading information.

In the intelligence business, as in science, one is not likely to come up with good answers unless one starts with good hypotheses. The intelligence agencies evidently did not have them. Pakistani forays across the LoC in winter at points not held or monitored by Indian troops were considered improbable because the weather and terrain would punish intruders severely. The KRC says, however, the inroads might have been predicted in war games scenarios. This is an important insight. It suggests that a “militarily unsustainable” and “politically irrational” bid to “alter the LoC” and “internationalise the Kas-hmir issue” might in certain circumstances have been predicted. War ga-mes would offer one set of circumstances in which to hit upon the right answers; another would almost certainly be a rigorous analysis of the post-nuclear tests scenario. But when no one thought a fundamental change had occurred in the military balance, such hints as the build-up of ammunition dumps on the other side were taken tomean an increase in infiltration; no one could imagine anything more aggressive such as intrusions.

The KRC laments the state of security management, the lack of institutions for robust analyses, long-term planning, coordination with specialists on foreign policy, politics and so on. It is legitimate to ask in this context what assessments the Cabinet Committee on Defence, the still embryonic National Security Council and Army Headquarters made of the impact of Pokharan II and Chagai on Pakistan’s military and political leaders. Was it thought that the open declaration of nuclear weapons in both countries would lead to greater restraint and sobriety in Pakistan? Was the boast of a Pakistani general forgotten, the boast that Pakistan’s capacity for irrational behaviour would always keep India off-balance? Did the Vajpayee government’s belief that nuclear weapons made India more secure filter through the whole security establishment, making it incapable of imagining and therefore guarding against a politically and militarily irrational operation?

A chapter on the nuclear issue tries in a convoluted way to counter the perception in India and abroad that Pakistani aggression in Kashmir was encouraged by the nuclear tests in Po- kharan and Chagai. It goes to great lengths to support the claim that “nuclear deterrence was in place” already by 1990, meaning, both India and Pakistan had nuclear bombs by then. Therefore, the tests in 1998 were “not all that significant” in influencing decisions in Pakistan. But this attempt to deny any linkage between the tests and Kargil, part of the effort to exonerate the Vajpayee government of responsibility for Kargil, leads to another problem: nuclear deterrence will be seen to have tied India’s hands, denying it use of its conventional weapons superiority. To overcome this, former army chiefs are quoted saying that nuclear deterrence had nothing to do with it; co-unter-insurgency operations, including the involvement in Sri Lanka, are what prevented a pro-active response to Pakistan’s decade-old proxy war inKashmir. It is not convincing.

Try as it might, the KRC does not succeed in banishing doubts about the effect of Pokharan on Pakistan’s political and military calculations and plans made in November 1998 to cross the LoC.