With Pakistan about to set up an interim civilian government in preparation for a new general election, there will certainly be a freeze in any initiative from New Delhi on the western front. In so far as the world is concerned, the issue in Pakistan is not the election itself, but whether the civilian government, always at the edge, will survive and the terror factories operating in the country shut down. In this context the revelation by a Pakistan army officer that the Kargil War was planned and executed by the Pakistan military under General Pervez Musharraf who then was the army commander, is a timely reminder to both Pakistan and India (and to the world) of the key role that the military plays in the political affairs of our western neighbour. The revelation is in so detail that there is little doubt that it is more or less an authentic version of what happened in 1999. The army officer, now retired, who has parted the curtain over the Kargil War has shown how badly the campaign was planned and executed and under what illusion that the Pakistan army’s top commanders tried their hand at taking India by surprise. Once again the army was using the thinly veiled ‘mujahideen’ as the true soldiers who participated and (died like flies) at the LoC front in Kashmir, while in fact they were all army men. This was what Pakistan tried in 1947, then again in 1965 and both times the stratagem got exposed once the Indian army moved in. Within days of the expose on Kargil, yet another army officer has come out with the version that Musharraf indeed had crossed into Indian territory, as deep as 11 km, and stayed a night with his troops that he had pushed across the LoC into Indian territory. Once the Indian army hit back and began to retake the elevated positions that Pakistani men occupied, both the civilian government and the army generals that side of the border became extremely concerned. Nawaz Sharif, the then prime minister of Pakistan, had to seek intervention both by Washington and by Beijing in turn to mount a face saving device but our Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee remained firm like a ramrod. This led US President Bill Clinton to advise Sharif to announce unilateral withdrawal of his army from Kargil; Beijing also refused to pull Pakistani chestnuts out of the Kargil fire and finally the truth dawned on Islamabad that India is not a overhanging fruit ready to be plucked. Why did Musharraf and the Pakistani establishment stage the Kargil that proved to be a costly misadventure for them? It was because the army was intent on disrupting the peace between the two nations for which Atal Bihari Vajpayee took the courageous and well-thought out lead. The Bus to Lahore diplomacy by Vajpayee was meant to harvest long-term peace with Pakistan despite India speaking from a position of undeniable strength. Atalji hit the central point of what Pakistani rulers had been for decades seeking to feed their people on — that India was not reconciled to Partition and was all the time planning to create a single nation out of the subcontinent and therefore Pakistan should make war against India as its strategic objective at all times. This suited the military. Several Pakistani commentators, like Husain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between the Mosque and the Military and Irfan Husain’s Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West, have revealed that hate India became the central point of Pakistan’s existence. Husain, a great scholar, though he served in Pakistan’s diplomatic cadre, has been able to apply the clinical neutrality of an academic in his writings. Irfan traces the ‘emergence of Pakistan in 1947, and the anti-Hindu, anti-India, posture it has adopted’ to the ‘violent events of 1857 and later’. The British in the early colonial period after 1857, he says, adopted a strong anti-Muslim posture and suppressed them. Husain places this in the historical context when the wide ranging Islamic empires were displaced in the emerging sweep of Christian West. Irfan does not mince his words when he says, ‘From its very creation, Pakistan has been obsessed with the perceived threat from India; indeed, most of its internal and external policies can be understood only in this context.’ For those who want to understand what is happening now in Pakistan, Irfan Husain’s book is of great value. It is American aid to Pakistan of $1.5 billion for the security forces there and much more in economic aid that keeps Pakistan afloat. Yet there is active hostility towards the same US fed by the right wing extremism and fundamentalist organisations that strut about that country and are both useful and hostile to the military. Husain admits that ‘people are not willing to take a hard look at the mushroom growth of the madrasas where little more than Islamic texts are taught or the steady march of the hard-line Wahabi version of Islam….’ The author also refers to the love-hate relationship between the military and the hard-line mullahs. We in India are refusing to learn any lessons from the developments in Pakistan. Blinded by vote-bank politics, most Indian politicians practice perverse ‘secularism’ and promote radical and fundamentalist leadership among Muslims. In case of Pakistan, can our policy-makers seriously believe that velvet gloves could win over the civilian population or at least part of it in seeking to wean the Islamic republic away from a hate-India led national endeavour? Pakistan’s military certainly is waiting for the Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan next summer. It hopes that it could once again have Afghanistan as its defence-in-depth from where it could build and operate the terrorist outfits that could harass India and the West. The Pakistani military gains thus could be the world’s disaster. After all, despite three specific wars and the fourth one in Kargil, failing to deliver India to Pakistan, the anti-India dream in public perception in Pakistan has not dimmed. Prudence warns that we have to be extra vigilant against terror being sponsored from across the border. New Delhi should not chase mirages like Pakistan delivering LeT leader Hafiz Saeed to India on a platter because what he is pursuing there is what generations in that country are being taught to believe in. There could be other Musharrafs popping up and more Kargils the moment a substantial peace move succeeds.