Pakistan’s nuke tipped missiles ready to be launched in Kargil towards India – history can repeat any time
Preetam Sohani
Jun. 21, 2005

When Pakistan realized that they couldn’t stop India in Kargil, they thought India will cross Line of Actual Control and push towards taking the rest of Pakistani Kashmir. Without informing the Pakistani Government, General Musharraf asked the Pakistani Military to make nuclear tipped missile ready to be launched towards India especially its military infrastructures in Kashmir.

Experts say, the same can repeat any time. That is why India should proceed towards creating the effective shield against Pakistan.

According to Press trust of India, Pakistan's military had prepared a nuclear-tipped missile to fight back a possible Indian attack during the Kargil crisis and former US president Bill Clinton had conveyed this news to the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who was taken "aback" by the revelation, a new book has said.

At the July 4, 1999 meeting between Clinton and Sharif, the American president had asked the Pakistani leader if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was.

"Did Sharif know his military was preparing their nuclear-tipped missiles? Sharif seemed taken aback and said only that India was probably doing the same," the book said, according to the Dawn daily.

In the book, "Pakistan between mosque and military" by Pakistani author Husain Haqqani, Bruce Riedel, special assistant to President Clinton, who was present at the meeting, is quoted as saying that "the President reminded Sharif how close the US and Soviet Union had come to a nuclear conflict in 1962 over Cuba".

"Did Sharif realize that if even one bomb was dropped - Sharif finished his sentence and said it would be a catastrophe," Haqqani's forthcoming book, to be published shortly in the US by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.

Riedel, a senior director of near East and South Asian affairs at the National security Council in the Clinton era, said Sharif "wanted desperately" to find a solution that would allow Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil "with some cover".

Going back to the meeting, Riedel said: "Was that what Sharif wanted, Clinton asked? Did Sharif order Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action? Did he realize how crazy that was? You have put me in the middle today, set the US to fail and I won''t let it happen. Pakistan is messing with nuclear war."

At the end of the meeting, Sharif agreed to announce a Pakistani withdrawal from Kargil and restoration of the sanctity of LoC in return for Clinton taking a personal interest in resumption of India-Pakistan dialogue, the book said.

Haqqani has spoken to a number of senior US officials who dealt with Pakistan during major crises confronting the country during the last 58 years and includes their description of crises like the 1971 disaster and the Kargil war in his book.

"Without something to point to, Sharif warned ominously, the fundamentalists in Pakistan would move against him and this meeting would be his last with Clinton," the book said.

According to Riedel, during the same meeting Clinton also raised the issue of Pakistan's reluctance to help the US catch Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders.

"The President was getting angry. He told Sharif that he had asked repeatedly for Pakistani help to bring Osama Bin Laden to Justice from Afghanistan. Sharif had promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI worked with Bin laden and the Taliban to foment terrorism."

Riedel recalled that Clinton's draft statement on the Kargil crisis also mentioned Pakistan's role in supporting terrorists in Afghanistan and India.

According to the Daily Times the book also revealed that it was the ISI that suggested to former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1976 that he should hold early elections and renew his mandate.

The April 1976 paper urging early elections was followed in October by another one from Lt. Gen Ghulam Jilani Khan, head of ISI, that spoke of the Prime Minister in "glowing terms" the book said.

The author writes, "The ISI's keenness in advising Bhutto to go to the polls is significant in light of subsequent events... General Zia-ul-Haq... Kept the ISI's role in planning Bhutto's election strategy a secret. Bhutto hinted at the possibility of having been trapped in a conspiracy by the military and intelligence services."

The conspiracy, if it existed, would have begun with the ISI proposal for an election, advanced though Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) agitation against the fairness of the election, and finished up with the overthrow of Bhutto in the July 1977 military coup d''etat, the book said.

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