First, prior to our research, it was widely believed that mujahideen, or
civilian “freedom fighters” involved in a Muslim war or struggle, played
a significant part in the Kargil intrusion – a falsehood caused by the initial
confusion of India’s civilian and military intelligence services, a carefully
planned Pakistani denial and deception campaign, and opportunistic
Islamic militant groups. The Indian Kargil Review Committee, which
was highly dubious about the role of militants in the conflict, still concluded
that “the regular/irregular ratio may well have been in the range of
70:30, if the overall numbers are taken into account.”17 Our interviews
with Pakistani and Indian ground commanders revealed that local civilians
played only minimal reconnaissance and logistical roles in the operation.
In fact, numerous Pakistani officers and soldiers told us they did not
encounter a single civilian combatant during the conflict.
Eight years after the event, Pakistan still officially maintains that freedom
fighters and not the Northern Light Infantry conducted the cross-
LoC intrusion. Former President Musharraf states in his 2006 memoir
that the “freedom fighting mujahideen occupied the Kargil Heights that
the Indian army had vacated for the winter.”18 Three reasons can be
offered to explain why Pakistan concocted the mujahideen cover and why
it maintains this façade even today. First, until the Kargil operation, the
Pakistan army did not consider the Northern Light Infantry at par with
regular troops. Being locals of the area, most NLI soldiers came from
villages near the LoC, which even today do not have the legal status as
being a full part of the Pakistan nation-state. Therefore, it was easy for
government officials to refer to these soldiers as freedom fighters as
opposed to regular army troops.
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/67217/excerpt/9780521767217_excerpt.pdf
The whole world knows about Pakistani so called 'freedom fighter' lies during Kargil
This still begs the question as to why Pakistan maintained the façade
after NLI soldiers had been captured and proof of their involvement was
abundant. As strange as itmay seem, the reason rests largely in the legality
of the position. The Pakistan government concluded that it could not have
admitted occupation by Pakistani troops across the LoC because the area
was demarcated under the 1972 Simla Accord and covered under the
1949 Karachi Agreement, and Pakistan’s admittance of the cross-LoC
operation was judged in Islamabad to be tantamount to admitting aggression.
The legal context differed significantly from that of India’s 1984
Siachen military occupation, which India had been able to justify because
Siachen was a contested area that was not demarcated with the rest of the
LoC. To the Pakistanis, however, Siachen violated the Simla Accord, as
pointed out in chapter 2 by Zafar Iqbal Cheema. Although Siachen was
still amajor Pakistani grievance, Pakistan’s Foreign Office believed that an
admission of regular troops crossing the defined LoC would be difficult to
justify internationally. In its assessment, continuation of the mujahideen
story, along with a narrative that defensive positions were improved,
would preserve some degree of plausible deniability.20
19
Pakistan’s perpetuation of the mujahideen deception may have provided
a thin veneer of legal deniability and a face-saving formula,
but in the end
it severely damaged Pakistan’s credibility both inside and outside South
Asia, as C. Christine Fair discusses in chapter 9. It also altered the standing
of Kashmir insurgency.
Instead of being regarded internationally as a
“freedom struggle,” the Kashmir insurgency came to be seen after Kargil
(and especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States) as
“terrorist” activity. If Pakistan had hoped the Kargil operation would
stimulate international focus on the Kashmir issue, this was not the
intended result.
