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| Officers question NDA Govt not allowing LoC crossing in Kargil | | | NEW DELHI, Two former officers who had commanded forces during the Kargil conflict have questioned the then NDA Government’s decision not to allow armed forces to cross the Line of Control (LoC) and said it had resulted in considerable losses and operational problems.
Lt Gen (retd) Mohinder Puri, then General Officer Commanding of 8th Mountain Division, and Air Marshal (retd) Narayan Menon, then Air Officer Commanding of Jammu and Kashmir, said the decision led to "strategic and tactical losses" for the Army and "considerable problems" for the IAF.
In separate articles on the 1999 conflict in the forthcoming issue of Indian Defence Review, the two officers said while the Army lost the option of conflict termination in an earlier timeframe and taking large number of prisoners of war by encircling them, the caveat of not crossing the LoC under any circumstances restricted the attack profiles of fighter aircraft.
Asking whether it was correct to politically lay down stringent restrictions of not crossing the LoC, Puri said "While we may have earned some brownie points, but strategically and tactically we lost more than we gained.
"By accepting, under international pressure to restrict operations to our side of the LoC, we have willy-nilly given de facto recognition to the LoC as the international border. Statements made by political leaders that there will be no redrawing of borders merely reinforces this hypothesis," said the officer who was given charge of the volatile Drass sector.
Puri said "Tactically, by not crossing the LoC we closed our options of conflict termination in an earlier timeframe and perhaps lost the opportunity to take a large number of prisoners who would have got entrapped by our encirclement".
This led to prolonging the operations and suffering avoidable casualties while recovering territory by evicting the enemy from the dominating heights of Kargil, he said.
By the time ceasefire was declared, "we had the enemy on the run, but by accepting it we offered them the easy route to withdraw to their country".
"As expected, the enemy did not respect the terms of the ceasefire and planted anti-personnel mines along their route of withdrawal: a route along which we had to move to clear the area upto the LoC," Puri said, adding the army suffered a large number of casualties due to such move which reflected the "unsoldierly qualities of the Pak Army".
In his article, Menon said he had received on May 25, 1999, "the codeword to commence offensive operations from the next day" but with a caveat that under no circumstances should any aircraft cross the LoC.
"Given that the known intruded area was about 140 km along the LoC with depths varying between one to eight km, the constraint of not crossing the LoC posed considerable problems, the most severe being the restrictions on attack profiles of fighter aircraft," he said.
Maintaining that fighters had to carry out manoeuvres like diving and pull out at high speeds to attack targets, thereby requiring a lot of airspace, Menon said, "Many of our missions had to be revised in consultation with army representatives who provided target coordinates and exact location of our own troops in the targets’ vicinity".
The former IAF officer also criticised the Army for its "inexplicable reluctance" in sharing intelligence, while army officer Puri blamed "total mismatch" of air photos with maps due to difference in scales.
Referring to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s book "In the Line of Fire", Puri said many of his contentions needed to be contested.
In particular, he challenged Musharraf’s statement that India had prepared for an attack since 1998 and that the Kargil operations were defensive by nature.
"If such was the case, we would not have been surprised by the intrusions and would have been adequately prepared to respond to Pak’s military designs. Except initially, at no stage did the Pak Army have the upper hand against us," Puri asserted. |
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