Former Pakistan Presi-dent Pervez Musharraf admitted in an exclusive interview to this newspaper that “Kargil was a legacy of the years of warring with India”, but that of all of the leaders in Pakistan, he, “the soldier-president”, was the one who came closest to inking a peace deal with India; not with one but two Indian Prime Ministers — Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.
“The entire deal was ready — Siachen, Sir Creek, Kashmir — but for some reason Prime Minister Manmohan Singh failed to keep his date to visit Islamabad,” Mr Musharraf said.
Speaking from his plush penthouse apartment in Dubai, Pakistan’s most famous exile said when asked why he had conducted the Kargil infraction for which he had been “demonised” many times over: “You must remember I am a soldier, a battle-hardened soldier who fought the ’65 war, the ’71 war. I have soldierly feelings. I hated what happened in East Pakistan. We didn’t even open a front against India. Instead, we surrendered. And I wept.”
“And then what happened in Siachen? In 1986, I was director-general of military operations. I knew exactly what happened. Pakistan laid claim to a part of the glacier which, granted, was no-man’s land, which Indian forces then took over. Think of the effect on a soldier’s mind. Think of the circumstances, the whole complexity. Kargil did not take place in isolation. It was a tit for tat,” the former general said.
In retrospect, he said, “Kargil should be seen in that context, you could call it an aberration, but it was also because we felt very bad”, adding that once he became President, he moved quickly to make peace with India.
“I am a man of war but I am also a man of peace. It takes fighting wars to know the true value of peace. I lost my best friend Bilal in the ’71 war. He was shot dead when standing right next to me. My three-month-old son, who was supposed to be named Shehryar, was renamed Bilal in my friend’s honour,” Mr Musharraf said.