On Most Vital Research

T.
NEGEEN PEGAHI
Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons and the Kargil Conflict

Reassessing Their Role in the Two Sides’ Decision-Making
ABSTRACT
It is widely believed that Pakistan’s newly demonstrated nuclear weapons
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capability emboldened that country to launch what became the Kargil conflict
of 1999 and correspondingly restrained India in responding to the attack. This
article argues, however, that decision-making on both sides was driven by
non-nuclear factors.
K E Y W O R D S : India, Pakistan, Kargil, nuclear, emboldenment
IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY 1999, Indian shepherds noticed intruders high in
the Himalayan mountains along the Kargil sector of the Line of Control that
divides the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Paki-
stan. After a slow and disorganized initial effort to determine the number,
identity, and disposition of the intruders, by the end of May the Indian
military grasped the severity of the situation: about two thousand men from
Pakistan’s paramilitary Northern Light Infantry had moved up to five miles
past the Line of Control along a front approximately 100 miles wide.1 Across
T. NEGEEN PEGAHI is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Director of the Mahan Scholars
Research Program at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, as well as a Non-resident Fellow at
the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. The views expressed here are her own and do not neces-
sarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of
Defense, or the U.S. government. She wishes to thank Timothy Hoyt for extensive comments on an
earlier draft. Email: <negeen.pegahi@usnwc.edu>.
1. At the time of the Kargil conflict, the Northern Light Infantry (NLI) was administratively
located under Pakistan’s Ministry of the Interior, although it was commanded by officers from the
Pakistan Army. Following the conflict, in recognition of the NLI’s impressive performance, the
formation was inducted into the Pakistan Army and granted the status of an infantry regiment
(Pegahi 2019).
Asian Survey, Vol. 60, Number 2, pp. 245–264. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2020 by
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and
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10.1525/AS.2020.60.2.245.
245
246 ASIAN SURVEY 60:2
this swath, they had established over 100 positions, at altitudes of up to

almost 20,000 feet. While Pakistani designs on Kashmir are as old as Pakistan
itself, this incursion was the country’s most aggressive attempt in decades to
advance that effort. Coming only a year after Pakistan’s May 1998 nuclear
tests, many observers attribute both Pakistan’s decision to launch what came
to be known as the “Kargil conflict” and India’s decision to respond in the
relatively restrained manner it did to Pakistan’s recent acquisition of overt

nuclear capability. But did that new nuclear status in fact embolden Paki-
stan’s aggression at Kargil? And did it restrain India from responding more
forcefully?
Answering these questions sheds light on crisis dynamics not only between
India and Pakistan but also between other nuclear-armed adversaries. Fears
that nuclear weapons embolden their possessors and restrain those states’
adversaries have both dominated the academic debate on the consequences
of proliferation and driven US non- and counter-proliferation policy. Schol-
ars have argued that “states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they
can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more
aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy” (Kroenig 2015, 117–18) and
that “this pattern appears to hold even against stronger adversaries that enjoy
nuclear superiority” (Kahl 2014). Senior statesmen have referenced these
arguments to explain why “everyone should worry about Iran” (Holbrooke
et al. 2008); more recently a senior US official cited them to emphasize the
importance of “denuclearizing the [Korean] peninsula” (Office of the Press
Secretary 2017). These fears tend to have their origins in the case of Pakistan
generally and its 1999 attack on India, in the mountains around the town of
Kargil, specifically (Bell 2015; Kapur 2003).
This article challenges the dominant explanation that Pakistan’s new
nuclear status drove each side’s decision-making in the Kargil conflict. It
argues instead that a series of non-nuclear factors drove both the Pakistani
planners of the attack and the Indian leaders charged with responding to it.
Specifically, I argue that the planners believed that India would simply accept
the fait accompli due to an insufficiently favorable conventional military
balance, regardless of Pakistan’s nuclear status, and that the Indian leadership
did in fact lack any better military options, again regardless of Pakistan’s
nuclear status. This analysis provides an alternative explanation for the Kargil
conflict in which Pakistan’s newly demonstrated overt nuclear capability
neither emboldened Pakistan nor restrained India. This reinterpretation in
PEGAHI / PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND KARGIL 247
turn deepens our understanding of arguably the most important crisis to date
in the “second nuclear age” (Bracken 2012) and provides a template by which
to investigate additional crises between India and Pakistan and other nuclear
powers as well (Narang 2014; Yoshihara and Holmes 2012).
The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section places
the Kargil conflict in the broader context of Indo–Pakistani relations. The
second lays out the existing interpretation of Pakistan’s decision to launch the

incursions that led to the conflict, and of India’s decision to respond to those
incursions in the manner it did. The third section specifies the types of
evidence needed to adjudicate among competing explanations of each side’s
behavior and reviews the types of evidence used thus far in the literature on
the consequences of nuclear acquisition. The fourth section evaluates the role
Pakistan’s nuclear capability appears to have played in the Pakistani planners’
thinking, and the fifth lays out the various military options India had and the
advantages and disadvantages of each. The article concludes with implica-
tions for our understanding of the role of nuclear weapons in the run-up to
and conduct of the Kargil conflict, as well as the conflict’s broader lessons for
the South Asian rivals and other nuclear powers.
THE KARGIL CONFLICT IN CONTEXT
Disagreement over the fate of the former princely state of Jammu and
Kashmir has been both a cause and a consequence of the enduring rivalry
between India and Pakistan (Paul 2005). Pakistan was founded as a home-
land for the subcontinent’s Muslims, in view of fears they would not receive
fair treatment in a Hindu-dominated India. By this logic, the Muslim-
majority princely state should have become part of Pakistan. Pakistan also
disputes the way in which the state’s ruler, a Hindu, acceded to India and
the often heavy-handed approach India has pursued in the state in the
intervening decades (Staniland 2013). India in turn was founded as a secular
state with a diverse populace. By this logic, there is no reason a Muslim-
majority state should not be included in the union; indeed, its inclusion
would strengthen those credentials. India is also critical of the role Pakistan
has played in the state, from support for a rebellion in the immediate post-
independence days to ongoing aid to an insurgency that has ebbed and
flowed over the past 30 years. While Pakistan has sought from the beginning
to revise the territorial status quo in its favor, India appears content to
formalize the Line of Control into a permanent international border (Fair

and Ganguly 2013). The Kargil conflict of 1999 was the latest battle in
Pakistan’s ongoing campaign to further its own efforts in the region and
undermine India’s.
THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR STATUS:

THE STANDARD VIEW

Most writers on the consequences of nuclear acquisition see Pakistan’s acqui-
sition of nuclear weapons as “the critical permissive condition that made
contemplating Kargil possible” (Tellis, Fair, and Medby 2001, 48); “the new
nuclear environment . . . contributed to the decision to stage the Kargil oper-
ation” (Hoyt 2009, 153). Pakistan’s nuclear weapons “not only failed to
prevent the war, they directly underlay Pakistan’s decision to encroach on
Indian territory” (Kapur 2003, 81). Pakistan’s decision-makers believed “their
achievement of rough nuclear parity with India now enabled them to probe
along the [Line of Control] with impunity” (Ganguly 2001, 122), since Paki-
stan’s “new nuclear status would prevent India from launching an all-out
conventional war in retaliation” (Kapur 2003, 88); moreover, “India would be
loath to dramatically expand the scope of a conflict for fear of escalation to the
nuclear level” (Ganguly and Hagerty 2006, 152). Pakistan’s decision-makers
believed that India would be forced to respond “only at the point of attack,
even though doing so was extremely costly to the Indian Army” (Joeck 2009,
117). Implicit in all this is the claim that Pakistan’s decision-makers believed
that India would have launched a much larger counterattack (which Pakistan
would have had a hard time repulsing) were it not for Pakistan’s new nuclear
status. Pakistan’s nuclear tests the year before, however, meant that the
country’s leaders felt that they no longer had to worry about such a severe
response from India, and this emboldened them to send Pakistani forces
across the Line of Control (Singh 1999, 686).
The appeal of this interpretation is understandable. Scholars highlight
what appear to be sharp differences in Pakistani and Indian choices before
and after the 1998 nuclear tests and attribute those differences to the change
in Pakistan’s nuclear status. Explaining the Pakistani decision to launch the
incursions, Paul Kapur (2003, 80) notes that “Kargil was the first Indo-
Pakistani war in twenty-eight years, and occurred one year after the countries’
1998 nuclear tests.” He goes on to offer excerpts from interviews with former
Pakistani leaders in which they reference nuclear weapons’ deterrent capabil-

ities and claim the operation’s planners were emboldened to launch the
incursions by the country’s new nuclear status (97 n79; see also Kapur
2005, 143, 145; 2008, 75, 76). Similarly, explaining the Indian decision to
respond to the 1999 incursions in the relatively restrained manner it did,
Timothy Hoyt (2009, 160) points out that “at Kargil, unlike the response
to Operation Gibraltar in 1965, India did not escalate across the [Line of

Control] or international border.” Analysts go on to cite how difficult and
costly the fighting at Kargil was for Indian troops, who sustained heavy
casualties (Kapur 2003, 83). This suggests that India would have preferred
some other, less difficult and therefore less costly option, which Pakistan’s
new nuclear status deterred. In short, scholars suggest both that Pakistan was
emboldened at Kargil and that it should have been, because its new nuclear
status restrained India.
IDENTIFYING AND EVALUATING EVIDENCE
On the Pakistani side, we need to examine the views of those actually

involved in the planning and authorization of the operation. Since leaders
may misremember events or have reasons to misrepresent their views, we also
need to evaluate whether the planners’ reported views seem plausible given
the environment they would have confronted at the time. We can then
evaluate what their beliefs were about the likely Indian response to the
incursions and what role, if any, they expected Pakistan’s new nuclear status
to play in that response. But the literature to date instead draws overwhelm-
ingly on leaders who were out of the decision-making process, such as then
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was left largely in the dark by his generals
as to the nature and scope of the operation, or out of power entirely, such as
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was then living in Dubai due to
corruption charges against her in Pakistan (Kapur 2003, 97; 2005, 143, 145;
2008, 143, 145; Kiani 2013; Times of India 2013).
Furthermore, these leaders’ comments focus on the perceived deterrent
properties of nuclear weapons, not whether (and if so, under what condi-
tions) that deterrent shield could incentivize expansionist efforts (Kapur 2005,
143, 145). In short, the statements used as evidence in the consequences-of-
proliferation literature thus far have come from the wrong people and covered
the wrong material.
On the Indian side, we need to examine the military options the state had
and the leadership’s views as to the relative merits of these options. Again, given
leaders’ possibly faulty memories and reasons to misrepresent their views, we
need to evaluate whether their reports on whether they were deterred from
escalating the conflict seem plausible, given the environment they would have
confronted at the time. We can then evaluate whether there was in fact any
“better” course of action—that is, a military response with a higher likelihood

of success for a comparable cost in blood and treasure, or with a comparable
likelihood of success for a lower cost—that Indian leaders could have and
would have pursued if not for Pakistan’s new nuclear status. Instead, the
literature notes only the difficulty of the fighting at Kargil in absolute terms,
not relative to any other military options India may have had, making it
difficult to evaluate whether India was likely deterred from some purportedly
superior military response by Pakistan’s new nuclear status. Again, we are rarely
hearing from the right people, and we are not hearing about the right measures.
It has been difficult to conduct this type of analysis, given how thin the
evidence has been on Kargil, particularly on the Pakistani side. The “paucity
of Pakistani literature on the origins and motivations” (Ganguly 2008, 54
n37) has made it difficult to pin down what drove the decision to launch the
incursions and what role, if any, Pakistan’s new nuclear status played in that
decision. For years after the operation, the government of Pakistan officially
denied that its forces were involved in the conflict at all, much less responsible
for it, claiming instead that the operation was launched and manned strictly
by mujahedin (Constable 1999, 48). Until recently, “Pakistani leaders have
not publicly explained the Kargil operation’s planning process or their deci-
sion to undertake the incursions” (Kapur 2007, 224 n1). Therefore, as even
the leading proponent of the emboldenment hypothesis acknowledges, “any
discussion of the Pakistani decision to launch Kargil must therefore rely to some
extent on conjecture” (n1, emphasis added). Other proponents are even less
circumspect, arguing that “even in the absence of incontrovertible public
statements, through a process of inference and attribution, one can make
a cogent argument” about the central role of “Pakistan’s overt possession
of a nuclear arsenal” in the Kargil conflict (Ganguly 2008, 59, emphasis
added). While the conventional wisdom provides one possible explanation
for Pakistani and Indian decision-making at Kargil—namely, that Pakistan’s
new nuclear status drove both sides—the dearth of relevant evidence has
made it difficult to evaluate that interpretation, much less any others.
More-relevant evidence, however, has been and remains available in the

area studies literature and can help analysts adjudicate among competing
interpretations of the case. A research effort led by Peter Lavoy has been
lauded as the most authoritative study of the conflict to date, and has added
an impressive amount to what we think we know from key figures on the
Pakistani side (Frey 2011). Lavoy was able to conduct multiple interviews with
three of the operation’s four planners, and the full research team received

a formal briefing by the commander of the Pakistani formation that con-
ducted the operation. These interviews and briefings provide a wealth of
information on the planners’ reported motives and expectations, particularly
when supplemented by accounts from those close to the planners. The
planners likely had a complex set of motivations for opening up about their
purported thinking, given what a fiasco Kargil became for Pakistan in general
and the Pakistan Army in particular. Still, taking their reported views into
account and checking them against other types of evidence remains preferable
to ignoring those views or dismissing them out of hand.
The Indian side has not been nearly as opaque as the Pakistani, but here,
too, key figures have provided more detailed reflections than have made it
into theory-driven treatments of the case. Indian leaders’ assessments of their
country’s capabilities and preferences can be used not only to better under-
stand the Indian choice of response but also as a check on the Pakistani
planners’ assessments—that is, these sources can help us evaluate whether
the Pakistani assessments were reasonably accurate and therefore whether
there was an opportunity for Pakistan to be emboldened. Combined, these
primary sources and secondary analyses by regional security analysts and
practitioners provide a much richer understanding of each side’s thinking
in the run-up to and during the Kargil conflict than have been used to date in
the consequences-of-nuclear-acquisition literature. Bringing these richer
sources to bear allows us to evaluate with greater confidence which causal
pathway the Kargil case actually followed, and therefore to better inform
debates on what happens when states acquire nuclear weapons.
THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR STATUS IN PAKISTANI

DECISION-MAKING: A NEW VIEW
In light of this additional information, the planners of the Kargil operation do

not appear to have been emboldened by Pakistan’s new nuclear status (Lavoy
2009a, 2009b; Khan, Lavoy, and Clary 2009). Indeed, according to the
researchers who have had the greatest access to them, the planners did not
think much about nuclear weapons at all in the run-up to Kargil, acting
instead “as if they lived in a pre-nuclear, conventional world” (Khan, Lavoy,
and Clary 2009, 90). This may not be surprising given the state of Pakistan’s
program at the time: nuclear planning and strategy were still embryonic (90);
the country’s weapons were not yet operational (Lavoy 2009a, 11); and none

of the planners had had any exposure to or experience with nuclear issues in
their careers, much less the specifics of how nuclear weapons might affect or
integrate into conventional military operations (Khan, Lavoy, and Clary
2009, 90). There is certainly no evidence the planners were thinking along
the lines of the “nuclear shield” mechanism posited in the consequences-of-
proliferation literature. On the contrary, Lavoy (2009b, 186) writes that they
“never thought the risk of nuclear escalation would deter India from counter-
attacking” but expected that a range of non-nuclear factors would produce
that outcome. In short, contributors to the most authoritative and in-depth
work to date on the conflict conclude that nuclear acquisition did not
embolden the Pakistani planners of Kargil (Lavoy 2009b, 205; Khan, Lavoy,
and Clary 2009, 90).
The Pakistani planners seem to have expected instead to create a fait
accompli based on strictly non-nuclear considerations. They appear to have
calculated that the Indian military simply lacked any good options for re-
sponding to a Kargil-like scenario. Pakistan Army leaders seem to have
believed that the Northern Light Infantry troops would be extremely difficult
to dislodge from their well-fortified positions atop the heights (Lavoy 2009a,
13; Musharraf 2006, 93, 96). The planners appear to have expected the annual
monsoon rains, which buffet the Line of Control south of Kargil from July
through September, to render any potential Indian effort in the area even
more unattractive (Khan, Lavoy, and Clary 2009, 87).
They seem to have been equally dismissive of the possibility of any Indian
efforts elsewhere in the region, viewing Indian troops as badly bogged down
with and dispirited by long-standing counterinsurgency duties (65, 89; see
also Lavoy 2009a, 13; Musharraf 2006, 93, 96). They appear to have believed
that opening any additional fronts along the Line of Control would only
further “dissipate the [Indian] forces already concentrating on the counter-
attacks in Kargil and involved in counterinsurgency operations” (Khan,
Lavoy, and Clary 2009, 89; see also Hoyt 2009, 161; Lavoy 2009b, 181). They
seem to have expected a combination of terrain, weather, and the state of the
Indian Army—not the change in Pakistan’s nuclear status—to render any
Indian counterattack at Kargil or elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir unap-
pealing to Indian leaders.
The planners appear to have been equally unconcerned about an Indian
attack across the international border. Given the terrain in the area of opera-
tions, any large-scale conventional attack, and certainly any threatening Paki-

stan with catastrophic defeat, would have to come across the plains and
deserts south of the Line of Control. Though the overall force ratio in the
theater favored India, it fell well short of widely used thresholds for successful
offensives, and the planners simply do not seem to have believed that India
had the forces to launch a full-scale conventional attack (Anand 1999, 1061).
A retired lieutenant general and former student of former Pakistani President
Pervez Musharraf ’s put it bluntly in the run-up to Kargil: the Indian Army
was “incapable of undertaking any conventional operations” (Nasir 1999, 25).
Similarly, a retired brigadier with access to Pakistan Army leaders relayed the
planners’ assessment that “India would not undertake an all-out offensive
against Pakistan, since by doing so it would run the risk of ending in a stale-
mate, which would be viewed as a victory for Pakistan” (Qadir 2002, 26).
Accordingly, the planners appear to have judged that India would not launch
any large-scale response, because it “did not make military sense” (Rizvi 2009,
338). And they seem to have expected a series of conventional considera-
tions—not the change in Pakistan’s nuclear status—to render any large-
scale Indian conventional attack along the undisputed portion of the border
unappealing to Indian leaders.
Furthermore, if the fait accompli strategy were nonetheless to fail and India
were in fact to launch a counterattack, the planners seem to have been
confident that Pakistan’s formations would rebuff it. As former Force Com-
mand Northern Areas commander Major General Nadeem Ahmed asserted:
“Had the Indians taken an offensive in Kargil, they would have met a properly
prepared Pakistani defense. The Indians would have gotten embarrassed”
(quoted in Lavoy 2009a, 2 n76). All of the factors that appear to have led
the planners to discount the possibility of an Indian counterattack also seem
to have led them to discount the likelihood of one posing any real problems
for Pakistan should it materialize. If the Pakistani troops, once discovered,
were engaged, the planners appear to have expected that they would hold off
Indian efforts until the snows started in the fall; this would force a halt to
operations and allow Pakistan to harden its positions, locking in its territorial
gains (Lavoy 2009a, 9; Khan, Lavoy, and Clary 2009, 64). Similarly, the
planners expressed confidence in their formations’ ability to defeat any Indian
effort to open additional fronts in other theaters (Hoyt 2009, 161). Thus, they
seem to have expected not only that India would simply accept the incursions
at Kargil as a fait accompli but also that Pakistani forces would prevail against
any response, should India have attempted one.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Kargil conflict, then, is just how
little appears to have changed with respect to Pakistani decision-making in
this first year following the country’s nuclear tests. Far from adopting a radical
new strategic approach emboldened by the country’s acquisition of overt
nuclear capability, the planners of Kargil seem to have been operating on
the same long-standing assumptions about Indian weakness that the Pakistan
Army always has, and to have believed that India would simply accept these
“nibbling operations” (Gauhar 1999) as it had in the past (see also Chari 2009,
361; Lavoy 2009a, 8, 23). Indeed, the planners claim to have been surprised by
the ferocity of India’s response, calling it an “overreaction” to what was
merely the latest instance of jockeying for position along the northern reaches
of the Line of Control (Cheema 2009, 60). Lavoy (2009a, 28, 37) finds that
for the planners, “the Kargil operation, while large, was mostly ‘business as
usual’,” and as a result they “did not believe that their secret land grab across
the Kashmir [Line of Control] would trigger a serious political crisis, much
less a major military conflict.” This finding runs directly counter to the great
causal weight US scholars and policymakers tend to attribute to nuclear
weapons in South Asia (Lavoy 2009a, 4).
In summary, there is no firm evidence that the Pakistani planners were
emboldened by their country’s acquisition the previous year of overt nuclear
capability, before launching what became the Kargil conflict. The planners’
claims directly contradict both the top-line argument—that nuclear weapons
emboldened Pakistan—and the specific causal mechanism by which that
outcome is held to have occurred. Far from viewing India as deterred by
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the planners appear to have expected India to
accept the incursions for a series of strictly non-nuclear reasons. The terrain,
the weather, and the disposition, commitment, and perceived state of read-
iness of Indian forces all seem to have combined to make the planners
discount both the likelihood of any Indian response to the incursions and
the threat any actual response would pose.
Even Kapur, the primary proponent of the emboldenment hypothesis

acknowledges this, noting that “Pakistan believed that retaking the Kargil
heights from entrenched defenders would prove to be extremely difficult, if
not impossible, for India. . . . Pakistan believed that this problem would be
exacerbated by India’s large-scale military commitments elsewhere in Kash-
mir, which they thought had left the Indians overextended and unable to
respond to new threats in the region” (Kapur 2003, 87). The planners simply

do not seem to have perceived any good military options for India, regardless
of Pakistan’s nuclear status.
But perhaps they misread India’s options and likely choice among them.
Perhaps Indian leaders did have a better military option, which they were
deterred from employing by Pakistan’s new nuclear status. The next section
therefore turns to the question of why the Indians contented themselves with
a relatively restrained response.
THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN INDIAN

DECISION-MAKING: A NEW VIEW
Contrary to the Pakistani planners’ expectations, Indian leaders did respond

to the incursions and, in some ways, escalated the conflict. Far from being
deterred from pursuing their preferred military response—whether by the
change in Pakistan’s nuclear status, as the conventional wisdom holds, or by
an array of non-nuclear factors, as the Pakistani planners seem to have ex-
pected—Indian leaders responded to the incursions with a fierce if localized
counterattack. They introduced additional ground forces, advanced artillery
pieces, attack helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. This latter choice in par-
ticular marked “a significant departure” for an India that had not used air
power in combat operations against Pakistan since 1971, even in the long-
simmering conflict over the nearby Siachen Glacier (Ganguly and Hagerty
2006, 154–55). Furthermore, Indian leaders have uniformly stated they would
have escalated still more had it been required. Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee has claimed that “nothing was ruled out. If ground realities required
military operations beyond the [Line of Control], we would have seriously
considered it.” Chief of army staff General Ved Prakash Malik, who led the
Indian response, ordered his senior commanders to “be prepared for escala-
tion—sudden or gradual—along the [Line of Control] or the international
border and be prepared to go to (declared) war at short notice” (Kapur 2007,
130; see also Malik 2006, 146–47). Vajpayee’s national security advisor, In-
dia’s defense minister, and India’s high commissioner to Pakistan have all
made similar claims (Kapur 2007, 127–31). In short, India was clearly not
deterred by Pakistan’s new nuclear status from responding to the incursions
or from escalating the conflict, and its leaders claim they would not have been
deterred from escalating still further had the need arisen.
However, further escalation would probably not have helped the Indian

leadership restore the status quo ante. Prime Minister Vajpayee explained
that India had “a limited objective: to throw out the invaders from Indian
territory” (Kapur 2007, 130). General Malik (2009, 354) understood the
need to stay on India’s side of the Line of Control as well as the motivation
behind India’s strategy, noting that the “loss of territory, however remote or
small, is just not acceptable to the public at large or to the political
authority.” Pursuing any military option other than a frontal counterattack
at Kargil would have meant leaving the Pakistani intruders in possession of
Indian territory longer—perhaps indefinitely, given the extreme difficulty of
taking or retaking defended positions in the heights. The “only restraining
factor” the civilian leadership handed down to General Malik and the
military was not to cross the Line of Control or, if military leadership
determined that crossing it was necessary, to get approval from the Cabinet
first (Anand 1999, 1058). Fighting only in the Kargil sector and only on
India’s side of the Line of Control meant difficult operations in some of
the most taxing conditions imaginable (Verghese 2009, 357). Indian leaders
nonetheless ordered their military to counterattack and drive back the
Pakistani intruders.
Given the difficulty of the subsequent fighting, observers understandably
assume that there must have been some better way for India to restore the
status quo ante. Rather than limit the fighting to the site of the incursions and
to India’s side of the Line of Control to boot, leaders in New Delhi could
have escalated the conflict horizontally or vertically. “Vertical escalation”
would have meant crossing the Line of Control into the Pakistani-
administered portion of Jammu and Kashmir with ground and/or air forces.
This could theoretically have helped India by allowing its forces to better
interdict the resupply of Pakistan’s positions. “Horizontal escalation” would
have meant opening additional fronts in more advantageous terrain along
other portions of the Line of Control or even along the international border
further south.
This could theoretically have helped India by forcing Pakistan to divert

resources to those new fronts or by securing pieces of Pakistani territory that
India could have used as leverage in post-conflict negotiations. The former
would have helped India defeat the Pakistani effort militarily; the latter would
have helped India defeat it politically; and either would have spared Indian
troops from having to fight in the grueling Kargil sector. At the extreme, an
attack across the international border could have allowed India to threaten

Pakistan with catastrophic defeat or even inflict such a defeat. Indian leaders
thus had several military options beyond, and more substantial than, the
response they chose.
But, while many analysts argue that Indian leaders were deterred from all
of these options by Pakistan’s new nuclear status, it is unlikely that any
option would actually have served India better militarily than the one chosen.
The first of the three, crossing the Line of Control to better interdict the
resupply of Northern Light Infantry positions, would have been difficult for
the Indian Air Force. While air power could understandably be expected to
provide India “a significant advantage” over vulnerable Pakistani ground
troops, the high altitudes and the Northern Light Infantry’s skilled use of
surface-to-air weapons “diminished India’s asymmetric advantage and
exposed vulnerabilities” in its air force (Acosta 2007, 405). Indeed, the Indian
Army’s initial requests for air support were “side-stepped,” citing the plat-
forms’ and weapons’ “likely ineffectiveness” in the area of operations (Anand
1999, 1055). Furthermore, Pakistan was doing little to support the paramili-
tary Northern Light Infantry troops, so any Indian interdiction campaign
would have had little impact (Hoyt 2009, 153, 161). Having allowed the ruse
to continue that the intruders were simply mujahedin acting on their own,
Islamabad could hardly provide them with much in the way of reinforce-
ments (Sethi 2009, 417). Thus, vertical escalation would probably have done
little to dislodge the Pakistani intruders and would have taken a toll on
Indian forces.
The second of the three options, opening additional fronts along the Line
of Control, would likely have been similarly unhelpful in dislodging the
intruders, and costly to boot. Opening a new front or fronts in the Kargil
sector would have required Indian troops “to go through or in the near
vicinity of the [Pakistani] intruders. This would have invited heavy casualties,
stretched [India’s] lines of communications and logistical resupply chain[,]
and compromised the element of surprise” (Anand 1999, 1061). It would also
have dissipated Indian forces, diluting those already committed to the coun-
terattacks in Kargil or engaged in the counterinsurgency effort elsewhere in
Kashmir (Khan, Lavoy, and Clary 2009, 89; Hoyt 2009, 161; Lavoy 2009b,
181). Pakistan, furthermore, had already sealed the gaps between the Northern
Light Infantry positions (Anand 1999, 1060–61). Opening additional fronts
further south in Kashmir would have “reduced India’s reliance on uphill
attacks into heavily fortified positions” but would have had the same delete-

rious effects on Indian communications, logistics, and commitments (Kapur
2003, 83). And Pakistan had already moved reserve formations into position
all along the Line of Control (Anand 1999, 1060–61). Seasonal weather con-
ditions would also have severely complicated any Indian operations further
south along the Line of Control. Thus, horizontal escalation would also
probably have done little to dislodge the Pakistani intruders but would have
taken a toll on Indian forces.
The final option, a major attack across the international border, would
have been the costliest of the three and would also have carried the greatest
risk of failure. As noted above, the overall force ratio, while favoring India,
already fell well short of widely used thresholds for successful offensives, and
the Indians appear to have been aware of that. “The lack of any significant
conventional edge,” noted a retired Indian brigadier, “would not have given
us any clear or decisive victory in case we had [crossed the international
border].” “Further,” he said, “Pakistan having anticipated our moves, had
also moved its defensive formations . . . , which prevented the Indian Army
from achieving an element of surprise. Any incursion across the [international
border] would have most likely resulted in a stalemate” (Anand 1999, 1061).
There is also of course the extraordinary toll in soldiers and materiel such
a war could be expected to take. It is not clear why observers would think that
the Indian leaders—who were interested only in a return to the status quo
ante—would accept such high costs for such a low probability of success by
escalating horizontally along the international border.
There were even stronger political reasons for India to reject these larger-
scale military options. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party had narrowly lost
a confidence vote in April 1999, and he described his party as “in the midst of
a do-or-die election” season (Dugger 1999, 4). His chief adviser, Brajesh
Mishra, pointed out that starting a substantial conflict with Pakistan in this
situation “would have been difficult” politically; the government’s caretaker
status “was a problem” (Ganguly 2001, 128). What was politically expedient at
home was also helpful with the United States. An editorial in the New York
Times (1999) noted the “commendable restraint” shown by India, while one
in the Washington Post (1999) quoted praise from the Clinton administration.
When Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif flew to Washington to seek
a face-saving way out of the conflict, all he could secure was President
Clinton’s promise to take “a personal interest” in the Kashmir dispute. Or,
as Mishra described it: if New Delhi had escalated the conflict, “sympathy

and respect for India would have diminished.” With India’s choice of
response, he said, “we retained international support and allowed for con-
demnation of Pakistan’s actions by the international community. And ulti-
mately that was important. When Nawaz Sharif appealed for help from
President Clinton, what did Clinton say? Withdraw” (Kapur 2007, 128). The
Indian leadership understood that “the unprecedented and near universal
diplomatic support” for India in the wake of the Pakistani incursions was
directly attributable to New Delhi’s choice of response (Ganguly 2001, 112).
Thus, a larger-scale Indian response would probably have meant additional
military costs and risks for little or no apparent gain, and substantial political
costs as well.
In summary, the Indian leadership does not appear to have been deterred
from responding to the incursions at Kargil by Pakistan’s new nuclear status.
Indian leaders escalated the conflict in several ways, and they claim they
would have escalated still further had it been required. Despite the obvious
difficulty of the fighting in the Kargil sector, probably none of the other
military options Indian leaders had would have been as effective in restoring
the status quo ante, and some would likely have cost a good deal more in
blood and treasure. The simplest explanation is probably also the correct one:
the Indian leaders pursued the option that made the most military sense,
regardless of Pakistan’s nuclear status. And what was militarily prudent had
the added advantage of being politically beneficial. The fierce but localized
Indian counterattack helped Prime Minister Vajpayee and his governing
party secure a decisive victory from their voting public at home and strong
praise from the Clinton administration abroad.
IMPLICATIONS
Twenty years on, firm evidence is still lacking that Pakistan’s nuclear tests the
year before the Kargil conflict drove either side’s decision-making in that
conflict. The only evidence that the nuclear acquisition emboldened Pakistan
to launch its incursion comes from Pakistani leaders who were either out of
the decision-making loop or out of power entirely at the time. Furthermore,
none of these claims addresses the argument’s posited causal mechanism—
namely, that the planners believed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would deter
a large-scale response that India would otherwise be capable of and interested
in mounting. Finally, most of these sources have their own understandably

severe biases, given the Pakistan Army’s long history of preventing civilian
governments from setting national security policy—when the military al-
lowed any civilian governance at all. (Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
had to watch her father, also a former prime minister, be hanged by the
military.) While the nuclear emboldenment hypothesis is an understandably
seductive story, we simply lack solid evidence for it, while we have a fair bit to
challenge it.
The evidence that Pakistan’s acquisition of an overt nuclear capability
restrained India is even less firm. Pointing out the difficulties of fighting in
the Kargil sector does not in and of itself demonstrate that Indian leaders had
other, better options they could and would have chosen were it not for
Pakistan’s new nuclear status—again, where “better” means an option with
either a similar likelihood of success at lower cost or a higher likelihood of
success at a comparable cost. To the contrary, a review of India’s other
options suggests none that would have been any more appealing than the
response it chose, and indeed, all seem less attractive. Again, while the intu-
ition that the subcontinent’s new nuclear environment drove all the major
decisions is understandable given the extraordinary destructive power of these
weapons, there is no strong support for such claims with respect to the Kargil
conflict, and there is some evidence against them.
The Kargil conflict offers a number of lessons more broadly. Most impor-
tant, despite the extraordinary destructive power of nuclear weapons, this case
shows that there are real limits to the political power they confer on their
possessors and to the political constraints they place on their possessors’
adversaries. The operation’s Pakistani planners had a number of non-
nuclear reasons to find the Kargil conflict an appealing proposition, while
the Indian leaders very likely had their own non-nuclear reasons to choose the
particular counterattack they did. This seems to confirm both sides’ belief
that there is indeed room to fight limited conflicts under the nuclear umbrella
while also highlighting that such conflicts are unlikely to change the status
quo in meaningful ways. These lessons were reinforced by India and Paki-
stan’s 2019 Pulwama crisis, during which India and Pakistan traded airstrikes
before settling back into the status quo ante, and are likely applicable to other
theaters and rivalries as well (Pegahi 2019).
These limits on what nuclear weapons can achieve also suggest that stop-
ping or slowing their further spread may not merit the high risks the present
nuclear powers, particularly the United States, appear willing to run and the

high costs they appear willing to pay in service of that goal. North Korea is
unlikely to be emboldened by its increasing nuclear capabilities—and like-
wise for a possible nuclear Iran at some point in the future. This should in
turn reduce how concerned Washington should be about the further spread
of such capabilities. The United States retains some low-level military options
against even a nuclear-armed North Korea and would retain the same against
a nuclear-armed Iran. The employment of those options, however, is unlikely
to produce any significant change in decision-making in Pyongyang or Teh-
ran. Both sides of current or potential nuclear dyads may thus wish to
consider moderating their expectations that nuclear weapons can do much
for them beyond maintaining the status quo.
One potential caveat to the analysis offered in this article is that Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal was still new at the time of the Kargil conflict. It has grown
considerably in size, sophistication, and perhaps most important, integration
into the state’s military and overall national security strategies over the inter-
vening 20 years. There remains, therefore, the possibility that the logic of
emboldenment is sound but that Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and planning
had not yet reached a sufficiently developed stage at the time of Kargil to
activate that causal mechanism. Further research should examine more-recent
cases to evaluate whether Pakistan’s nuclear status has advanced to the point
that it has started to significantly influence Pakistani decisions about initiat-
ing or escalating crises on the one hand, and Indian decisions about respond-
ing, on the other.
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Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons and the Kargil Conflict

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this swath, they had established over 100 positions, at altitudes of up to

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THE KARGIL CONFLICT IN CONTEXT

formalize the Line of Control into a permanent international border (Fair

THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR STATUS:

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Pakistani leaders in which they reference nuclear weapons’ deterrent capabil-

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IDENTIFYING AND EVALUATING EVIDENCE

On the Pakistani side, we need to examine the views of those actually

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More-relevant evidence, however, has been and remains available in the

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THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR STATUS IN PAKISTANI

In light of this additional information, the planners of the Kargil operation do

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Even Kapur, the primary proponent of the emboldenment hypothesis

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THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN INDIAN

Contrary to the Pakistani planners’ expectations, Indian leaders did respond

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This could theoretically have helped India by forcing Pakistan to divert

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Acosta, Marcus P. 2007. “The Kargil Conﬂict: Waging War in the

Bell, Mark S. 2005. “Beyond Emboldenment: How Acquiring Nuclear

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Kahl, Colin H. 2014. “How Worried Should U.S. Policymakers Be about

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