This volume took six years to research and compile. From the beginning, this study was a challenge. This crisis, in comparison to previous conflicts in the region, drew an unprecedented level of controversy, competing narratives, and implications for domestic politics specifically in Pakistan, but also in India and for the course of international relations in South Asia. For this reason alone, I owe a great deal of gratitude to those who contributed to this volume and many people who were forthcoming with their candor in formal interviews and private exchange of views with me and my colleagues over the past six years. This multi-authored volume is a testimony of the Clauswitzian proverb of “wading through the water” and an earnest attempt to provide the most objective and authenticated version and analysis of this conflict.

The project editor and authors interviewed dozens of policymakers, intelligence officials, and military officers in Pakistan, India, and the United States. They also received a formal presentation by the commander of the Pakistani formation that conducted the Kargil intrusion, Force Command Northern Areas (FCNA), and several other civilian and military officials associated with the operation. Project authors presented preliminary findings and received helpful feedback from other scholars and various governmental and military representatives at conferences in Monterey, California in June 2002, at the United Services Institute in New Delhi in September 2002, and at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad in January 2003.

In the spring of 1999, Indian soldiers patrolling near the town of Kargil about 5 miles on their side of the Kashmir Line of Control (LoC) were ambushed by assailants firing from unseen positions high atop frozen peaks of the Great Himalayan mountain range. After several weeks of confusion, Indian officials realized the intruders were not Kashmiri militants, as they initially had thought, but well-trained troops from Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry (NLI), and that the infiltration was much larger and better organized than previously assessed. India then mounted a major military and diplomatic campaign to oust the intruders. After two months of intense fighting at altitudes ranging between 12,000 and 17,000 feet, during which both sides lost several hundred soldiers, Pakistan ordered its forces home, and the crisis ended. Although no territory changed hands – as it had done in previous Indo-Pakistani wars – the Kargil conflict was a landmark event. Occurring less than a year after India and Pakistan openly tested nuclear weapons, Kargil dispelled the common notion that nuclear-armed states cannot fight one another. Like the only other direct military clash between nuclear powers – the Sino-Soviet conflict over Damanskii (Zhenbao to the Chinese) Island in the Ussuri (Wusuli) River starting in March 1969 – the Kargil conflict did not come close to causing a nuclear war.

The theory of nuclear revolution holds that states armed with nuclear weapons should not fight conventional wars against each other. The risk of military escalation is supposed to produce such caution among decision-makers that the opposing sides in a crisis will curtail their coercive behavior well short of war. Pakistan partially defied this logic in the spring of 1999 by sending fighters to secretly seize mountainous territory near the strategically important Srinagar–Leh highway in Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistani military planners considered this to be a limited, tactical operation, and calculated that war could be averted through the time-tested combination of military fait accompli, international political pressures, deterrence threats, and Indian restraint. Viewing the territorial intrusion as a blatant act of aggression and a strategic threat, India launched a ferocious military campaign to oust the “invaders,” but stopped short of attacking Pakistani territory or even striking Pakistani military positions across the Line of Control (LoC) separating the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir.

During the Cold War, and especially after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union developed elaborate crisis-management strategies to gain advantages over one another during military crises and in their overall strategic competition while at the same time trying to influence domestic and international reactions and attempting to control military escalation. In South Asia's first military crisis since May 1998, when India and Pakistan each conducted nuclear explosive tests and declared themselves nuclear weapons states, New Delhi and Islamabad were forced to practice Cold War-like crisis management during the summer of 1999.

The Kargil operation was an audacious attempt to seize an opportunity of historic proportions. Indian troops predictably vacated posts along the Line of Control (LoC) as they retreated to winter positions – a normal measure taken by both Indian and Pakistani forces to reduce the strains on forces during the harsh winter months. Pakistani planners aimed to seize this unprotected territory to the maximum feasible limit, with an eye on interdicting National Highway 1A, the strategically important Indian road that runs between Srinagar and Leh. But the plan's boldness also made it dangerous and ultimately untenable. Its success would require hundreds of troops to infiltrate across the LoC and maintain their positions for weeks without being detected. After their inevitable discovery, they would have to hold off Indian counterattacks until the onset of winter, which would close the passes, halt military operations, and allow Pakistani infiltrators to harden their positions. This military fait accompli would enable Pakistan to redraw the LoC.

The operation's planners seemed convinced that India would not expand the conflict elsewhere along the LoC or the international border, and that the international community would view the Kargil incursion as part of the normal pattern of military activity along the LoC, similar to India's occupation of the contested Siachen Glacier fifteen years before. While some of the calculations of Pakistani planners were borne out by events, the faulty assumptions they made, when combined with tactical missteps on the ground, doomed the Kargil operation to failure.