Kargil War
The 1999 high-altitude clash in Kashmir, the first shooting war between two declared nuclear powers, fought over peaks above 16,000 feet.
In the spring of 1999, fighters slipped across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir and dug into commanding ridgelines above the town of Kargil, some perched higher than 16,000 feet. India said they were Pakistani soldiers; Pakistan first insisted they were Kashmiri insurgents, though it later became widely accepted that regular troops of the Northern Light Infantry held the peaks. What followed was the first shooting war between two states that had each openly tested nuclear weapons the year before.
A war fought straight up
India detected the intrusions in early May and launched Operation Vijay, eventually committing tens of thousands of troops to a brutal problem: prying entrenched defenders off the tops of mountains. Attacking uphill in thin air, against machine guns sited on ridgelines above National Highway 1, Indian infantry took heavy losses at Tololing, Tiger Hill, and Point 5140. Everything had to be hauled up by hand or by mule, from artillery shells to the wounded, in cold that fell well below freezing at night. The air force joined in with Operation Safed Sagar, sending Mirage 2000 jets to drop laser-guided bombs on bunkers near 16,500 feet. By 26 July the last positions had been cleared, a day India now marks as Kargil Vijay Diwas. Official Indian losses came to 527 killed and more than 1,300 wounded; Pakistani deaths are disputed, with estimates running from a few hundred to well over a thousand.
Why the world panicked
Only a year before, in May 1998, India and Pakistan had each detonated nuclear devices and declared themselves nuclear-weapons states. A conventional war between them now carried a shadow no earlier clash had: the fear that fighting might climb the ladder toward nuclear use. Western capitals pushed hard for a halt. The decisive moment came in Washington on 4 July 1999, when President Bill Clinton met Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and made withdrawal the price of American goodwill. Sharif ordered Pakistani forces to pull back, leaving Pakistan diplomatically isolated with no ground to show for the venture.
The reckoning
The retreat cut deep inside Pakistan. The operation had been planned largely by the army under its chief, General Pervez Musharraf, with the civilian government kept at arm's length, and its humiliating end poisoned relations between Sharif and his generals. That rift helped produce the coup of October 1999, when Sharif tried to sack Musharraf and the army removed Sharif instead, handing Musharraf the country. Analysts have studied Kargil ever since as a live test of a dangerous idea: that nuclear weapons, by making total war unthinkable, may make small wars along the edges more tempting. The heights above Kargil, retaken one frozen ridge at a time, are a reminder of how thin that edge really is.