Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 43 - The Kargil War

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

On this episode Joe and Travis talk about the Kargil War of 1999. You may have never heard of it but it involves nukes, ice fortresses, World War One style frontal assaults up a mountain, and ice axe murder. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some Merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow us on Twitter: @lions_by Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20090327120658/http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/research/kargil/war_in_kargil.pdf Amarinder Singh (2001). A Ridge Too Far: War in the Kargil Heights https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/k/Kargil_War.htm

I'm Henry from Fortress on a Hill. We're a leftist veteran podcast that aims to expose the reality of the U.S. military's many wars abroad, the horror that it puts on the people that live in those places, and the damage that military service does to Americans. role, giving oversight to the military, Fortress on a Hill aims to change that. Fortressonahill.com or wherever you get your podcast. Now, back to Lions Led by Donkeys. What you heard right behind you were the sound of Bofors guns directly targeting the top of Tiger Hills, the prelude to the final assault. Also going on simultaneously are multi-barrel rocket launchers also attacking the same positions on Tiger Hills. Fireballs and smoke fill the air. The sound of the Bofors' guns does not stop for the next 13 hours. But right now the guns are providing covering fire to the men making their way up to the top.

Nearly 3000 men from three different regiments are getting ready to put their lives on line. men from three different regiments are getting ready to put their lives on line. Men from the two Naga and eight Sikh regiments take position on the right and left flanks of Tiger Hill. The 18 grenadiers hide at the rear where Pakistan does not expect anyone to be. Later this will prove to be a decisive moment. yeah you slid in my dms like hey uh indian pax and about to go to fucking war again we should cover one of their wars and uh we picked the dumbest one we could find which was the cargo war and uh as of most of their little congregations of of their never-ending war over cashmere there seemed to be already over by the time we got to record this um yeah i'm actually like

obviously on one hand like it's really good that they didn't like nuke each other to death or launch some sort of ridiculous large-scale war but on the other hand like damn we're almost like a week out like by the time this episode ever got released like assuming it gets released on next monday like this is it's already been out of the news for like two or three days by the time we're recording and we like decided to record it like immediately yeah like we were like we have to record this as soon as we can and which is normally not the case because uh thing about a history podcast not time sensitive uh um but it is nice to get out you know when it is relevant but i think we've already uh

that ship already sailed i guess thank god honestly thank god but yeah we get scooped by trevor noah yeah that was fucking awful um so uh going into the cargo war we uh we have to point out that we're not going to try to relitigate the status of kashmir uh that would be a series unto itself and that's not something we're going to try to tackle one because i definitely do not know enough about it to make an educated argument and two both pakistan india can fuck off with that bullshit because kashmir clearly belongs to the glorious crater Kurdistan greater Kurdistan stretches from Albania to Japan and we figured as there's probably a couple

listeners who are you know this is the thing that they studied which is cool good for you man but most people aren't like that so Travis is going to give us a explain like i'm five quick rundown of how the fuck kashmir ended up how it is right now um the five minute history of uh indian pakistan and kashmir is uh well it's hard to really do accurately uh which is good because i'm this isn't my area of expertise so i'll give the uh

i can give the for dummies version and that's about it because i'm, this isn't my area of expertise. So I'll give the, uh, I can give the for dummies version and that's about it because I'm a dummy when it comes to this. Um, but, uh, so I guess the, the, the best place to start would probably be when the British show up because they, they seem to kind of be behind everything these days. Um, especially in that region, Yemen, Yemen, the why Arabs lose wars article and now India and Pakistan. Uh, so yeah, so the British showed up in the, uh, the early 17th century, like a specifically the British East India company, um, showed up in the early 17th century along the coasts of, uh, of India and where they established just like small trading posts um with the permission of the local the local powers particularly the the mughal empire um which was a very large powerful um empire in the indian subcontinent at the time um and then over the next two centuries the east india company grew stronger and stronger eventually controlling territory in india and uh by like the mid 19th century they controlled pretty much the entire indian subcontinent um from like what

is now pakistan through what is now bangladesh and um then in 1857 there is a sepoy rebellion which is probably worth an episode oh it isn't um and then which that resulted in the i guess long story short the british empire took over from the east india company after the sepoy rebellion and uh by the end of the 19th century or around like world war one or so um british india stretched all the way from what is now Pakistan to what is now Myanmar and also included – well, actually, I don't know if technically British India included Nepal and Sri Lanka, but the British also controlled those areas. And they also controlled, to some extent, Afghanistan, kind of from the same power node in British India. power node in british india and uh it should also be noted that um both the east india company and the british were pretty pretty brutal rulers um so whenever one of those that there's that there's this one british historian who loves to talk about how uh how great the british were for india because

like they bought trains or something i forget his name name, but he's like a really big deal. And I think there's been some podcast or something that talked about how shitty he was. Sounds like a future reading series episode. That'd probably be fun. But yeah, so the British, but the East India Company and the British Empire, basically their agricultural policies and so on ended up causing multiple famines across the three centuries that they controlled

India, leading to the deaths of tens of millions through starvation and disease. And the most famous... The Great Bengal Famine during World War II is effectively the Indian Holodomor. It can be argued that it was a genocide.

Yeah, deliberate deliberate like at the feet of winston churchill and the british empire um and uh so yeah so it was pretty bad and they also the british had a their kind of mo across their entire empire was playing various ethnic and religious groups off of each other and basically putting a wedge between these groups to cause sectarian tensions that they could you know play divide and conquer um so that people are too busy hating each other to hate the the british empire and um as a result of you know the increasingly brutal uh british rule throughout the late 19th and early 20th century the indian independence movement gained more and more power and influence. And the catastrophic losses incurred by the British in World War II basically kind of forced the British to start reevaluating their empire. And in 1947, August of 1947, the British India was officially dissolved into the new states of india and

pakistan and uh pakistan included uh also what at the time was called east pakistan but what is today bangladesh and uh india included well i think every everything that is now india but they're also these um these princely states uh which were as part of the partition plan were basically a left to their own like left to decide which uh which side that they would join and um the specifics of partition are like way beyond my knowledge like the specific legal aspects and events and so on but the basic idea is is they wanted Pakistan to be for the large Muslim population of British India and India for the large Hindu population. And of course, they drew borders. And these borders weren't exactly perfect, which left tens of millions

of Muslims living in Indian territory and tens of millions of Hindus living in Pakistani territory. Muslims living in Indian territory and tens of millions of Hindus living in Pakistani territory. And when partition occurred and the two states were separated, there was a really awful and extremely violent population displacement in both directions, which led to probably two or three million deaths. And it was just really, really horrible. And the kind of the intense violence in which both states were born is probably a large part of why there's so much bad blood between the two all the way through to the present. And so India and Pakistan, they would kind of they would be at each other's throats pretty much from day one.

And so I mentioned earlier that these princely states were kind of left to decide which side to join. And one of those was the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu, which is in the kind of the mountainous Himalaya region on the northern northwestern part of India and northeastern part of Pakistan and also borders China to some extent. And this was one of those princely states which was left to decide on its own. And it didn't decide immediately. And Pakistan worried that they would join India. So in August or October of 1947, just two months after independence, Pakistan invaded Kashmir and Jammu. And Kashmir decided that in order to get Indian protection against Pakistan, they would concede and join India. And the details of that are really complicated.

But the basic idea is Kashmir sort of joined India and India sent forces to defend it. And they fought a war in 1947 and early 1948. And in, I think, April of 1948, they agreed to a ceasefire along what they called the line of control, which divided Kashmir into basically two sections, the Pakistani section, which was about a third of the territory, and the Indian section, which was about two thirdsthirds of the territory and this line of control would be the kind of de facto border between the two states in um in kashmir i think through till the present um yeah it's still kind of there unchanged i think it changed a little bit but not a whole lot they're unchanged i think it changed a little bit but not a whole lot yeah the basic principle is this semi-official division between the two in which india gets about two-thirds in pakistan

about a third and uh things were relatively quiet at least uh by india pakistan standards until 1965 when um pakistan started infiltrating forces into kashmir in order to foment an insurgency against uh indian occupation and uh so india was a little bit mad about this and so they launched a full-scale invasion of pakistan um and the ensuing war was probably i guess arguably the largest conventional war since world war i War II and this involved like massive armor battles and massive air battles which caused like huge amounts of casualties

and by the end of the war India was generally ahead and a ceasefire was signed I think the war only lasted I think less than three weeks like I want to say 17 days was what I read but either way it was really brief but India won was signed i think the war only lasted i think less than three weeks like i want to say 17 days was what i read but either way it was really brief but india won that seems to be the case in all of them yeah basically um and then so in east pakistan um bangladeshi independence groups

were forming and gaining power and i think that actually the biggest bangladeshi independence group is actually a malice group um so going back to uh our far cry 4 episode yeah um and in 1971 bangladesh declared independence from pakistan and uh in response pakistan launched what they called operations searchlight and basically this was the systematic mass murder of bangladeshis and uh i don't remember the exact figures but i think estimates range from a hundred thousand to like two million people were killed yeah in a very short amount of time by pakistani forces and and they had a lot of um bangladeshi uh facilitators as well uh yeah i don't want to give them any derogatory nicknames but uh like there was definitely some who still want to be part of east pakistan and very recently uh bangladesh was still prosecuting people who were involved in it oh wow i think it was only a couple

years ago yeah it wouldn't surprise me but uh either way india i think this was when um indira gandhi was uh prime minister at the time uh she or india under her rule intervened in bangladesh and um a kind of interesting side note at this um richard nixon was so angry that india intervened in bangladesh um that henry kissinger and nixon decided to send a full carrier battle group um to the coast of india to basically threaten war with india if they didn't stop if they or if they like stopped fighting um in bangladesh like basically we would go to war with india if they continued stopping the genocide. And basically, this was because we sold a lot of weapons to Pakistan and India bought like

MiG-21s from the USSR. And we were just really mad that they bought weapons from the USSR that we literally threatened war with India because they were stopping a genocide. So, another like checkmark on like why Kissinger fucking sucks i think kissinger could never just sleep on a genocide you're like oh gotta get involved somehow and it's not gonna be to stop it yeah and uh so actually and so pakistan then also invaded india or attacked india and positions in the west um in order to try and take the pressure off bangladesh but before the american carrier battle group could arrive india had already won India and positions in the West in order to try and take the pressure off Bangladesh. But before the American carrier battle

group could arrive, India had already won the war liberating Bangladesh. Liberating is perhaps too loaded a word, but allowing for the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. And the 1971 war is kind of interesting because this

was basically the Indian MiG-21s versus Pakistani F-86s. And the MiG-21s just wiped the floor with the Pakistani F-86s. So that's maybe another reason the U.S. wanted to invade India was because the Soviet planes were making ours look bad. That will be another feature in the cargo war as well um okay so over the next so india would test successfully test their first nuclear weapon in 1974 and they rapidly began uh developing and expanding their nuclear arsenal afterwards and so that resulted in that plus like the massive casualties that the pakistani military incurred in 1971

was probably what led to the gradual slowdown of like outright conventional warfare um there are obviously still conflicts throughout the the especially in the 80s on the siachen glacier still conflicts throughout the especially in the 80s on the siachen glacier and uh and actually like an interesting note they both forces maintain permanent outposts on the siachen glacier which is at over 20 000 feet high which makes it the highest battleground in the world and uh i actually saw a picture a while back of a pakistani uh t- tank well okay technically a chinese type 692 tank but it's a ripoff the type of t55 stationed on the siachen glacier at like 20 000 feet up and i'm just thinking like you know try putting an m1 abrams at 20 000 feet anything at 20 you know it's interesting the siachen glacier is also partially controlled by china now uh yeah yeah so and well india and china also fought a war that not many people know

about yeah uh in 63 yeah also how fucking nuts does like a commander be like this is a good place for armor when they're looking at a glacier that is taller than most mountains like yeah fuck it put armor up there oh it's sick the t-55 can conquer even the highest mountain yeah i'm just waiting for one to summit everest you know we have the first amputee we have we've had the first amputees we've had people without bottled oxygen we have like kids old people it's time for the t-55 yeah yeah it's time for the t-55 to make its uh debut ascent just like crushes the summit of the mountain causing it to get like 20 or 30 feet shorter but uh yeah so the uh it also it should be noted that um although pakistan is arguably

arguably the aggressor in most of the wars that i i just talked about um indian rule of kashmir is certainly not particularly pretty um the legality aside of like where of who kashmir is erbil but the the region uh is mostly muslim and india has a pretty bad history when it comes to its treatment of uh the indian muslim population i think india is the second largest muslim country in the world i think it has nearly 200 million muslims behind and indonesia is the second largest Muslim country in the world. I think it has nearly 200 million Muslims behind and Indonesia is the first. But nonetheless, like India has a really, really bad history of how it treats its Muslim population. And Indian forces in Kashmir are they're an occupation force, arguably.

And and with that comes routine human rights abuses such as like mass rape, torture, murder and so on. People just disappeared off the street. Exactly. One of their their main. So like the J.E.M., which is the militant organization, hadn't quite existed yet during the time period we're talking about. But they're the ones who attack the Indian police convoy who killed 40 some people people, which is what started the newest war, conflict, pissing contest, whatever you want to call it. The Indian police in Kashmir have a tendency

to disperse riots and stuff because the riots are much more common than outright militant attacks right now. They disperse them with birdshot from shotguns and they aim for the face uh and and like bb guns and they aim for eyes and things like that um yeah that's fucking awful that makes american police look good which is hard to do yeah exactly um and i'm sure like you know this isn't an an argument that Pakistani control would be better, but it is an argument that obviously the Assayish and Peshmerga should be sent as peacekeeping forces to reclaim the region for its true owners.

Yeah, they'll be disarmed and they'll let ISIS in. Because there's like six Christians in Kashmirmir when isis invades they'll just completely withdraw the peshmerga forces and let isis murder all the christians like they did uh they totally didn't do in iraq um but uh but yeah so the the 1990s saw pakistan increasing its support for separatist movements in indian controlled kashmir and then in 1998, Pakistan tested successfully its first nuclear weapon. And I believe that's where Joe comes in. All right. So, like Travis said, India is not innocent in the things that we were going to talk about.

But because of the nature of the conflict, almost all firsthand accounts and sources are Indian. So take that for what it's worth. I did find a book, which I quote from extensively, that was written by a Pakistani general who helped plan the mission or at least was in the room. Knew a guy who knew a guy type situation. mission or at least was in the room uh knew a guy who knew a guy type situation um but it is not often in modern conflict where we can say uh this is this is absolutely somebody's fault uh but this war is absolutely pakistan's fault and we can and we can say that with full certainty um but not entirely because as you'll find out it's not that easy when it comes to pakistan or the military um it is the fault of the isi or which is pakistan's version of the cia for people who

don't know uh the isi is pretty fucking notorious for doing shit completely on their own with no input from the government uh it's one of the reasons why it's actually not that hard to believe that the pakistani government had no fucking idea Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. Yeah. Because the ISI is just that powerful. So in the winter of 1998, people will say start crossing the line of control that separate India from Pakistani Kashmir into Indian-controlled Kashmir. And they started taking strategic points. So, Pakistan said that they were freedom fighters.

And so, there's also sources at first that said they're Kashmiri militants trained by the ISI or even Afghan mercenaries who for some how or another took a break from the ongoing Afghan civil war going on next door to just jump on over and do more civil war. So, uh, but the fact remains is they were absolutely 100% Pakistani regular soldiers.

Uh, they actually didn't even do that good of a job covering their tracks, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Uh, the Pakistani soldiers stormed over the border in what became known as Operation Badr. And their goal was to take high points, choke points, points that would be very, very defensible. They weren't just going to sweep the Indian army out of Kashmir. That wasn't their goal. But what you do have to ask is, why the

fuck did they want to trigger a conflict? You're not just going to be able to storm across the LOC and take things. That's like saying North Korea is going to be able to storm across the DMZ and take a high point just because they want it and South Korea isn't going to respond.

So, every war Pakistan had fought against India to that point had been a crushing defeat uh most of them stopped specifically because india did not want to keep advancing in this case they wanted india to withdraw completely from the saichin glacier thus somehow magically forcing india to negotiate on the the wider Kashmir conflict and bring the whole thing to a close. It doesn't make a lot of sense, which I know Travis talked about the Sijin Glacier a little bit already. But like most things in Kashmir, it's claimed by both sides, neither of whom accept the other's claim. So why do they want to control a meaningless fucking glacier that's 20,000 feet in the air?

If you're looking for a legitimate answer, there isn't one other than territory. Like when people complain about, oh, we lost a Sijin Glacier, they just talk about how large of a landmass they lost. It's not worth anything. Like that T-55 on top of a 20,000 foot mountain, is it going to fucking do anything?

You can't just rain main gun rounds down from a fucking mountain that's not how it works a glacier is useless military high ground is like a 20,000 foot glacier isn't a ridgeline or a hill or something it's a mountain

you're not dragging artillery pieces up there unless it's T-55 apparently but that didn't stop both sides from You're not dragging artillery pieces up there. Unless it's T-55, apparently. But that didn't stop both sides from launching a full eight operations against one another over the fucking thing. Small teams ice axed their way up sheer cliff faces to try to attack the other side. In the end, there was an Operation Rajiv, which involved Indian soldiers scaling a literal ice fortress and attacking the enemy with bayonets and hand grenades 21 000 feet in the air uh over over nothing in the end india pretty much controlled most of the glacier um but in order to get india off their glacier they'd have to get

something to bargain with uh which brings us to the town of cargill another completely pointless piece of shit uh i don't mean to uh disparage the fine people of the town of cargill but i mean it was a population of 9 000 and there was nothing there uh the the only thing that was useful was not the town itself but rather where it was um so kashmir and especially this region of kashmir is incredibly rugged and even the best roads are only about two lanes wide. Um, and since air travel in a place of such high elevation is actually kind of difficult, almost all traffic comes in by road. So if the Pakistanis could seize cargo, they could control, uh, part of an Indian national

highway that ran through it, effectively blackmailing the indians to get the fuck off the glacier if this sounds like a bad idea it's because it is and the isi knew it was uh the isi had submitted this exact same plan to two different prime ministers in the past one was the all hawk someone who was such so bad at their job they created the fucking taliban and the other was benazir budo who was was so bad at their job that they created the fucking Taliban, and the other was Benazir Bhutto, who was so bad at their job that they kicked that office for corruption. Both of them told the ISI that shit was nuts and not to do it. Their main worry was, you know, India would attack them.

A military operation against India would draw them into another large-scale war that they had no hope of winning. So that's why this time around, the ISI didn't bother to ask for permission. In 1999, the Indians found evidence of massive amounts of infiltration, and the Prime Minister of Pakistan got an urgent phone call from the Prime Minister of India, Bihari Vajrapi asking him just what the fuck was he doing um the pakistani prime minister then or an emergency meeting because the prime minister had no idea what he was talking about in the meeting the pakistani prime minister nawaz sharif was

brought uh equal parts of lies and misdirection to prove that what the indian prime minister was saying was not entirely true. This was presented to him by the ISI and the Pakistani chief of staff, Pervez Musharraf. The chief of staff and the ISI told the Pakistani prime minister that troops had not crossed the line of control and that the Indian forces were simply finding Kashmiri militants, which they were supporting and everybody was totally fine with they even brought out a map to show him exactly where the soldiers were uh now they know so uh the thing was the map was an operational map uh and like a military type map uh that the isi was actually using to plan their operation uh it did actually have Pakistani army positions,

dozens of miles the LOC clearly marked all over the goddamn place. The map, it turned out, was one of the misdirections. The map had no text on it, only symbols, and the LOC was not marked. The military commanders and ISI directors presented in the room give absolutely no orientation to the map to the prime minister as to what the symbols on the map meant or where the places were now for a prime minister of a country the size of pakistan you would expect that they kind of know where the loc is but not exactly and that is what the isi was hoping and they were right

uh so and for reasons that nobody's entirely sure of the prime minister did not ask and then there's the lie the main hitching point to the indian prime minister's phone call was the pakistani soldiers were over the loc so the marked LOC on the map should be important, but there wasn't one. Of course. Also, the room is full of military officers of the chief of staff on down to pretty much every

divisional commander in the Pakistani army. None of them asked any questions either. So, that's when the ISI director explained to the room that the current positions of the indian pakistani troops and he wasn't lying he was simply misdirecting them uh but he assumed that the minister did not know where the loc was uh this is a direct quote from the book uh quote from cargill to the coup um during the presentation when pakistani and indian positions were pointed out to the prime minister he was unable to fully comprehend the locations of these posts there were no mention of pakistani troops

crossing the loc nor of pakistani troop build-ups five to ten kilometers beyond the loc one of the retired generals recalled i saw scores of positions across the loc but i did not say anything and if you thought the isi was done lying you don't know the isi the presentation went on to explain to the prime minister that the mujahideen of kashmir had seized several points but all of these were in undemarcated zones of the loc by that of course he meant that they were technically neither controlled by India or Pakistan. But even then, India was lying because they weren't Pakistani troops. They were Mujahideen. Pakistan only support their operations, which the Prime Minister was totally

fine with. That was, of course, a bold-faced lie. Head of the ISI at the time, Shahid Aziz, said, quote, There were no Mujahideen. Our soldiers were made to occupy barren ridges with handheld weapons and ammunition. Literally, the only cover that the soldiers were given was that they did not wear regular uniforms and that the ISI broadcasted pre-recorded phone calls over unsecured lines, knowing that the Indians would be listening in. Even Aziz himself said that this fooled absolutely nobody.

Aziz himself said that this fooled absolutely nobody. Even with all this assurance that Pakistani troops would not be involved in direct fighting, even though, remember, they were all Pakistani troops, the Prime Minister was worried that India would not take this shit lying down. Don't worry, the ISI had that covered too. They launched in a flattery offensive, saying, quote, Sir, you'll go down in history as the pakistan the history of pakistan as the prime minister whose tenure kashmir was resolved and sir pakistan was created the muslim league and they'll always be remembered for creating

pakistan and now allah has given you the opportunity and chance to get india held kashmir and your name will be written in golden letters okay he even he even went on to appeal to the fact that uh the prime minister was technically kashmiri in uh dissent and asking him what his family would think if he did not act it's like i know we didn't tell you that we were invading india but like now that we've invaded india it's cool right we're all cool and the the plan that they had for like the mental gymnastics that were required for anybody to believe what they believed of how india would respond to this is outstanding um also they quickly explained that the indians had already lost the strategic points as the infiltrators had secured them and they were

impossible to take back. They thought the Indians would do the exact same thing the Pakistanis did when they lost control of the Sijin Glacier. Keep their fucking mouth shut. So when that happened, then Prime Minister Zia-ul-Haq did not want to say shit when the Indians took control of the area

out of embarrassment. And the Pakistani leadership assumed that the Indians would be just as ashamed and defeat across the LOC. Like, there was no news reports that their military was pushed off the glacier or anything like that. They just like, whoop, that sucks, and they didn't say shit. Just try to save face. What is very clear here is that the Pakistani military and intelligence community plan this operation totally and completely on their own.

But it does not mean that the entire command structure or the entire ISI was involved. It is generally believed that only four people in total knew about the plans in the entirety. That blame is almost always put on Pervez Musharraf and the ISI chief Aziz. Or was it? Okay, because everything I just said could kind of technically maybe be a lie, depending on who you believe. And the ISI might be kind of hard to trust, and that's understandable. But so is the Prime Minister, and so is Professor Musharraf. Nobody here is cool.

Nobody here is like a trustworthy actor. trustworthy actor um but because we're nothing if not a fair and balanced podcast i have to tell musharif side as well like yes i don't know we've never played both sides before but i guess i'll start for this episode uh um musharif insists that he told sharif his plans months before but it should also be noted the two of them fucking hated each other just as soon as the war is over which is why mushar would eventually uh take over the government uh but so while um either the pakistanis were lying or not lying depending on who you believe or another the indians launched operation vj to retake the point seized by pakistan while the pakistan the pakistani government had rolled the dice,

hoping that India would just accept that they now controlled various points of their territory, they could not have been more wrong. India mobilized 200,000 soldiers. The Indian Air Force also launched its own operation, Safed Chagar. I'm probably pronouncing that terribly. I'm sorry to our Indian audience, which I'm sure exists

uh it quickly turned into something of an educational operation india had done little to upgrade or replace its aging helicopter and jet fleet since the last major war with pakistan 1971 and in some cases they are still fueling jets they had first flown in the 1950s this ended a little more than a turkey shoot for the modern anti-aircraft missiles being used by pakistan they had a large supply of stingers and they did they made pretty easy work out of the indian air force which made them have to fly higher meaning that their bombing runs were much more inaccurate. Also, sometimes the altitude of the battlefield itself was more than enough to

bring down a couple jets and helicopters. Not a good area for an air war. That did not mean, however, that the Indian Air Force could not control the skies because despite the fact they're flying some airframes that were on since the advent of jet engines,

the Indian Air Force had immediate and total air superiority of their Pakistani counterparts. There was one reason for this. The Indians had missiles that could lock on and destroy enemy jets beyond what the human eye could see. These are what is known as beyond visual range missiles. It's pretty common these days. I would imagine most air forces have them if they don't whoops uh but the pakistanis did not have this capability uh knowing this 1999 yeah seriously uh and they were flying american airframes as well um and they have f-16s yes yes they do

um and i think a lot of that has to do with kind of like when we sell the m1 abrams to other countries we sell a different armor like we don't sell the bleed uranium armor we sell with steel so they're easier to kill if if the time comes um so knowing this the pakistani air force flat out refused to fly in support of the pakistani army which is something i have literally never heard of this is some like roman time shit or one branch in the military refused to support the others um or like world war ii imperial japan yes yeah and the navy is like nope not helping the army today um so they flew combat air patrols over pakistan but they would not go near the LOC during the conflict. Like if India decided to try to bomb logistics complexes or whatever, they would have interdicted them.

But because they made these operational plans knowing that they wouldn't have to do anything because india had a strict rule about not not operating over the loc they simply wanted to secure what they considered indian kashmir so the pakistani air force stayed out of it completely and in most parts they would stay over 10 miles away from the loc just to stay safe and there was like there's stories of uh indian jets fucking with them, like purposely flying over the LOC and getting as close as one mile away from the nearest jet and then just turning around knowing they weren't going to be attacked. This meant that while Indian jets and helicopters were bombing the dog shit of Pakistani troops,

the Air Force would sit back and refuse to help in and said, watch. On the sea, pakistanis were equally toothless the indian navy launched operation talwar which immediately strangled pakistan's sea trade the port of karachi was blockaded and aggressive patrols stopped all oil imports into the country uh this quickly became a problem you see um one of the pakistani military and the isis uh things they told the the government to to kind of get them to go along with the operation that already started and i don't even know how the pakistani prime minister would have stopped this if he wanted to

because it already happened but um they said don't worry about it because the pakistani economy was pretty much in shambles at the time. They were going through pretty rough economic times. So fueling a war was simply not going to happen. And the military and the ISI were like, look, don't worry about it. We'll just use our current stores. You won't have to do anything else. It'll be fine.

Well, the blockades in the Indian Navy operation meant that if India decided to really say, fuck this, we're going to invade them, they had only about six days of fuels to sustain itself in reserves. So that guaranteed that they would lose any war that they fight. Absolutely, yeah. Though India had pretty much every advantage,

they still had to take back their strategic hills that the Pakistanis had taken. And it turns out, that was going to be really fucking hard. The Pakistanis controlled every high point and used the terrain artillery down at the slowly advancing Indian troops. The Pakistanis also laid down something around like 10,000 landmines and a few approaches that the Indians could take. The Indians would have to retake these positions one by one. And, I mean, this is the most modern mountain warfare i've ever heard of yeah and it still resembles something out of like the italian front of world war one for the most

part yeah i mean honestly like at that kind of altitude and that kind of territory like terrain like what good is technology it turned it's really not a whole lot like they tried to so like the pakistanis had um this american equipment that would help that they would put up and it would help them try to find where uh like shots were coming from that was like the most uh i think it's like i don't know i had it in afghanistan it's fucking worthless but um like the computer will tell you where the enemy is depending on where their gunshot came from that is about the most advanced piece of technology i see being used uh in this conflict other than that it's almost all frontal assaults with artillery support and it's not even big artillery support because they have to bring these fucking guns up mountains so it's really small

field pieces yeah like i don't know like 105 millimeter like short howitzer yeah and a lot of really small mortars um so one of these battles was the battle of tiger hill and it would be one of the most insane of the entire conflict first of all tiger hill was a was not a hill it was a thousand foot sheer cliff face covered in ice and snow um the pakistanis were high up on the cliffs raining machine gun fire and grenades down the indian troops and that is when one yahara singh yadiv decided to take charge of the assault up a fucking cliff remember this is not a hill and he decided to do this by free climbing up a cliff face with an ice axe to attach ropes for the soldiers behind him,

all while being shot at. Yadiv was shot 14 fucking times and did not stop climbing. When he was done doing that, he saw his platoon got pinned down again and could not keep going up the ropes. So Yadiv climbed another 60 feet up another sheer cliff face and so like he had already lost his rifle i guess i should probably point that out the only thing he had was a whole bunch of hand grenades and a knife and his ice axe of course so he climbed up a cliff and destroyed a pakistani position using only a bayonet and hand grenades then he then when another bunker opened up on his platoon he forced himself

to get up probably higher than a motherfucker have blood loss at this point in like altitude sickness those two can't combine to make like a good like mindset um and then he charged the other machine gun position ice axing four people to death in the process he survived he captured pretty much the entire objective by himself he was eventually rewarded the param vir chakra which is the highest military medal in the Indian army

and there's actually a strange event happened on Tiger Hill that day the Indian army recommended another soldier for the highest medal for uh heroism on that day and that was a pakistani captain uh colonel shirkhan uh interesting so after they had taken uh tiger hill the con had led a frontal counter-attack personally like he led his whole platoon uh from the front they were all killed by a hail of machine gun bullets mind you but uh apparently the indian officer president was so uh moved by his bravery that he wrote him an award citation and stapled it to his corpse i have never heard of anybody doing that ever.

And I feel like I've read a lot more stories about like these kinds of like insane acts of bravery and like old school, like 19th century, like warrior honor kind of nonsense from like India and Pakistan than anybody else. Yeah. and pakistan than anybody else yeah india has the same so a total outsider point of view from doing research on this and and just reading a lot about military history it seems like india's military culture is nearly unchanged from colonial times like it is very very firmly situated in like the gentlemanly warfare aspect of things which is really weird but yeah they literally uh wrote an award citation for dead enemy and stapled it to his corpse and he got it in 2010 khan was awarded the medal the nishan e heider which is the highest award that paxton has to offer based on an enemy citation that's pretty cool yeah that's fucking sweet and uh like his i think it was his brother or his nephew got the medal uh for him posthumously and he said like i'm very

happy that our enemy and our enemies are not cowards because cowards would not do this or something like that like that's fucking badass so old school like i would expect that to happen like during like the battle of waterloo or some shit yeah exactly like nowadays if like you know some like taliban soldiers did something really brave while fighting marines the marines would just like pee on their corpses and then post racist memes imagine like imagine like a peer-on-peer war like when fucking russia invaded georgia like they just shot people in the face and threw them in a ditch yeah it's really interesting like india and pakistan have this like really bad history with each other and yet nonetheless like when they're actually fighting a war they there seems i mean obviously there's still like atrocities and so on but things like this

do happen nonetheless while and so many i feel like any war the united states has fought probably since like i don't know like the the civil war like this sort of things i haven't heard about this kind of stuff happening not like the enemy citations and stuff like there was um during world war ii that like that scene in uh was a band of brothers where they let a german general like say farewell to his soldiers uh that actually happened um stuff like that um i guess there was incidents of japanese commanders wanting to surrender and hand over their sword and like and uh the the the marine officer or army officer accepting the center let him keep it stuff like that um but it's super few and far between not shit like this like even um recently when uh the guy with the

bitch and mustache was shot down over pakistan like two weeks ago um the kashmiris were uh pretty upset that he was bombing them so they're like beating the shit out of them and the pakistani soldiers showed up and like saved him which is shocking like i wouldn't expect i i don't know why but i would expect them to not do that because they were just bombing them it's like when the that russian uh su-27 i think got shot down or su-24 got shot down over syria by the turkish air force i believe the pilots landed safely but were then either one or both of them i think were basically like lynched by turkish-backed rebels in syria yeah they fought to the death for the most well one of them fought

to the death and it was like on video he got wounded and he said something like uh i don't know like this is how a russian dies or something like that and like pulled a hand grenade and ran at him which is admittedly fucking badass yeah or like the jordanian pilot who got captured by isis jesus fucking christ that's horrible poor poor man um yeah so uh much like tiger hill um many of the positions that had to be taken by pac that were taken by pakistani troops had to be retaken by the indian troops were out of clear air artillery strike range meaning the only way to retake them would be through a direct frontal assault one of those was the battle of Tololing

it was attack on another position on a cliff face as a full 18,000 feet above sea level and weather that would dip down below 18 degrees below zero the assault path was a barren moonscape with no cover or concealment this shit like it literally looks like uh like it literally looks like the moon there's nothing

there it's just a straight dead cliff face there's nothing there there's not even any ridges like you'd think a mountain would have boulders and ridges and shit this has nothing um so indian military doctrine at the time actually called for any frontal assault to be carried out during the night which sure that makes sense but the idea had to quickly be abandoned when the commanders pointed out that their soldiers would probably freeze to death another trade-off would be what the soldiers had to carry um now this assault would take several days, and the Indians knew it would take several days. But a person can only push themselves so hard for so long at such high elevation. And the human body just doesn't work well under strain up there.

So, the soldiers had to leave all of their food and water behind so he carried the ammunition they would take for the objective um let's see and well the plan was i mean they're still going to burn through all their ammunition they are soldiers after all um so any resupply would have to be hand carried up the mountain after the initial assault and because this wasn't something that armies are built around anymore they simply picked all of the they made like a small army of porters out of army cooks cobblers and laundry workers which i honestly was more shocked that the indian army still had cobblers than anything else they acted as a human supply chain all the way up the fucking mountain to the front line. According to a lieutenant named Parveen Tomar,

it took four people, four of the logistics support soldiers, to support one soldier who was doing the fighting in the harsh environment. That makes sense. Yeah. And it's actually, you know, that sounds staggering, but it's kind of normal the way armies are built now, but you can only imagine

how much more support that one fighting soldier would need i think i i feel like i've heard that like in the u.s military like for every one combat soldier there's like 12 support soldiers that sounds about right to me yeah um and then like another 20 contractors. But, uh, but to your point about how this, this war, um, or at least some of these battles are like very much like a world war one or world war two kind of thing. Like I just,

I Googled pictures of the battle of Tololing and one of these, the pictures, it's Indian soldiers like setting up a position on this like horrible moonscape of a mountain with Bryn guns. Yes. So like, I mean, honestly, on this like horrible moonscape of a mountain with brin guns yes so like i mean honestly like i would probably rather have a brin gun going up that mountain than like um uh like a m240 or something because i'm sure it weighs less and you don't have to carry as much ammo like they're probably better off with brin guns than like what would be like a more modern uh light

machine gun yeah and i mean at least you know the brin's gonna i mean i i carried a 240 and 240s are incredibly reliable but i never carried it fucking 18 000 feet up and like in the snow and i mean it's like negative 18 degrees i don't know how it's gonna work up there the brin that's probably gonna be all right if it's 1999 like like that Bren gun, you know it works because it's been shooting for 60 years. And, you know, it's incredible that they brought, the Indians brought artillery to this battle and the Pakistanis really had none but um the the indian artillery commanders admitted they weren't really doing much because they had to fire up a mountainside and then hope it dropped down on the enemy behind it and it did not really work um that's tough yeah this really does look like something out of i like the like the ottoman campaign and when they try to invade russia like it's fucking looks obscene

and because they had to wait until broad daylight um and you know this is i feel like this is what the if somebody built a fucking fortress on on everest and you had to like assault mount everest this is what it would look like um and in broad daylight the order was given to quote just go up there and bring them down by their necks um so old school yeah um and damn the torpedoes right full speed ahead don't give up the ship uh the source i used the uh for this and for most of this article are really really badly translated indian news articles and so i try to use other things but it doesn't really seem like most western countries care much about the cargo war and the i found one from like um it was from some command staff college uh a paper that an u.s army colonel wrote and the only thing

they cared about was the mountain warfare but like not the intricacies of how the fuck they actually pulled it off but like just logistics it was really boring to read and i got nothing out of it but um and also the really bad translations are fun uh because they described the final assault on pakistani positions as a quote berserker assault and i choose fuck yeah i i choose to believe that means they stripped naked did a bunch of drugs and literally ate the enemy i mean honestly like how else are you gonna assault a position that's at 18 000 feet like i know if i was going if i was tasked with assaulting a giant mountain with like nothing but the like you know 100 rounds of ak-47

ammunition like i'd want to strip down do math and then just like run and hope that they get scared of the fact that i'm naked or like wearing nothing but boots and like a bandolier and a fucking bitch and mustache if there's one thing i learned about the pakistani or the indian high command over the last couple weeks is that i think i think they're issued an outstanding much mustache their mustache game is on point absolutely they might not have food or water on totaling but they have mustache and oh i mean they did win so yeah yeah they did and eventually indian soldiers did take the hills though it took a couple days um i mean so losses in this war aren't too great because um even though i'm talking about full frontal assaults and scaling ice fortresses this is all mostly small team stuff like the indians may have mobilized 200 000 soldiers but they very rarely

operate anything above a battalion because they knew it'd be impossible to move them around in such horrible terrain which makes me really i think i wonder how the fuck they pulled that off in previous wars yeah i think they uh i think i read somewhere that the pakistanis only ever had like no more than a couple of like maybe four or five thousand troops um involved at any one time anyway so like yeah just about it's uh i mean and i i can imagine i mean just looking at some pictures of the of the terrain in this region it it's really, really brutal terrain. So, like, whether or not you sent, like, 100,000 soldiers or, like, 10,000 soldiers, like, it's going to be incredibly difficult for them to move and stay supplied.

So, you might as well just send 10,000. Yeah. And it should be pointed out that the pakistanis never actually thought they'd have to fight the indians like that that's probably the dumbest part of this whole thing is that they just like yeah they probably won't fight us um yeah now like i said if you remember back to isi's original plan for infiltration none of this was supposed to happen india was supposed to just roll over and accept that pakistani troops moving into the neighborhood. And more than that, if they did want to fight back, they'd be afraid of losing soldiers and they would quickly just stop. Faced with the fact that India had absolutely no intention on stopping, and not only were they okay with a little bit of blood,

they would World War I style charge straight up a fucking mountain if they had to. Pakistan quickly began to look for an out and their best option was a long time ally of the united states and its current president bill clinton um now clinton uh did not want to get involved at all uh because he knew it was pakistan's fault um he said that he would only get involved in moderating peace agreements once pakistani troops withdrew completely back to their side of the loc he quickly changed his mind however when he was shown evidence that pakistan is moving nuclear weapons closer to kashmir and yeah uh pakistan was uh what was pretty much accepting that not only were they going to lose that india

was going to say fuck this and just keep fighting, which India never showed any intention on doing that. But I guess when you get your ass kicked that many times, you just start to assume you're going to get kicked again. By July 24th, 1999, Pakistani government agreed and pulled all of their troops back to the LLC. government agreed and pulled all of their troops back to the LOC. On the international stage, because remember, one of their goals is bringing the Kashmir question, so to say, in front of an international audience. Like, hey, guys, we need to get together the international community, wink, wink, and you just need to decide that Kashmir is Pakistan's. Like, they wanted to get people talking about it again, but it didn't really work because the conversation didn't really turn to, so what's the deal with Kashmir?

It was like, what the fuck, Pakistan? That's the only thing anybody cared about. Rightfully so, Pakistan was considered the bad guy. Say what you will about the status of Kashmir, but they definitely invaded. say what you will about the status of Kashmir but they like definitely invaded and even post war Pakistan refused to admit that their regular soldiers were

involved in the conflict at all that was one of the reasons why it took Khan the Pakistani soldier who who was given a citation by an Indian soldier all the way until 2010 to get his award because it wasn't until 2010 that Pakistan admitted that they did it um Pakistan also awarded 90 other people awards for gallantry

during the fighting uh that there was also a website it was like on the Pakistani military's website they updated it with like martyrs as they were killed in Kashmir. If they weren't involved in fighting, why were they getting medals? If they weren't involved in fighting, why were you just randomly updating your website with dead people? Another thing that analysts like to point out that this is only a theater where really experienced soldiers could fight was the extreme environments. These heights were not places where Kashmiri militants would ambush Indians at. They would fight them in the streets like we just saw a couple weeks ago, the suicide bombing, IEDs like that, stuff like that.

They're not going to hike up 20,000 feet and fight the Indians. This is not something that they're not going to hike up 20 000 feet and fight the indians this is not something that they did this is something that required specialized training and tons of expensive equipment so you know don't die or freeze to death these arguments all but shit can pakistan's attempt at plausible deniability um so and i talked about a little bit earlier but only two months after the cargogill War, Prime Minister Sharif would be forcibly removed from office by Pervez Musharraf. Which brings us to our ultimate question here. What the fuck, ISI? What was the point?

on the surface for what they say and just trust that they just thought that they didn't roll over you have to either accept that the isi is incredibly incompetent or there's more to it because nobody believed that this was going to happen and and even uh aziz who was the ISI chief at the time, was like, yeah, this war is fucked. Our bad. But like almost – so, the Pakistani high command was involved with the ISI in planning this, which how the prime minister ended up firing a lot of them. He ended up firing Pervez Musharraf, which is why he launched his coup so you have to accept that not only did the isi plan this so professor mishraff could get in power but they also just figured that these particular people would be fired in order to him in order for him to launch a coup which is like i don't know to to steal a a saying from fucking q anon that's like 18d fucking chinese checkers level shit and i don't

know if i believe it like yeah i believe that the isi wanted to fuck with sharif like i do believe otherwise they would ask for permission but i don't know if prevez musharaf was their ultimate goal um i don't i don't i just don't know and the isi does so many things that retroactively fuck over pakistan that i it's not like you know this for instance like we compare them to the cia a lot the cia does a lot of fucked up shit and they end up having a lot of tertiary blowback on their operations like i don't know creating the fucking mujahideen afghanistan all these death squads in latin america drive hundreds of thousands of immigrants north. Shit like that. But if you look at it at the time of when they did it, it at least makes sense.

Like, to further America's goals, no matter how nefarious they are, you're like, okay, that makes sense. Nothing the ISI did here makes any fucking sense to me. Like, do you see anything here that makes sense yeah it's pretty bizarre i don't know man i mean we're not intelligence wonks but like i know somebody like well if you if you look at the past of kashmir and no it's like this is dumb this is so dumb this whole war is like when north korea fucking built the largest flagpole and put the world's largest flag on it so south korea built like a sound system like nobody gives a shit it means nothing the only thing that happened is like a thousand people died yeah i mean honestly i feel like that's most wars since like oh jesus since like vietnam

well even vietnam vietnam itself yeah it's like the the iran iraq war was eight years long you know probably a million people died and nothing really changed at the end of it no saddam was in a lot of debt yeah like saddam invades kuwait 1991 like tens of thousands of people die and nothing's really changed at the end of it yeah um uh i guess you could say like when russia invaded georgia in 2008 they like seized a tiny piece of territory that literally nobody else in the entire world gives a shit about except like the eight people in georgia and like the three people who live in that piece of territory uh uh yeah i don't know man like i i have a theory and it's it's bad but it's as bad as a theory as

the rest of the isi and that is the greater isi boonk gang theory have you ever heard of boonk boonk gang he's a fucking heard of boonk boonk gang he's a fucking terrible stand-up comedian not really a stand-up comedian he just like stunts on instagram all he does so he's like this um he looks a lot like uh fucking he looks like a soundcloud rapper he has tattoos all over his face and has a grill and shit and he goes into places and just steals shit on camera and he live streams it. And he'll just yell gang shit, gang shit, boom gang, just for laughs. And I like, it's completely self-destructive of himself because he gets arrested all the time.

He got shot once. Like, I feel like ISI is doing it for the, for the gang shit. It doesn't make it. No, this doesn't make sense but i'm calling it isi is the original boot gang and he's just doing they did they should have waited until now to do it because like there was no clout in 1999 but like uh if they had done it now they could have like live streamed that shit and gotten like so much clout dude yeah i mean the hashtag would have been trending uh so for better or for worse that's the cargill war and it is apparently

created by soundcloud rappers and that is now historical fact actually uh takeshi69 is the uh is uh is Musharraf um that's the uh so him getting arrested for racketeering is like Musharraf being ousted from power something like that in this world

that we created war would be a whole lot more colorful uh Travis thank you as always for coming on and once again fighting through losing power yeah well i mean as uh as we said when the power came back on i'm excited for when kurdistan reclaims uh kashmir um because then kurdistan can have access to all the hydroelectric power plants in the Kashmir region so that when they lay at the giant's ring or line of extension cables from Kashmir across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, all the way here to Erbil, I can have electricity 24 hours a day. would look a whole lot when like i had i'm a little bit older than you but uh i remember back maybe like land parties and you just had this fucking daisy chain of extension cords across the house but but it's like over the course of fucking six countries uh yeah i feel like that's

a fun game that all of our listeners can play is try to pick out when travis lost power well because it has happened in every single episode every episode yeah most of them i think at the end so i think the last episode i did i remember listening to it and you can kind of tell when i lose power because it's like i'm just kind of gone and and you're like end the episode episode quickly wrap it up and the one before that it's like the audio changes like in the middle of a sentence because you like cut the recording and start it over again

oh poor Nate I'm sorry Nate thanks again for a stop by you can follow us on the twitter at lions underscore by you can follow travis at haycraft underscore

travis and you can follow me for all your shit posting needs at jcast 99 um if you want to listen to our i'm not even showing bonus episodes we do now but our wonderful

far cry is maoism episode one dollar to the patreon gets you access to that uh so until next week we'll see you guys later. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward

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