Kargil Conflict: Civil – Military Relations and National Security Decision Making

Abstract

Kargil Conflict was a military confrontation that took place in an environment of relative peace between India and Pakistan, when there was a civilian government at the helm of affairs in both the countries unlike the two previous wars i.e 1965 and 1971. The civil-military balance and its linkage with national security decision making yields interesting lessons in the national security decision making process and civil-military relations in the context of Kargil Conflict. Harold Laswell’s Garrison State theory and Samuel Huntington’s Objective and Subjective Control notions alongwith the theories of some other scholars like Morris Janowitz, Nelson Pallmeyer, and Rebecca Schiff have been employed as theoretical references to analyze the balance of civil-military relations and its linkage with the non-institutionalized decision making in national security affairs. The reasons for lack of institutionalized decision making have also been analyzed to identify the institutional deficit leading towards policy dissonance highlighting the need for an institutionalized decision-making approach along with effective civilian oversight structures. Using Kargil Conflict as a case study the motivations, strategic rationale and errors of assumption of political and military decision makers have been analyzed highlighting the conceptual and structural factors impacting upon the balance in civil-military relations. The research showcases how our historically evolved imbalance in the civil-military relations is linked with those conceptual and structural factors that were a product of a National Security State environment. The peculiarities of the historically evolved civil-military balance under a National Security State environment demand alteration of the conceptual and structural factors to bring out the desired balance in the civil military relations. On conceptual plane the military’s voluntary submission to civilian control and the civilians’ improvement of their performance and capacity deficit have been identified while on a structural plane the alteration of high threat environment, weak democratic impulse in political parties and weak civilian oversight institutions have been identified to attain the desired balance in civil-military relations under the constitutionally defined boundaries. Though Pakistan retained vestiges of the British Colonial tradition and a Garrison State like environment in the fifties and sixties it later morphed into a National Security State that kept experiencing authoritarian and democratic rules. Since a single civilian control model has not yielded the desired results in the past, a combination of Objective and Subjective control by the civilians, alongwith a voluntary socialization of the military in civilian subservience as a democratic norm is deemed an effective prescriptive remedy for addressing the civil-military imbalance.