Summary: In the previous six episodes of this series we looked at the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War; the first engagements of the war itself; the early effects of the war on China’s relationship to the combatant nations; the bold Indian gambit to expedite the war’s end by capturing the Pakistani capital Islamabad; the Indian armed forces’ post-Operation Amritsar struggles to crush the Kargil insurgency; the war’s impact on the 1996 U.S. presidential elections; the mass protest rallies held in Pakistan’s major cities after the collapse of the Pakistani army August 1997 Punjab offensive; and the escalation of hostilities into regional nuclear war. In this chapter we’ll review the global diplomatic effort to prevent the regional holocaust from escalating into a worldwide nuclear conflict and the Melbourne cease-fire conference which finally ended the 4th Indo-Pakistani War in early 1998.

Once the hotlines started ringing in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow they continued to ring for hours. The heads of state of the world’s three greatest powers, however much they might differ on other aspects of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, agreed with each other wholeheartedly that the regional nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan had to be halted quickly before it escalated into full- scale global war. This was a particularly high priority for China, whose leaders were highly anxious about the prospect of the People’s Republic getting sucked into a major war for which its armed forces, heavily armed and proficiently trained as they were, were not yet fully prepared.

In just the first two hours after the initial Indian nuclear strikes against Pakistani forces, Chinese premier Jiang Zemin made no less than a hundred phone calls to U.S. and Russian officials while at the same time trying to re-establish communications with Pakistan’s government, whose key functions had(to say the least) been severely disrupted by the Indian nuclear strike on Islamabad. A provisional administration had been established by those senior officials who’d managed to get out of the city before the Indian bombs hit, but they had all they could do simply to restore communication links with their own people, let alone get in touch with Beijing.

There was also heavy communications traffic between the Chinese embassy in Washington and the U.S. State Department, and between the Chinese ambassador’s office in Moscow and the Russian foreign ministry headquarters at the Kremlin. Jiang and his peers among the CPC elite had long and frightening memories of the Sino-Russian frontier clashes of the late 1960s; it wasn’t the sort of experience that they were particularly eager to repeat. President Clinton could relate to that unease; as a college student during the Vietnam War he’d protested American involvement in that conflict, and as the chief executive he was concerned that further escalation of the Indo-Pakistani conflict would have dire consequences not just for U.S. interests overseas but also for his hopes of enacting major social reforms at home. For that matter Vladimir Putin, whose past career as an intelligence officer had given him a superb education in the art of quickly and frankly assessing amu given geopolitical situation, had decided a swift and decisive resolution to the hostilities between India and Pakistan was seriously overdue.

So it was decided to use a carrot-and-stick approach in order to coax the Indians and Pakistanis to the negotiating table-- the stick being the threat of freezing the two countries’ assets in the United States and China, the carrot being a pledge of substantial economic and industrial aid to the combatants to expedite their recovery from the damage each had sustained at the other’s hands during the initial nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. After nearly four days of diplomatic juggling, during which there were sharp(and not wholly unreasonable) fears of further volleys of nuclear missiles across the Indo-Pakistani border, India finally agreed on September 28th to open cease-fire discussions with the provisional government of Pakistan.

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In early October of 1997 Indian and Pakistani diplomats gathered in Melbourne, Australia for the first day of peace talks under the auspices of U.N. mediators. Security was as tight as the proverbial drum; the organizers of the cease-fire negotiations were keenly aware that an act of terrorism could have tragic consequences for efforts to bring peace between India and Pakistan, the Australian government had ordered no expense be spared to protect the delegates. But at times that first day it seemed like it might be more necessary to protect the delegates from each other, given the way they argued so vehemently over the most trivial matters. One junior member of the Indian negotiating team actually had to be sent home after getting in a fistfight with an aide on the Pakistani side.

Back on the Indo-Pakistani frontier, the remaining ground and air forces of the belligerent nations nervously awaited the results of the Melbourne conference. Even without the use of nuclear weapons the war had taken a tremendous toll in human lives on both sides; few but the most die-hard nationalists were anxious to see hostilities resume, and even the die-hards had been given pause by the devastation caused by the first Indian and Pakistani nuclear strikes. Radioactive fallout was making India’s already grave environmental problems that much more dire, while in Pakistan the fragile provisional government was facing a simmering political crisis as its citizens continued to live in fear of the possibility of a new wave of atomic attacks on their homeland-- a fear the Melbourne conference wasn’t totally able to discourage.

Even the fighters of the Kargil insurgency, who in the earlier days of the war had fearlessly challenged Indian conventional forces more than once, were disturbed by the prospect of a renewal of nuclear hostilities between India and Pakistan. One of the great if unspoken worries among the leadership of the Kargil insurgent forces was that a second Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange might kill large numbers of rebel troops either through deliberate Pakistani use of tactical A- bombs on Kargil territory or as the result of an accidental detonation of an Indian nuclear warhead over rebel-held sectors of the Kargil region. Of course the first scenario was somewhat more likely than the second, but neither of them were particularly comforting.

While the Indian and Pakistani negotiating teams in Melbourne struggled to grope their way toward an armistice, U.N. disarmament officials were urgently trying to verify none of Pakistan’s or India’s remaining stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium had been stolen. Fears of such material being used to make a “dirty bomb” ran deep, and were not entirely unwarranted. FBI and Interpol agents combed eastern Asia seeking to track down would-be black market uranium buyers and “head them off at the pass”, so to speak, before they could get their hands
on sufficient quantities of uranium to manufacture suitcase nukes.

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After a two-day late October recess necessitated by a medical emergency involving the number two man on the Pakistani negotiating team, the Melbourne cease-fire talks resumed on November 1st amidst a growing private sense of futility among diplomats on both sides of the bargaining table and the U.N. intermediaries who were overseeing the discussions. And they weren’t the only ones feeling as if the cease- fire conference was going nowhere: a Gallup poll of 5500 Americans conducted the day before the negotiations recommenced indicated that 81% percent of those surveyed believed it was inevitable hostilities between India and Pakistan would resume at the same brutal level they had been waged at before the Melbourne conference-- or worse, escalate to the point where the doomsday scenario portrayed in Robert Dole’s 1996 campaign ads could all too easily become reality. Interest in the basics of constructing and living in a fallout shelter was beginning
to reach heights not seen since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

President Clinton tried to reassure his fellow Americans peace was in sight, but few were willing to believe him. He was once again coming under fire from critics at both ends of the political spectrum: his fellow liberals were blaming him for not having done a better job of using Washington’s diplomatic influence to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan before the war, while conservatives blasted him as a Chamberlain-esque weakling whose misjudgments of the situation along the Indo-Pakistani border had practically invited war. And the almost
endless barrage of personal scandals that had been plaguing Clinton’s administration since at least the beginning of his second term weren’t doing much of anything to help his cause-- if anything, they served to make his already shaky political standing that much more dubious. In one of the first major grass-roots movements of the Internet era, two Midwestern anti-Clinton radio callers started an e-mail petition drive calling for the chief executive to resign from office. That action in turn prompted Clinton supporters, dwindling though their numbers might be, to initiate a counter-movement urging the president not to give up his job without a fight.

On November 9th, as the peace negotiations between India and Pakistan temporarily relocated to Sydney while minor repair work was being done on the Melbourne headquarters of those discussions, Clinton was rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital with what the White House press office described as “moderate chest pains”. That was an understatement of the first order-- Clinton had in fact sustained a heart attack as a result of months of stress from the combined pressure of struggling to contain a mounting scandal at home and bring about an end to the Indo- Pakistani war abroad.

When the negotiators returned to Melbourne three days later, they did so with a renewed sense of urgency; with Clinton incapacitated (at least in the short term) and acting president Al Gore trying to keep the machinery of the U.S government from breaking down in the face of domestic anxiety over Clinton’s medical condition, it was clear that neither India nor Pakistan could expect much further assistance from the United States in achieving a permanent cease-fire. Until things had calmed down in Washington, the White House’s attention would be focused almost exclusively on the domestic front. Problem was, India and Pakistan simply couldn’t afford to wait for the dust to settle at the Oval Office before reaching a long-team peace agreement.

It was around this time that Australian prime minister John Howard made a surprise visit to New York to meet with his ambassador to the U.N.; feeling that the current crop of mediators overseeing the cease-fire negotiations back in Melbourne were beginning to suffer from physical and mental fatigue, he asked the ambassador to step in and take things in hand to ensure that the talks stayed on track long enough for the ink to dry on a long-term peace accord. Within hours of the meeting’s conclusion, the Australian U.N. ambassador and his two top aides were on a plane bound for Melbourne Airport.

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From that point forward, the peace talks proceeded at a quick and relatively smooth pace. Although the Pakistani and Indian air forces remained on high alert, and Pakistani and Indian ground soldiers were still warily eyeing one another across the India-Pakistan border, the cease-fire in that region continued to hold. Even the Kargil rebellion seemed to have quieted down considerably, with the rebels contenting themselves for the moment with making propaganda broadcasts across the dividing line that separated the Indian and Pakistani control zones in
Kashmir.

On December 28th, 1997 the Indian and Pakistani negotiating teams held their final session in Melbourne to sign the treaty that formally ended the 4th Indo-Pakistani War. Under its terms, hostilities between the combatant nations would end as of 12 noon Indian Standard Time on January 1st, 1998 and all military personnel still in the Kargil region would be withdrawn in favor of a U.N. peacekeeping contingent assigned to monitor the two countries’ compliance with the terms of the accord. The U.N. also began coordinating a vast multi-national relief effort aimed at helping the survivors of the Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange rebuild their shattered lives.

Back in Washington, the political troubles the war had created for the Clinton Administration were not in any way diminishing even with the Melbourne peace treaty in place. In fact, in some respects the real trouble for President Clinton and Vice-President Gore began when the treaty took effect...