Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has revealed that President Pervez Musharraf had brought the Kargil plan to her when she was the prime minister and he the Director General of Military Operations.
"Kargil was an absolute disaster," Benazir said in an exclusive interview with Third Eye Television. "I asked Gen Musharraf what would happen when the Kargil plan was put up to me and he said he would put the flag of Pakistan on the Srinagar Assembly."
She said she vetoed the plan because she knew that 'ultimately we would have been asked to go back to where we were and that's exactly what happened'.
"So, I wish they had listened to what I had said at that time and not got lost in the brilliance of the military strategy," she said.
During her tenure, she said, there were no non-Kashmiri groups involved in the Kashmiri insurgency.
"Yes, Kashmir was an issue during my tenure. But during my tenure there were certain differences," she said. "For example there was no attack like the Bombay blasts or the attack on Indian Parliament. The second issue is that there were no non-Kashmiri groups involved in the Kashmiri insurgency," she said.
"It is under Musharraf's watch that the Taliban have regrouped. And it is under Musharraf's watch that the home grown militants are dictating the foreign policy of Pakistan. Where we have incidents like Kargil and we have incidents like the Indian Parliament attack and we have incidents where the housing colony of wives and children of military officers in India are blown up," she said.
Asked how she would have responded to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's peace efforts, she said, "We (PPP) would have taken to task the home grown militants and simply not allowed them to dictate Pakistan's foreign policy agenda by doing what they want and when they want. In fact we would have been deeply concerned about the fact that Al Qaeda people are turning up in our country. And we would have made the situation very difficult for them to either seek refuge in Pakistan or for the Taliban to regroup in Pakistan or for our own homegrown militants to use Pakistan as a base for launching attacks on other countries."