The American Hoax?

‘Clinton’s n-hoax forced Pakistan to end Kargil war’
Press Trust of India
India Express: October 16, 2006

A former Pakistan foreign official has accused the Clinton administration of playing a “hoax” to put “pressure” on Islamabad to withdraw its troops and end the 1999 Kargil conflict with India.
Shamshad Ahmad, who was the Pakistan Foreign Secretary at that time and also attended the meeting between former premier Nawaz Sharif and US President Bill Clinton in Washington, said in an article published in a leading daily here that the American president asked Sharif if he was aware that the Pakistan Army had began moving nuclear-tipped missiles to the borders.
“In my view, it was only an American hoax to bring Pakistan under pressure for withdrawl,” he said. Ahmad also said that there was no need for Musharraf in his book In the Line of Fire to give an explanation that Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons at that time.
In his book, the Pakistani president has said it was a “myth that we (India-Pakistan) came to the brink of nuclear war. The limits of our forces were nowhere in sight, still less in danger of being crossed. ”
“By exploring a bomb does not mean that you are operationally capable of deploying nuclear forces across the border over selected target.
“Any talk of preparing for nuclear strikes is preposterous,” he has said in his book, an account contradicted by former US Secretary Strobe Talbott and Clinton’s aide Bruce Riedel in their separate accounts on Kargil.
Riedel, whom Clinton kept along with him even during the one-to-one meeting with Sharif has said in his account that the former American President asked Sharif ‘if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was. Did Sharif know his military was preparing their nuclear tipped missiles,” for which Sharif appeared surprised.
Riedel has written an account of that historic meeting titled American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Blair House published by the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.