It is a time to acknowledge the immense courage of our sentinels in fatigues. It is also a time for introspection, so that the sacrifices these soldiers made are not in vain, so that more men are not required to die in similar circumstances in the future. This newspaper has always argued against politicising the Kargil issue, since it concerns every Indian and not just political parties who wish to cynically exploit it for their own electoral ends.

It is in this spirit that it now calls for a dispassionate inquiry into why the nation was faced with this expensive and unnecessary military engagement. There is also need to assess how well its Army responded to the threat at the bordersduring the two months of conflict and what strategies need to be evolved to secure the country's borders in the future.

The question of whether there was an intelligence failure or a lack of political and military will to respond to the growing evidence of infiltration certainly needs to be answered squarely if the apparently yawning gaps in military surveillance are to be plugged.

When did large-scale infiltration first manifest itself, and were the early intruders Mujahideens or Pakistani army regulars? Did diplomatic initiatives like the Lahore bus trip provide a smokescreen for Pakistan to mount its calculated assault? There were also many costly slip-ups after fighting broke out in real earnest. According to some reports the Army initially failed to recognise the seriousness of the intrusion once it was known. The perception that it was only a handful of mercenaries creating all the mischief led to the general lack of alertness that eventually translated into a tragic and unnecessarily high rate ofcasualties.

Experts believe that it was the same ill-informed assessment that resulted in the operation to recapture Tiger Hills stretching on for almost two months. According to initial perceptions this extremely strategically important region was occupied at best by just a few Mujahideen. The truth, however, turned out to be quite different and learning it cost precious human lives. It also now transpires that the Pakistani armed forces were closely involved in these operations right from their inception and that they had consciously replaced their earlier guerrilla tactics with that of systematically occupying Indian territory.

To permanently mount a 24-hour all-season vigil on the crucial 200-km stretch from the Mushkoh Valley to Turtuk -- the theatre of the recent conflict -- is a near-impossibility given the weather conditions and terrain. This means that both surveillance and diplomatic measures need to be shored up. So how is all this to be achieved? The nation will have to both learn and unlearnfrom the past and evolve new paradigms to tackle the future. But it cannot do this without first asking itself some basic questions. Defence Minister George Fernandes and principal secretary to the PMO Brajesh Mishra have both promised a probe into the Kargil issue. This must be done, not to hide facts, but to learn from them; not as a exercise in saving face for the BJP but as an exercise to save the nation.