July 26 marks 10 years after India won the limited but high-stakes Kargil War initiated by Pakistan. On this day in 1999, the Indian soldiers gave the country a significant victory - albeit at a heavy cost in life, limb and blood. More than 500 military personnel gave their lives and a grateful nation celebrated a Kargil Diwas (Day).

But regrettably a decade later, it is evident that the nation has learnt little by way of imbibing the right lessons. And this is not for lack of clear and objective recommendations based on a careful review of what caused Kargil and what went wrong as far as national security was concerned. The Kargil Review Committee headed by veteran security analyst K. Subrahmanyam produced its report in record time and this was submitted to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government.

To its limited credit, the NDA constituted four separate task forces to make tangible recommendations to improve and restructure the following areas: management of the country's borders; internal security; intelligence gathering capabilities; and defence management.

These reports were then submitted to the NDA government and reviewed by a Group of Ministers. The earnest hope and crying national need was for these recommendations to have been discussed in some detail in parliament so as to obtain consensual political support and then be implemented progressively. The objective ought to have been to prevent another Kargil and create necessary national security capacity from the apex downwards.

Alas, little of the implementation took place during the NDA rule and even less so in the UPA's first tenure.

Consequently the nation had to face the ignominy of its parliament being attacked by terrorists in December 2001 and seven years later, undergo the trauma of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks - a veritable maritime Kargil.

In the interim, national security has become a political football and it was deplorable that in the run up to the 10th anniversary of the Kargil Diwas, some political representatives actually described this war as belonging to the NDA/BJP. The martyrs and their families and those wounded in the icy heights of the Kargil-Drass region have been predictably forgotten and ignored.

The lack of adequate capacity for national security - despite the rhetoric that is periodically heard - is best reflected in the kind of time and attention paid to this highest and most sacred national calling in the Indian parliament.

In 10 years, there has been no sustained or meaningful debate on the Kargil war and its lessons in any session of parliament. And to add insult to injury, in the same period, the Ministry of Defence has returned almost Rs.50,000 crore (over $10 billion) as money unspent from the amount allocated for acquisition and modernization of the Indian military inventory. Thus the reality is that in the post-Kargil decade, India's trans-border military capacity has shrunk - but no one in the political spectrum is particularly concerned.

In this period, the nature of the security challenges facing India has become more complex and tangled and today the external and internal security strands have coalesced into one opaque domain.