Author: Karamatullah K Ghori
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: September 9, 2015
URL: http://www.newindianexpress.com/columns/karamatullah_k_ghori/No-Wisdom-Gained-50-Years-Since-India-Pakistan-War/2015/09/08/article3016283.ece

Reliving history made in one’s own lifetime is an unusual, if not strange, experience. But such an experience is on our hands for my generation — those of us who were witness to the 1965 War between India and Pakistan. September 6 marks the 50th anniversary of the war that shouldn’t have taken place, at all. But that it did, nevertheless, makes it intriguing, and also worth dissecting, what with the memory of that day, September 6, 1965, etched into my memory as if it were only yesterday. I was a callow, freshly-inducted junior lecturer at Karachi University’s Department of International Relations. I got that honour of  teaching at Pakistan’s most prestigious university because of having topped in my MA exams two years earlier. I was barely into my early morning lecture when a student burst into the lecture hall and announced, in a voice choking with emotion, that India had invaded Pakistan by crossing the international border near Lahore. Radio Pakistan, the state’s official news organ, had obviously taken its time before breaking the news of the early dawn incursion to a bemused nation. That initial announcement of India’s ‘unprovoked aggression’ against Pakistan is, to date, the authentic and official version of the war. Questioning it is unpatriotic.

September 6 is Defence of Pakistan Day in its official almanac, celebrated, each year. Subsequent personal, authentic and scholarly-researched accounts — some by generals  and senior officers who’d seen action in that war — nailed down the fallacy of ‘unprovoked aggression’ in black and white. But their books were read by few and have become library fixtures over time. The dust of time has blurred their accounts. And, then, in today’s cyber age, the only book read by most is Facebook.

So, the popular version of India being the unprovoked aggressor against Pakistan still prevails and sits well with the intelligentsia and the layman alike. General Chaudhry, then in command of Indian forces, is still lampooned for his hectoring that he’d be drinking the chotta peg of his evening whiskey at the Lahore Gymkhana that September 6 evening. That the general’s arrogance had to lick the dirt, because of Pakistan’s ‘heroic  resistance’, is still making the rounds to rake up popular jeers. However, those few who have still had the scholar’s integrity, and objectivity, to dig up truth from under the rubble of doctored history haven’t shied away from stating the whole truth of what went on before that fateful day of September 6 when Indian tanks did, after all, roll across the border between the two countries near Lahore.

Strangely, the architects of the war weren’t the generals in uniform but the neatly attired, suave and dashing Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then Foreign Minister in Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s cabinet. ZAB was seen in Pakistan as Ayub’s heir-apparent, whom the soldier-president was believed to be grooming to take over from him, one day. But ZAB was greedy for power and wasn’t prepared to wait. In his lust for glory, he thought he’d come up with an ace, a win-win throw of the dice that would catapult him to the top of Pakistan’s power pyramid in one swoop. ZAB, with his gift of the gab, convinced Ayub that the time to wrest Kashmir back from India’s hands was Pakistan’s for the taking. India was still reeling under the blight of its 1962 debacle in NEFA (North East Frontier Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh) against China. The morale of its military was low. So was its people’s faith in their political leadership since the demise of the charismatic Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, a year earlier. Ironically, ZAB had represented Pakistan at Nehru’s funeral.

It was ZAB’s brain-child to infiltrate Pakistani commandos in Indian-held Kashmir, in the summer of 1965, under the alluring code-name, Gibraltar, to rekindle memories of the Muslim conquest of Spain, in the early 8th century. ZAB was confident that the commando infiltration would trigger a general uprising by the Kashmiris against India, and Pakistan would use that smokescreen to capture Srinagar. At the very least, he argued, the moribund Kashmir issue would be internationalised and the world would rush to douse the fires in Pakistan’s favour. Strangely, another soldier of fortune, General Pervez Musharraf, came up with the same logic to unleash his ill-fated military adventure in Kargil, in 1999. The result, in both cases, was disastrous. The 1965 infiltration back-fired when the Kashmiris didn’t rise up against their ‘occupiers’ and the army was forced to deploy its Plan-B, code-named ‘Grand Slam.’ This was the curtain-raiser that provoked India to open a larger front as its payback to Pakistan. The war didn’t last long. In just 17 days, both combatants ran out of fire-power. The ceasefire was more out of mutual exhaustion than anything else. Eventually, the Russians induced both to write a sombre footnote to a grisly, bloody and totally useless episode at Tashkent, in January 1966.

ZAB didn’t become a hero of the 1965 war. He was kicked out in ignominy by Ayub. But he was too incorrigible and over-ambitious to be restrained for long. He managed to inveigle Ayub’s successor, General Yahya Khan, into short-changing the Bengalis of East Pakistan, following the December 1970 general elections. Bangladesh was the result of ZAB’s corrosive power grab. But it still took another war with India, of 1971, before ZAB would climb to power in a truncated Pakistan — on the back of a defeated, demoralised and humiliated army — as the only ‘national’ leader capable of picking up the pieces of a shattered Pakistan — a product of his Machiavellian lust for power. In the fitness of things, ZAB was, eventually, made a horrible example by another General, Zia-ul-Haq, six years hence.

What is the moral of this cloak-and-dagger 50-year-old episode that spawned one war and laid the groundwork for another within a span of five years? It’s none other than that cynicism, myopia and unbridled pandering to ambition by a power-driven political leadership can spell disaster. It becomes lethal and a self-fulfilling recipe for doom when matched with the limited vision of a chauvinistic military brass.

Fifty years on, the psychosis of war lingers on between India and Pakistan. The prevailing ambience, on both sides of the divide, is as jingoistic as it was in the pre-1965 war period. Peace and normalcy between neighbours is as elusive today as it was 50 years ago. Sabre-rattling is still the name of the game and threatening the ‘enemy’ with doomsday scenario in the event of another war is, currently, the buzzword. Ironically, neither side seems ready to learn from their own experience, which is tragic. What do historians say about a people too naïve, or self-absorbed, to learn from their past mistakes? That they will be condemned to repeat them, time and time again. It’s high time for saner sense and cooler nerves to take over. But is anyone listening?

- The writer is a former Pakistani diplomat.