The message has been delivered. I know it's difficult for you, but suck it up. Kashmir is still with India.
It's not India that started the war for Lahore, it's Pakistan that started the war for Kashmir, thinking locals would rise to help their Pakistani brothers.
@Psychic I want you to go through the exact history of what happened during that time. Nationalism is one thing, and I understand. But that should not give way to jingoism at any stage. I will not tell that to anybody and everybody.
I have a feeling that you have certain degree of rationality.
The GHQ in Rawalpindi, did not have any idea that India will open up a second front in the flat lands, where the tanks can hit the black top. At times it seems so childish, arguing about these things with people who don't know head or tail about the chain of events.
To me, it does not really matter who won or who lost some 50 years back when the World was entirely a different place, South Asia in particular.
Just for your information, I'm quoting Babar Ayaz, an eminent Pakistani author and veteran journalist :
Even 48 years after 1965 war, children in schools across Pakistan are taught that the unreliable India attacked Pakistan in the middle of the night on 6 September 1965. Though military historians agree that Pakistan did not win the war, which in the first place they did not anticipate, the entire propaganda machinery misinformed the people that war had been won and how the Hindu army cannot fight the Muslim army. Pakistan had to lobby hard with the international community to intervene for a ceasefire. Though the Pakistani soldiers and officers fought valiantly, so did the other side. India did not open the East Pakistan front in a big way; they just bombed Dacca and Chittagong a couple of times. Either they wanted to concentrate on West Pakistan, or they just wanted to teach a lesson that no covert war would be tolerated. Shaukat Riza underlined: ‘As early as 1950 Indian Prime Minister Nehru had warned Pakistan that an attack on Kashmir would mean a general war, and if a war is imposed on India it would be fought, as far as possible, on Pakistan soil.’ 6 India had moved its forces towards Jammu and Kashmir in 1951, when there was a lot of irresponsible talk about ‘jihad’ against India as mentioned by Nehru, in his letter written to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. Though Riza has discussed the perspective of the 1965 war and accepted the involvement of Mujahideen, he has not mentioned ‘Operation Gibraltar’. Instead, he has talked about ‘Operation Grand Slam’, which he says ‘was a gamble in which the other side did not play according to our rules. To Indian troops in Chhamb area the trajectories of shell landing on their position was immaterial. In attacking across the ceasefire line we convinced ourselves that the other side would limit the fighting to Kashmir.’
Riza puts the blame of this war harshly on the then foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for convincing Ayub that the war would remain restricted to Kashmir. And mildly blames Ayub for his naiveté to believe in the advisers, who failed to envision the Indian reaction. More criticism of Bhutto’s hawkish policies as foreign minister, which resulted in the 1965 war, can be found in other recorded history of this futile Pakistani adventure. He (Bhutto) also tried to woo the US-led Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) countries to help Pakistan, although it was clear that the only purpose of this alliance was to counter communism in this region. America had already warned Pakistan on using its equipment in the Rann of Kutch battle a year earlier.
Quoting Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Pakistan’s retired chief of air staff, former foreign minister, Abdul Sattar has recorded: ‘The operation name Gibraltar, prepared by Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, was approved. Calling for incursions by Kashmiri volunteers into India-held Kashmir, it was based on three assumptions – people of Kashmir would rise to support guerillas, a large-scale Indian offensive against Azad Kashmir was unlikely, and the possibility of attack across international border could be ruled out – all of which turned out to be wrong.’ 7 Sattar has also disclosed that ‘neither the air force nor the navy was informed about Operation Gibraltar and the fact that the army did not prepare for the contingency of war is further evidence of his [Ayub] anti-war intentions.’ 8 Finally, the then Soviet Union prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, who had good influence on the Indian government, brokered the Tashkent Agreement. Ayub Khan signed it but his Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had assured him of Chinese help before starting the Operation Gibraltar, opposed this peace treaty. Sensing that he might be sacked for the 1965 debacle, Bhutto left Ayub and cashed on the anti-Indian sentiment of the people in Punjab. The Punjabis were also under the spell of the propaganda that the war was started by India, as they knew nothing about Pakistan’s covert operation. Although now the consensus among various writers on this subject is that there was a stalemate at the end of this seventeen-day war, Pakistanis are still fooled that they were winning the war when Ayub agreed to the ceasefire. Islamic fervour and Pakistani nationalism was exploited to the hilt during and after this war.
