A History of the Pakistan Army:
Wars and Insurrections
A fourth edition of A History of the Pakistan Army was published in December 2013. The book is being much revised and brought up to date with a great deal of hitherto unpublished information. There are four extra chapters, including one about Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, which includes a story about a honey trap:
After the parade and subsequent socialising we [the Attaché Corps] returned in the Navy launch across Karachi harbour, and when we arrived at the quay the [Pakistan army] female major was obviously having some difficulty in climbing the ladder, so again she was offered assistance by every male within reach (as it were), and smilingly accepted the arm of the Indian naval attaché and chatted with him all the way back to the hotel. That evening, when all the attachés had drinks in our hotel room, the Indian naval captain had his leg pulled by many of us. He had made a conquest, we laughed – until he began to look a little embarrassed and self-conscious, whereupon we curtailed our well-meant but rather juvenile attempts at humour.
But it was the lady major who had made the conquest.
In Islamabad some months later I received a late-night telephone call from the Indian Air Attaché to say that his High Commission was worried that his naval colleague had vanished and could I please make inquiries . . .
And the denouement is described.
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Comments on the last edition of the History included one from the former Director General of Military Operations in the Indian Army, Lieutenant General VR Raghavan, who observed that “This book has the special advantage of being written by an observant military author who is both candid and objective.”
And Lester Grau of the Foreign Military Studies Office at the US Military College at Fort Leavenworth – ‘the intellectual centre of the Army’ – wrote “I have read some three to four dozen books about South Asia. I only wish this could have been the first. It is a basic primer on an important regional military in a potential war zone.”
