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VIEW : Army left high and dry I
A R Siddiqi
A multiple paraplegic product of partition, the Pakistan army, within less than a couple of months of its caesarian birth, found itself at war with India over Kashmir
The opaque domineering Pakistan military remains an institution unto itself, casting large shadow over a fledgling government already dogged by an energetic, opportunistic opposition and activist Supreme Court.
Thus comments an observer in a recent issue of Time. Without reflecting on the wisdom of the commentator and the ease with which he sums up the character of the Pakistan military (army), the basis of his judgmental statement remains open to question.
It needs to be admitted that army had not only domineering chiefs like Ayub and Yahya but also Musa and Tikka, and as discreet as Jehangir Karamat who resigned at the behest of former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif (October 1999), scrupulously loyal to the government of the day. Known as the Butcher of Balochistan and Bangladesh, Tikka served the government of the day (1971-1976) in an almost Balaclava spirit: Theres not to reason why? Theirs not to give reply, Theirs but to Do and die.
In my own long years as a professional journalist and PR practitioner, I have often come across foreign journalists and writers jumping to conclusions. Their penchant to let the preconceived and half-baked opinions tends to colour their accounts of as complex a subject as the state of civil-military relations in Pakistan.
A multiple paraplegic product of partition, the Pakistan army, within less than a couple of months of its caesarian birth, found itself at war with India over Kashmir. Who might have been more at fault than the other in initiating the war, is too anachronistic and controversial a subject to recall with any chance of a rational debate. India initiated war under the cover of a fraudulent instrument of accession signed by the Hindu raja of the Muslim majority state accounting for some 80 percent of the states population. Pakistan was a still an impossible hodgepodge of a state, quite unable to pay India in the same coin. Its army was still without a nucleus under the command of a British general, Sir Frank Messervy. Incredibly enough, the Pakistani British chief was operationally responsible to the Supreme Commander. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, headquartered in New Delhi. Pakistan army being still in a nascent state, the civilian took charge of the war.
The founder of the state and Father of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the governor general, directed the acting army chief, Lt-General Sir Douglas Gracey to move in a brigade-plus in aid of the Kashmiri regulars (mujahideen). Gracey regretted and to end the matter there, Mr Jinnah then summoned the joint chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude to meet him in Lahore. Auchinleck also regretted to leave the staff and operational conduct of the war to the civilian authorities.
The Frontier province premier, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan launched the frontier tribesmen to pre-empt the Indian military invasion of the state. There was no central command of the irregular effort form the Pakistan side. An ex-INA officer, General Kayani, and a retired Indian army major, Shaukat Hayat Khan wrangled over the command of forces, practically non-existent. The Frontier tribesmen, mujahideen, in the opening phase of their lightening advance made Baramula within less than a couple of days to use it as their main base. The leading elements hit the outskirts of Srinagar entering into the capital when they broke ranks and went berserk. That gave the Indian government all the time in the world to rush their forces by air using mostly BOAC (British One Corporation) passenger planes.
Thus the first India-Pakistan war happened to be largely under a civilian command and control in Pakistan. A brigade under the command of Brigadier Mohammad Akbar Khan was dispatched to the warzone. Officers and men committed were treated as absent without official leave (AWOL) to protect them from court martial.
It was not before May 1948 that Pakistan formally admitted to the army being there in a supporting role for the Kashmiri freedom fighters. Thus the civil and military elements had been in one and the same bracket. The so-called domineering army acted and conducted itself strictly according to professional norms. There was nothing opaque about the role of the army in the war.
The abrupt end of the Kashmir war left a coterie of frontline soldiers against the Centre. They believed Kashmir was in their hands when government let it slip through their fingertips. An essentially weak and indecisive government called off the war to leave the army high and dry, denying it its first chance to prove its mettle in war. That created the first wave of resentment against government under an incompetent leader. That set the pattern of civil-military relations for all time to come.
Barely a couple of years later, in March, 1951, Brigadier Akbar staged an abortive coup détat.
Again in March, 1953, martial law was imposed in Lahore by the GOC, Lahore, Major-General Muhammad Azam khan in the aftermath of a religio-political movement going haywire. The movement turned against the Qadianis accused of doubting the status of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as the last messenger of Allah. Martial law was imposed under the orders of the central government. Rather than underscoring the military hegemony, the Lahore martial law highlighted the governments own imbecility to take control of the situation.
(To be continued)
The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk
VIEW : Army left high and dry — II
— A R Siddiqi
The 1965 war brought Islamic sentiment into the dazzling limelight as a weapon of war
By a rational reckoning so far, the army would be more of a critical observer than an active player in Pakistan’s political roulette. The army would rather be playing a sort of Solitaire (a card game also known as Patience) to give politicians all the room they need to make a mess before looking to the army to come to the aid of civil power. The army may well be forced to intervene in a firm but benign mode, short of martial law and come in aid only to help the political process go towards the desired climax. Developed, the Solitaire may well be codified as the ‘Kayani Doctrine 2012’.
The Lahore martial law had a seminal importance for the exploitation of the military arm to pull the religio-political chestnuts out of the fire. The Objectives Resolution adopted earlier by the Constituent Assembly in 1949 made Islam the state religion. The Resolution was incorporated in the constitution under General Ziaul Haq’s martial law (1977-1988). Whereas the anti-Qadiani movement, leading to the Lahore martial law, was the thin end of the Islamic wedge, the 1965 war brought it full circle.
The 1965 war brought Islamic sentiment into the dazzling limelight as a weapon of war. Even in the opening phase of the local battle in the Rann of Kutch, in the depth of the Sindh desert, the Islamic lore was invoked. Achieving the element of surprise in Rann, Pakistan won a brigade-plus battle against the Indians. Brigadier Iftikhar Janjua captured two salient features at Bair Bet and Point-79. The first military success of its kind in a regular two-sided military operation, a tactical achievement, was projected as a great military triumph, celebrated countrywide.
Sindh was poetically renamed as Babul Qasim, doorway to Islam, commemorating the conquest of Sindh by the young Islamic warrior, Mohammad Bin Qasim, in the 8th century.
Ceasefire in the Rann turned out to be a travesty of peace. The mock guerrilla Operation Gibraltar, launched in the first week of August 1965, collapsed within less than a week of its launch. Grand Slam Operation was the next to follow. India responded in a pre-dawn invasion of Lahore on September 6, 1965. The September war, operationally an amalgam of mutually conflicting civil-military ambitions, ended without satisfying either. The military, under Field-Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, invoked the weapon of Islam even on the first day of the war. He recited the Kalama-e-Tayyaba in his first address in a broadcast to the nation at 12:00 high noon.
On the civilian side, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s foreign ministry was hoping for the war to end as a toss-up between heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. The war ended inconclusively to oblige neither. It did however invest the field marshal, the military genius and ‘generalissimo’, with his crown of thorns. The chief civilian planner, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, skipped and hopped to get himself out of the loop as nimbly as one could. The army high command under General Mohammad Musa, struck the motivational chord to soften the impact of the inconclusive war. Eventually, however, he had to bear his cross with the field marshal.
The army as a whole had to bite the bullet, losing much of its image of invincibility and triumph against ‘Hindu’ India. The boys, majors and lieutenant-colonels, had done pretty well while brigadiers and major-generals did not, with a few exceptions like Abrar’s GOC, Sixth Armoured Division and Tikka’s GOC Eighth Division (etc). As a whole, field commanders and staff planners stayed well below the expected level.
The Tashkent Declaration of January 1966 drove Bhutto to make a clean break from the (mis)fortunes of war to leave the field marshal and the army high and dry. Things would never be the same again for the exalted status of the military as a whole. Ayub’s darkened military image would lead to his abysmal fall in 1969. Army chief General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan replaced him. Since his takeover on March 25, 1969 until December 7, 1970, Yahya behaved as an ‘interim president’ — his inner ambition and lust for power notwithstanding. Pakistan had under him its democratic elections for the first time since its inception. As expected, the elections introduced Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League (AL) as the largest single party way ahead of Bhutto’s West Pakistan’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), with 85 seats in the National Assembly. That awakened the genie of absolute power in the army, supported by the PPP under its dynamic chief, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto did not accept the hegemonic AL on the basis of the electoral majority to create a terminal, life-and-death inter-wing (national) crisis. Yahya opted for the PPP to compromise his neutrality as the head of the state and supreme commander. Mujib and Bhutto set out on the warpath, bringing the army into the fray with a bang. AL was, with its top leadership incarcerated or fled to India, banned ab initio, thus cancelling out the elections altogether. The civil war in Pakistan led to an India-Pakistan war ending in a military debacle for Pakistan and the separation of its eastern wing.
That brought Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto into absolute power, initially as president and martial law administrator and subsequently as prime minister.
Arising from the great military debacle in 1971 remains the question: why should the army be the monkey of the piece to pull the civilian chestnuts out of the fire? The question remains open for the nation to answer more urgently now than ever. Much of the army high command is scrupulously keeping itself out of the political hodgepodge, minding its own turf. Meanwhile, let us all hope for the best.
(Concluded)
The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk
A R Siddiqi
A multiple paraplegic product of partition, the Pakistan army, within less than a couple of months of its caesarian birth, found itself at war with India over Kashmir
The opaque domineering Pakistan military remains an institution unto itself, casting large shadow over a fledgling government already dogged by an energetic, opportunistic opposition and activist Supreme Court.
Thus comments an observer in a recent issue of Time. Without reflecting on the wisdom of the commentator and the ease with which he sums up the character of the Pakistan military (army), the basis of his judgmental statement remains open to question.
It needs to be admitted that army had not only domineering chiefs like Ayub and Yahya but also Musa and Tikka, and as discreet as Jehangir Karamat who resigned at the behest of former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif (October 1999), scrupulously loyal to the government of the day. Known as the Butcher of Balochistan and Bangladesh, Tikka served the government of the day (1971-1976) in an almost Balaclava spirit: Theres not to reason why? Theirs not to give reply, Theirs but to Do and die.
In my own long years as a professional journalist and PR practitioner, I have often come across foreign journalists and writers jumping to conclusions. Their penchant to let the preconceived and half-baked opinions tends to colour their accounts of as complex a subject as the state of civil-military relations in Pakistan.
A multiple paraplegic product of partition, the Pakistan army, within less than a couple of months of its caesarian birth, found itself at war with India over Kashmir. Who might have been more at fault than the other in initiating the war, is too anachronistic and controversial a subject to recall with any chance of a rational debate. India initiated war under the cover of a fraudulent instrument of accession signed by the Hindu raja of the Muslim majority state accounting for some 80 percent of the states population. Pakistan was a still an impossible hodgepodge of a state, quite unable to pay India in the same coin. Its army was still without a nucleus under the command of a British general, Sir Frank Messervy. Incredibly enough, the Pakistani British chief was operationally responsible to the Supreme Commander. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, headquartered in New Delhi. Pakistan army being still in a nascent state, the civilian took charge of the war.
The founder of the state and Father of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the governor general, directed the acting army chief, Lt-General Sir Douglas Gracey to move in a brigade-plus in aid of the Kashmiri regulars (mujahideen). Gracey regretted and to end the matter there, Mr Jinnah then summoned the joint chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude to meet him in Lahore. Auchinleck also regretted to leave the staff and operational conduct of the war to the civilian authorities.
The Frontier province premier, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan launched the frontier tribesmen to pre-empt the Indian military invasion of the state. There was no central command of the irregular effort form the Pakistan side. An ex-INA officer, General Kayani, and a retired Indian army major, Shaukat Hayat Khan wrangled over the command of forces, practically non-existent. The Frontier tribesmen, mujahideen, in the opening phase of their lightening advance made Baramula within less than a couple of days to use it as their main base. The leading elements hit the outskirts of Srinagar entering into the capital when they broke ranks and went berserk. That gave the Indian government all the time in the world to rush their forces by air using mostly BOAC (British One Corporation) passenger planes.
Thus the first India-Pakistan war happened to be largely under a civilian command and control in Pakistan. A brigade under the command of Brigadier Mohammad Akbar Khan was dispatched to the warzone. Officers and men committed were treated as absent without official leave (AWOL) to protect them from court martial.
It was not before May 1948 that Pakistan formally admitted to the army being there in a supporting role for the Kashmiri freedom fighters. Thus the civil and military elements had been in one and the same bracket. The so-called domineering army acted and conducted itself strictly according to professional norms. There was nothing opaque about the role of the army in the war.
The abrupt end of the Kashmir war left a coterie of frontline soldiers against the Centre. They believed Kashmir was in their hands when government let it slip through their fingertips. An essentially weak and indecisive government called off the war to leave the army high and dry, denying it its first chance to prove its mettle in war. That created the first wave of resentment against government under an incompetent leader. That set the pattern of civil-military relations for all time to come.
Barely a couple of years later, in March, 1951, Brigadier Akbar staged an abortive coup détat.
Again in March, 1953, martial law was imposed in Lahore by the GOC, Lahore, Major-General Muhammad Azam khan in the aftermath of a religio-political movement going haywire. The movement turned against the Qadianis accused of doubting the status of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as the last messenger of Allah. Martial law was imposed under the orders of the central government. Rather than underscoring the military hegemony, the Lahore martial law highlighted the governments own imbecility to take control of the situation.
(To be continued)
The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk
VIEW : Army left high and dry — II
— A R Siddiqi
The 1965 war brought Islamic sentiment into the dazzling limelight as a weapon of war
By a rational reckoning so far, the army would be more of a critical observer than an active player in Pakistan’s political roulette. The army would rather be playing a sort of Solitaire (a card game also known as Patience) to give politicians all the room they need to make a mess before looking to the army to come to the aid of civil power. The army may well be forced to intervene in a firm but benign mode, short of martial law and come in aid only to help the political process go towards the desired climax. Developed, the Solitaire may well be codified as the ‘Kayani Doctrine 2012’.
The Lahore martial law had a seminal importance for the exploitation of the military arm to pull the religio-political chestnuts out of the fire. The Objectives Resolution adopted earlier by the Constituent Assembly in 1949 made Islam the state religion. The Resolution was incorporated in the constitution under General Ziaul Haq’s martial law (1977-1988). Whereas the anti-Qadiani movement, leading to the Lahore martial law, was the thin end of the Islamic wedge, the 1965 war brought it full circle.
The 1965 war brought Islamic sentiment into the dazzling limelight as a weapon of war. Even in the opening phase of the local battle in the Rann of Kutch, in the depth of the Sindh desert, the Islamic lore was invoked. Achieving the element of surprise in Rann, Pakistan won a brigade-plus battle against the Indians. Brigadier Iftikhar Janjua captured two salient features at Bair Bet and Point-79. The first military success of its kind in a regular two-sided military operation, a tactical achievement, was projected as a great military triumph, celebrated countrywide.
Sindh was poetically renamed as Babul Qasim, doorway to Islam, commemorating the conquest of Sindh by the young Islamic warrior, Mohammad Bin Qasim, in the 8th century.
Ceasefire in the Rann turned out to be a travesty of peace. The mock guerrilla Operation Gibraltar, launched in the first week of August 1965, collapsed within less than a week of its launch. Grand Slam Operation was the next to follow. India responded in a pre-dawn invasion of Lahore on September 6, 1965. The September war, operationally an amalgam of mutually conflicting civil-military ambitions, ended without satisfying either. The military, under Field-Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, invoked the weapon of Islam even on the first day of the war. He recited the Kalama-e-Tayyaba in his first address in a broadcast to the nation at 12:00 high noon.
On the civilian side, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s foreign ministry was hoping for the war to end as a toss-up between heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. The war ended inconclusively to oblige neither. It did however invest the field marshal, the military genius and ‘generalissimo’, with his crown of thorns. The chief civilian planner, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, skipped and hopped to get himself out of the loop as nimbly as one could. The army high command under General Mohammad Musa, struck the motivational chord to soften the impact of the inconclusive war. Eventually, however, he had to bear his cross with the field marshal.
The army as a whole had to bite the bullet, losing much of its image of invincibility and triumph against ‘Hindu’ India. The boys, majors and lieutenant-colonels, had done pretty well while brigadiers and major-generals did not, with a few exceptions like Abrar’s GOC, Sixth Armoured Division and Tikka’s GOC Eighth Division (etc). As a whole, field commanders and staff planners stayed well below the expected level.
The Tashkent Declaration of January 1966 drove Bhutto to make a clean break from the (mis)fortunes of war to leave the field marshal and the army high and dry. Things would never be the same again for the exalted status of the military as a whole. Ayub’s darkened military image would lead to his abysmal fall in 1969. Army chief General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan replaced him. Since his takeover on March 25, 1969 until December 7, 1970, Yahya behaved as an ‘interim president’ — his inner ambition and lust for power notwithstanding. Pakistan had under him its democratic elections for the first time since its inception. As expected, the elections introduced Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League (AL) as the largest single party way ahead of Bhutto’s West Pakistan’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), with 85 seats in the National Assembly. That awakened the genie of absolute power in the army, supported by the PPP under its dynamic chief, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto did not accept the hegemonic AL on the basis of the electoral majority to create a terminal, life-and-death inter-wing (national) crisis. Yahya opted for the PPP to compromise his neutrality as the head of the state and supreme commander. Mujib and Bhutto set out on the warpath, bringing the army into the fray with a bang. AL was, with its top leadership incarcerated or fled to India, banned ab initio, thus cancelling out the elections altogether. The civil war in Pakistan led to an India-Pakistan war ending in a military debacle for Pakistan and the separation of its eastern wing.
That brought Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto into absolute power, initially as president and martial law administrator and subsequently as prime minister.
Arising from the great military debacle in 1971 remains the question: why should the army be the monkey of the piece to pull the civilian chestnuts out of the fire? The question remains open for the nation to answer more urgently now than ever. Much of the army high command is scrupulously keeping itself out of the political hodgepodge, minding its own turf. Meanwhile, let us all hope for the best.
(Concluded)
The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk
