How Indian Insiders Saw 1965 War?

[harpoon]

A candid discussion on 1965 war by Pakistani:

 

[Infinity]

India & Pakistan were there, where it was........................and so was Kashmir.............If you say India was the Aggressor then Pakistan well defended, but if Pakistan was the aggressor India too well defended its territories......................

 

[Srinivas]

Because neither country would be able to hold on to any territory they "conquered". Even if we conquered Lahore, it would be no use to us and we would eventually have to return it to Pakistani because most people in Lahore would be anti-Indian and pro-Pak and they would revolt/riot, etc. Same with any territory Pak gained in Rajasthan or Indian Punjab. However, the same cannot be said of Kashmir, if Pak indeed had conquered Kashmir which it set out to do in 1965, we might have never gotten Kashmir back after. Hence, we met our war objectives of defending Kashmir, as that was all that mattered to us.

The fact that Pakistan went from conquering Kashmir to defending Lahore by the tooth should tell you how the war in 1965 exactly shaped out. Thereis a reason that you celebrate "Defence (of Lahore) Day" rather than "Invasion (of Kashmir) Day".

No matter how much you try to twist history (which happens to be quite the rage in Pakistan), you will forever have to live with the fact that despite help from Iran and China, you barely defended Lahore (and in no certain means, definitely lost the war).

Well said mate. The author in the article is discussing about the general not being adventurous or agressive, Here the invading force failed to take advantage and allowed time for the enemy to take advantage and reinforce. The agreement took place in Tashkent in Russia, the then USSR, an ally of India which indicates it was India who dictated the outcome.
By that time Indian forces encountered a fierce resistance at Sialkot put up by the arriving reinforcements, had the general been adventurous Indian forces should have captured Lahore.
Eventually Pakistan was out of supplies and cannot withstand war situation after 15 days of war and agreed to peace agreement.

 

[Srinivas]

This one time it may be advisable for Indians to let the Pakistanis go. Each nation after all needs an occasion to smile at themselves. They would like to see some positives in 65 for 71 had none.

The 65 war that began in Sept had its origins in the Rann of Kutchh incidents earlier that year. Ayub , the self promoted Field Marshal felt he could pry J&K from India. What he then did was Op Gibraltar - insertion of SSG into J&K:

(1) Salahuddin Force” operating in Srinagar Valley

(2) “Ghaznavi Force “ in Mendhar-Rajauri area,

(3) “Tariq Force” in Dras-Kargil area,

(4) “Babar Force “in Nowshera-Sundarbani area,

(5) “Qasim Force” in Bandipura-Sonarwain area,

(6) “Khalid Force” in Qazinag-Naugam area,

(7) “Nusrat Force” in Tithwal-Tangdhar area,

(8) “Sikandar Force” in Gurais area

(9) “Khilji Force” in Kel-Minimarg area.

It began in Aug 65 and failed to meet its objectives.

Op Grand Slam was launched to capture Chamb and threaten Akhnur as it was feared that Muzaffarabad was threatened. Maj Gen Akhtar Malik was the GOC of 12 Infantry Division tasked for this. Half way through the war for some inexplicable reason he was replaced by Maj Gen Yahya Khan. This gave the Indians a well needed pause to consolidate themselves and stop the advancing Pak forces.

It was against this back drop that the IA then launched an offensive to threaten Lahore - a high value objective whose loss would be unacceptable to the enemy. It had the desired results and compelled Pak to recoil & shift troops south from Chamb - Akhnur area to defend Lahore.

The war on the Pakistani side was thus conducted disinterestedly because the higher leadership was simply irresolute and was not prepared or interested in fighting the war which came as a rude shock to them once the Indians attacked Lahore.

Post No 1 talks of various incidents that happened on the Indian side. It may be remembered that both IA & PA then were like huge lumbering armies equipped mostly with WWII equipment mostly inexperienced in sustained operations in the plains. India exploited its advantage of depth, numbers and exercised its option of opening up fronts away from the area of choosing where the enemy would like to fight.

Nothing surprising therefore that small battles dictated the war . Overall both nations would like to feel that they achieved their war aims.

One can only question what the war aims of Pak were ? For India it was to defend its own territory & take the war into enemy land, make him recoil .

Ayub was militarily naive enough to think that India would not start an all out war if Pakistan went for what Ayub himself called “India’s jugular vein” i.e. Akhnur.

Grand Slam harmed the Pakistani military cause in two ways.

Firstly, it provoked India to launch an all out war which Ayub did not have the resolution to fight and which Musa did not have the military genius to conduct!

Secondly, as a result of this indecision Pakistan failed to capture Akhnur whose loss would have led to a serious operational imbalance in the Indian dispositions in Kashmir and would have weakened India’s resolve to attack Lahore and opposite Chawinda without first redressing the serious imbalance opposite Kashmir.

Thus Pakistani military/political leadership failed in both aims; ie to sever the jugular and to prevent an all out war; and primarily because of irresolution on part of their own higher leadership rather than enemy resistance. Thus Ayub and his team were not propelled by a burning desire to defeat the enemy by decisive conduct of operations but by an essentially defensive attitude.

This lack of ability to see / war game things through to their logical end keeping all options available to India in mind has been visible again & again. Longewala, Kargil are some examples which proves that fortune does not always favour the brave - it frowns at the stupid.

Majority of the names are kings from out side the sub continent

 

[rockstarIN]

There are a lot of similarities in 1965 & Kargil.

Both failed very badly though India was less aggressive in 1999.

 

[niaz]

I was a student in London at that time. I read about the war in the UK newspapers and also went Pakistan High Commission in Lowndes Square ( at that time one of the nearby buildings served as a hostel for Pak students) where one could get hold of a couple days old Pakistani Newspapers.
After 47 years and knowing a lot more about what actually happened, I can safely say that we were fed on lies and propaganda. Since Indians (at least those who live in North India) are not that much different in their behaviour patterns; I have no doubt that as there were as many lies and venom in their reporting.

Ayaz Amir was in the Army but took an early release. IMO the following article is very apt.

Of times lost

Ayaz Amir
Friday, September 07, 2012
From Print Edition


Islamabad diary

Back from a trip to Amritsar and Delhi on Wednesday evening, and too tired to go on to Chakwal as I had meant to – PIA never disappointing, the flight from Delhi late by three hours – I sought refuge under the roof of the Avari, where my poverty usually takes me when in the favoured city of the Emperor Jahangir.

And as I sat down to write this on Thursday morning, from somewhere down below on the Mall – it will always be the Mall whatever patriotic name we give it – came the ever-enchanting voice of Noor Jahan the Second, the first being the royal consort of Jahangir. She was singing that haunting song, “Rah-e-haq ke shaheedo...”, a tribute to the martyrs of the 1965 war, and it came suddenly to me that this was the Defence of Pakistan Day, an anniversary remembered with less and less fervour as the years pass...not because respect for our fighting soldiers has in any way diminished but because the truth about that conflict is now more widely understood.

It was a war that Pakistan did not seek; it was a war into which it stumbled. The hawks – the two leading ones being Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the 12 Division Commander, Maj Gen Akhtar Hussain Malik – forgot to make the little calculation that any adventure undertaken in Kashmir would impel or tempt India to straighten out the balance somewhere else, at a time and place of its choosing.

When our Kashmir adventure turned into a serious threat to Indian forces in Kashmir, to no one’s surprise except ours Indian forces crossed the international border on the front stretching from Sialkot to Lahore.

Our soldiers fought bravely, at places magnificently, as did junior officers up to the level of battalion commanders. A few brigadiers too distinguished themselves. (The Indian official account of the war, which can be read on the net, generously mentions the performance of some of our fighting units.) And of course the air force acquitted itself superbly. But if one looks for Mansteins in the higher echelons of command one is likely to be disappointed. There were none, not one strategic manoeuvre worth remembering.

Our self-appointed field marshal, Ayub Khan Tareen, lived to rue his blunder. After the war he was no longer the same man and his grip on national affairs weakened. The supreme irony of course was that Bhutto whose role in pushing the war was second to none exploited the outcome, and the subsequent Tashkent agreement, to spread the insinuation that had not Ayub chickened out our forces would have won a signal triumph...which of course was complete nonsense.

Premier Chou En-lai counselled a bewildered field marshal to conduct a guerrilla war, vacating cities if they had to be vacated and conducting a war from behind every bush and boulder. But he could have been preaching to the mountains. The ceasefire when it came, with no little pushing by the superpowers, came not a moment too soon for our exhausted high command.

But for years and years the mythology persisted, and it was woven into a national legend, that India was out to destroy Pakistan and would have succeeded but for our brave armed forces. The Defence of Pakistan Day commemorates this historiography.

This mythology would not have mattered if it had not led to lasting, and baleful, consequences. We had a fairly open relationship with India until then. But with the war the barriers went up and all ties were cut; defence spending sharply increased; more divisions were raised. The ramparts of the national security state rose higher. And barriers went up in our minds as well. India was the enemy and this doctrine superseded all others.

We had been doing fairly well economically, ahead then of such states as Malaysia and South Korea. The war put us off the rails completely. (The only good to come of it were the war songs of Noor Jahan, which are still a marvel to listen to.) With the 1971 war the dogmas learned from the 1965 conflict were reinforced.



Strange, is it not, that the brightest politician of his age should have been the prime carrier of this policy of revanchism and hate? We will fight for a thousand years, was one of his clarion calls, anti-Indianism a plank – nay, an essential component – of his extraordinary success in Punjab in the 1970 elections. And it was Punjab which catapulted him to national power, not Sindh.



Think again...Punjab dyed in the hues of chauvinism, the country as a whole wedded to the notion of undying hostility towards India...the high priest of this doctrine was the secular, de luxe whisky-sipping (occasionally guzzling) Bhutto. Who listens to the boring lectures, or the stale oratory, of the custodians of the two-nation theory headquartered permanently in Lahore? Bhutto’s oratory had a mesmeric effect on the Punjabi mind. And his oratory had two key components: pseudo-revolutionism and jingoistic nationalism.



Only now are the barriers raised then coming down slowly, not because of any fresh dawn of enlightenment but the pressure of cruel circumstances. Our army is engaged in no fake adventure on the eastern front. It is caught in a real and brutal war on our western marches, battling an enemy all the more sinister because the strength and staying power of that enemy comes not from evil Jew or conniving Hindu but from within our own ranks.

Our Indian wars, no matter the causes, were simple, black-and-white affairs. We knew who the army was and Noor Jahan had no trouble singing the glories of our valour, real or imaginary. The war we are now engaged in is so much more complex because the enemy is not only the visible enemy we see, cutting the throats of our soldiers in the name of Islam. The enemy is also our own confusion which still cannot make out what is at stake.

At stake is the nation’s soul, its direction. We emerge from the smoke and fire of this conflict and we can hope for national salvation. We lose, or remain victims of confusion, and we might as well seek a confederation with Somalia or the Sudan (with apologies to both these nations).

A Pakistan which has forsaken the tolerance sought to be inculcated by its founding fathers, a Pakistan losing no sleep at the persecution of its minorities and the killing of Shias, a country which can countenance the victimisation of an Aasia Bibi or a Rimsha Masih, is a country in dire need of asking some hard questions of itself. All injustice is bad; injustice perpetrated in the name of religion is infinitely worse.

We can be such hypocrites. Are the lives of the Caliphs dead pieces of parchment or living examples to follow? What would the great Omar have done if after a short absence from Makkah he had come to know of the plight of a young Christian girl, Rimsha Masih?

There and then he would have fired the interior minister, the Rehman Malik of his time, and asked the inspector general of police, the kotwal, to run round the city walls with a knapsack on his back. And he would have carried the girl Rimsha on his shoulders to her house and asked her mother if they had enough to eat, and if anything was found wanting, on bended knee he would have cried for Allah’s forgiveness. For was it not Omar who said that if a dog went hungry by the banks of the Euphrates he, the Caliph, would be asked about it on the Day of Judgment?

The Islam which spread so fast from the sands of the Hejaz was a thing of achievement and glory. And to think what we have made of it in this republic founded in the name of Islam?

Email: winlust@yahoo.com

Of times lost - Ayaz Amir

 

[INDIC]

Why Pakistan never want to talk about Operation Gibraltar.

 

[ajtr]

Why Pakistan never want to talk about Operation Gibraltar.

Coz that operation was carriesd out by non state actors/mujaheedins/kashmiri freedom fighters.....

 

[Ticker]

Why Pakistan never want to talk about Operation Gibraltar.

Who told you that. Start talking.

 

[INDIC]

Who told you that. Start talking.

Look what I found.

 

[Ticker]

Who told you that. Start talking.

See, some body has already started talking and punching key without giving any thought to what is being typed.

Coz that operation was carriesd out by non state actors/mujaheedins/kashmiri freedom fighters.....
Original Post By ajtr

I told you. Who stops you. Start talking.

Look what I found.

Good find.

Keep at it.

 

[ajtr]

See, some body has already started talking and punching key without giving any thought to what is being typed.



I told you. Who stops you. Start talking.

Ofcourse i being pakistani voice can take credit of speaking about it..............

 

[hassana]

I can not understand the competing mentality on both sides ,who killed the most.? Just close your eyes for one minute and pretend this area is united imagine the miracules we can perform limtless.

 

[ajtr]

I can not understand the competing mentality on both sides ,who killed the most.? Just close your eyes for one minute and pretend this area is united imagine the miracules we can perform limtless.

what you result got by your imagination and pretension after closing your eyes......

 

[Last Hope]

Being an aggressor, Pakistan's aim was to liberate Kashmir from Indian occupation. But they failed.

Indian aim was to take over Lahore and surrounding areas, but they failed leaving huge chunks of armor lying in Punjab with Indian soldiers abandoning tanks and running back. Hence Indian aim failed too.

If it were not for Kashmir, 1965 would have been a victory for us. Other efforts like aerial war and stopping huge forces from entering Lahore was tremendous.