Hundred per cent right.
As Akbar said somewhere, Allah was against Pakistan. (At least on these two occasions.)
1. That is true. Believe it or not, India had a newly raised brigade, with a brigade headquarters but no troops, and only a hotch-potch two or three battalions stood between General Malik and a breakthrough. And you know the unbelievable development: Musa Khan descending from the Heavens in a chopper, putting Yahya in charge and whisking away a completely dumbfounded Malik. His letter to his brother in later years, before his death in Turkey, makes melancholy reading.
That gave Lt. Gen. Harbaksh Singh the few days that he needed, and he managed to plug the gap.
Incidentally, the Brigadier who did the Rann of Kutch operations was a Corps Commander in 71, and he attacked at the same spot and broke through! And - wait for this - some squaddie saw his chopper passing, fired at it, and brought it down, and Eftekhar died of burn injuries
after having won a victory which nobody exploited!
If I was writing this as a fictional account, I would have been howled down.
2. I can't help wondering at this repeated again and again: tactical brilliance and strategic blindness.
3. Here you are being unfair to everybody else in Pakistan. This is what Bhutto had been aiming for from the outset, from his adventurous days as Ayub Khan's irresistibly charming and unstoppable (and lying) Foreign Minister. He wanted power, and he broke the Pakistan Army in his bid for power. He weakened it in 65, and he shattered it in 71 (do you recall that he replaced Gul Hassan Khan as C-in-C as the last step). Then he made his fatal error, of rebuilding it. Or perhaps he thought he was dooming it by appointing Zia and never thought of what might happen.
Sorry for the diversion.
Back to JF17 vs. J10. My take is: somewhere, sometime, you need to start
design from the ground up, but using sub-assemblies, not components. There isn't enough of a supply chain to do it from components. Having learnt to manufacture with components and raw materials will only help that higher level effort.
Second, I've said this before, about the PN, and I'll say it again, you need to have deterrent power - like Singapore, be a shrimp with teeth. Only in your case, you are far higher in the pecking order. A major investment in missiles, not MBTs; in attack helicopters, not in infantry regiments; in SAMs, network-centric resources and light planes with BVR, not glittering objects of desire.
Just my take. And there's always the chance that I've been paid to say this!!
OoH sorry.
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