Tiki Tam Tam
<b>MILITARY PROFESSIONALS</b>
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The contempt for the enemy (i.e. India) syndrome has afflicted the Pakistan military too for a long time, forgetting the fact that the Indian and Pakistani forces were part of the same armed forces with similar fighting traditions till 1947. The Indian soldier was contemptuously referred to as a dal-khor bania (lentil-eating moneylender) while we prided ourselves as a superior meat-eating warrior nation.
Flushed with pride in the wake of what really was a very minor operation in the Rann of Kutch in early 1965, we dreamt of marching on Delhi and raising the Pakistani flag on the Red Fort as we sat out the hot summer of 1965 in the field, with no senior officer ever talking any sense to us brash youngsters. (My late friend Rana Bilal and I got a good dressing down from the CO when we once suggested over lunch that the Indian soldier might have some fighting qualities too and that we shouldn’t take him very lightly). With barely six infantry and one and a half armoured divisions (6 Armoured Div being nothing more than the old 100 Armoured Brigade Group which I joined on getting commissioned in 1962) we deluded ourselves into thinking that we would easily overrun the much larger Indian forces.
The Indians played from a different sheet of music, and the rest is history. No lessons were learnt, and then we found ourselves mired in East Pakistan. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the conflict, the despised Bengali Mukti Bahini were no walkover as they fought tooth and nail for their freedom, and won the day with the support of the “lala.” One thing is beyond dispute: our generals sitting in Rawalpindi were well and truly out-generaled by their Indian counterparts, and we ended up losing half the country, notwithstanding the bravery of the Pakistani rank and file. As B.H. Liddell-Hart said, “Wars are won and lost in the minds of the generals, not in the bodies of their men.”
We still learnt no lessons: addressing the students of the 1981 Armed Forces War Course in which General Musharraf was then a student, the then CGS emphatically said that one Pakistani soldier is equal to ten Indian soldiers, forgetting the old adage that “God is on the side of the bigger battalions,” while faith and hope are not cogent factors in military planning. Several years later we got embroiled in Kargil, conveniently forgetting that the Indians were not ever going to give up an inch of what they consider to be their territory without a stiff fight, come what may. After the initial setbacks and intelligence failures, they threw everything into getting the heights vacated in Kargil, and seemed willing to spread the scope of the conflict to the international border, and even to indulge in nuclear brinkmanship.
The result was that Nawaz Sharif had to dash off to Washington DC, hat in hand, to beg Clinton to broker a ceasefire; the captured heights, held at the cost of heavy loss of life, had to be vacated. He paid the price for his follies soon thereafter.
The moral of the story? Those who invade other people’s land and underestimate the resolve of the enemy to resist the occupation do so at their own grave peril. People of occupied lands, when well led and motivated, will fight to the last man to win back their country for the grasp of the occupier, no matter what.
From the article “Never despise your enemy!” by BRIG M. SHER KHAN (RETD) that appeared in the Pakistani newspaper THE NATION published on Wednesday, January 17, 2007.