Ray

Lessons from 1965 and 1971 wars

COMMODORE (RETD) TARIQ MAJEED

Each of the two major India-Pakistan wars left its own grim lessons. There were, however, a number of important features and failures, which were common to both the wars. An intriguing but instructive feature, which holds a lesson for the next war, was that before each war the political scene in both Pakistan and India underwent significant changes. In May 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru died rather unexpectedly. More unexpectedly, Lal Bahadur Shastri, a lightweight politician became India’s premier. It immediately unsettled the previously stable Indian politics and policy planning.

In January 1965, the Indian army took a number of aggressive steps in the disputed area of Rann of Kutch, which set the ball rolling towards the September 1965 war. Earlier, in the same month, following elections in Pakistan, President Ayub Khan got a new term of office. It boosted his confidence. So, when the Indians embarked on an uncalled for aggression in the Rann of Kutch, Ayub Khan ordered retaliation. This led to the military clash in April-June 1965 which saw the Indian forces being routed, and which was the forerunner of the September war.

The political situation was reversed before the 1971 war. In India, the government was stable, in Pakistan unstable. Ayub Khan had been ousted by General Yahya Khan. In December 1970, he ordered general elections on a newly-devised joint electorate system. The cleverly manipulated elections placed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the top in East and West Pakistan respectively, and gave them the ‘mandate’ to create sharp polarisation in politics which crippled the government and the political process, and inflamed the insurgency in the Eastern wing.

Three months later, in elections in India, prime minister Indira Gandhi swept back into power with a bigger majority and an inflated ego. Within a month of her re-election in March 1971, as Major K.C. Praval discloses in Indian Army After Independence, Indira Gandhi ordered her military chiefs to prepare for a war against Pakistan in November 1971.

In both the wars Pakistan’s leaders did not have any national, political or even a military war aim. Operation Gibraltar, i.e, infiltration of commandos into occupied Kashmir in August 1965, planned by the foreign minister, Z.A. Bhutto, and approved by President Ayub, was also devoid of any clear aim. The vague aim was only to cause disturbances in the Indian Held Kashmir and foment a rebellion which would be made the basis of wide propaganda against India to draw the attention of the world to the Kashmir Issue and compel the UN to resolve it!

As for the aim in the 1965 war, it was left blank; because Pakistan’s top decision makers were convinced there would be no war! In 1971, the same blunder was repeated. Neither the government nor the armed forces had prepared any policy as to how to proceed if India launched a war.

In 1965, the Indian leadership was also without any definite war aims, and thus there was a stalemate. But in 1971, India had set quite clear political and military aims more than 6 months before the war.

Both wars were short. The 1965 war began with the Indian invasion at the Lahore border on September 6 and ended after17 days on September 23. The 1971 war began on the night of November 20/21 and stopped after 26 days on December 17.

This aspect must be thoroughly studied to derive the right lesson for the war in future. It is unlikely the next India-Pakistan war would also be very short. The question to be answered is: what were the reasons that made the two wars so brief in duration, and whether similar reasons would be operative in the next war? It requires deep analysis.

This much, however, may be said that the length of the next India-Pakistan war will depend on the sincerity of purpose and determination of Pakistan’s leadership. If they will fight to defend the country at all cost, and will not become pawns of the Western powers, then the war would be quite long and may last for several months. Analysis also reveals that India cannot face a prolonged war, due to some invariable internal and external compulsions. A prolonged war would generate a disintegrative force in India but a unifying force in Pakistan.

A phenomenon common to the two wars was that the role of the Foreign Office in Islamabad was seriously damaging to the national security interests. In both wars the top man controlling the Foreign Office was ZAB! In 1965, he was the foreign minister in Ayub Khan’s cabinet. In 1969, when Gen Yahya seized power, Bhutto, who was on a personal grid with Yahya and the generals in his coterie, became the unofficial adviser on foreign affairs. After success in elections and with the political crisis intensified in 1971, he further consolidated his position. Later, he was officially appointed as the foreign minister.

Before each war, the Foreign Office and Bhutto personally, spread a false belief that India was not likely to start a general war. Actually, on each occasion there were clear signals that India planned to launch an all-out war. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Riza in The Pakistan Army: War 1965, writes that even as late as Sept 4 when a middle-rank officer in GHQ expressed fear that in response to Pakistan’s guerrilla moves in Kashmir, “the Indians are bound to react against Lahore and Sialkot, the answer was a reassurance from our Foreign Office that India would not start all-out war.”

It was the Foreign Office that planned and programmed Operation Gibraltar. It was a fiasco from the beginning to the end. When its various aspects, i.e its objectives, planning, launching and conduct are looked at critically, it appears that it was meant to be a disaster.

In Foreign Office’s harmful role the strangest incident was that it had received authentic advance intelligence of India’s scheduled attack on Sept 6,1965, but it did not pass this vital information to the president or the Army high command! Air Marshal Asghar Khan reveals in The First Round: Indo-Pak War 1965 “Mian Arshad Hussain who was then Pakistan’s High Commissioner to New Delhi, claimed in a meeting after the ceasefire that he had sent a message through the Turkish Embassy in New Delhi on Sept 4, 1965 informing the Foreign Office that India was planning to attack Lahore on Sept 6. This message was received in Islamabad but never shown to Ayub Khan. When Aziz Ahmad, the foreign secretary, was confronted with this, his only explanation was that he had not seen the message in time!”

In 1971, the theory spread by the Foreign Office was that India did not want a general war but aimed only at helping Shaikh Mujib’s Awami League to seize a piece of territory in East Pakistan, from where to make a unilateral declaration of independence which should force the government in Islamabad to accept an independent Bangladesh! It was an inane, indeed, an insane theory. But the deplorably irresponsible regime in Islamabad believed it to be true. So the armed forces were again caught unprepared for war.

For 12 days after the start of the 1971 war, the Foreign Office refrained from announcing to the world and the home public that India had launched an all-out war against Pakistan! Why? A notable common lesson is that in both wars there was a community of interests between the Soviet Union and the US. Outwardly, the US and the Soviet Union kept their global show of mutual hostility, but behind the scene their actions and reactions with regard to the India-Pakistan wars sought common aims, which favoured India and hurt Pakistan. They had set the precedent in the 1962 India-China war when they both rushed to assist India.

In the 1965 war, both the big powers professed neutrality. The US clamped an arms embargo on the warring states, although Pakistan was a US ally by the CENTO and SEATO pacts as well as by the 1959 US-Pakistan secret security treaty. The embargo hurt Pakistan but not India, because Pakistan had a large quantity of arms and ammunition in the pipeline from the US. Besides, India continued to receive its arms supplies from the Soviet Union.

The US and the Soviet Union were in unison in pressuring Pakistan to forego its planned counteroffensive against India and to accept ceasefire. The Tashkent Conference, where Pakistan was made to lose what it had almost won on the battlefield, was also a jointly sponsored US-Soviet project.

In 1971, the Soviet Union was a formal ally of India and sent its military personnel and combat units to join the Indian naval and air war effort. While the Soviet Union was openly hostile to Pakistan, the US was secretly so and caused great damage to Pakistan.

Over the years, several American sources have revealed the covert US help to Shaikh Mujib, the Indian government and the rebel band, Mukti Bahini, which was raised and directed by the Indian army. Henry Kissinger, president Nixon’s national security adviser in 1971, whose book “The White House Years” disclosed many of these details, summed it up in a speech in New Delhi on Nov 15,1995. He said “In 1971, Washington wanted an independent Bangladesh just like New Delhi.” Have the rulers and the intelligentsia learnt anything from this?

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