I haven't read the entire article yet, but I would like to make some observations about the comments regarding the Pakistan Army campaign against the Baluch fighters in 1973 (pages 8 - 9).
I believe Selig Harrison's objectivity on this matter is suspect. In his book
In Afghanistan's Shadow, Harrison concedes his close relationship and friendship with many of the Baluch Sardars involved in the militancy of 1973.
The accuracy of his accounts of the
battle of Chamalang, where a majority of these casualties and alleged atrocities against non-combatant Baluch occurred, have been questioned by Robert Wirsing in his book
Pakistan's Security Under Zia. Following is an excerpt:
Quote:
More common, however, was the view that Pakistan had never been a viable state, that brute force was all that held it together, and that the United States, in supplying its government with the arms to repress dissent, was exposing itself to considerable risk of guilt by association. No one more tirelessly advanced these themes than the Carnegie Endowment's long time South Asia-watcher, Selig Harrison. "As the Bengali's still bitterly recall," Harrison reminded his listeners in congressional hearings on the Reagan administrations proposed aid package in 1981, "it was American weaponry that the Pakistan Army used against them. Similarly, when the Baluch staged and insurgency of their own in 1973, Islamabad once again turned its US Equipment not against invading Communist forces, but against its own people. It took 80,000 Pakistani troops four years to subdue the Baluch, despite repeated strafing attacks on the Baluch villages by US fighter planes received under the military aid program and by Huey-Cobra helicopters borrowed from the Shah of Iran." In an article published in 1978, Harrison had written that " at the height of the fighting in late 1974, American supplied Iranian combat helicopters provided the key to victory in a crucial battle at Chamalang in early September when a force of some 17000 guerrillas of the Marri tribe, was decimated."
Harrison's claim was factually inaccurate and highly misleading. By 1970, Chinese-supplied aircraft made up "33 percent of the Pakistan Air Force's 270 planes, 65 percent of all the interceptor-bombers, and 90 percent of the first-line modern fighter planes at its disposal." These percentages rose even higher in the first few years of the 1970's (prior to the outbreak of the Baloch insurgency) with large Chinese transfers to Pakistan of the Shanyang F-6 (mig 19). The sinification of PAF's inventory was clearly in an advanced stage when the insurgency broke out in Baluchistan in 1973. To the extent that the air force was involved at all in the fighting in Baluchistan, the probability was slight that it would have used its Korean War vintage F-86 Sabre jets and not its newer and far more numerous Chinese aircraft. AS for the Huey-Cobra helicopter gunships, no armed helicopters of any kind were used by the Pakistan army against the Baluch insurgents. Pakistan had none of its own at that time, and the Shah loaned Pakistan only a small number (most sources say ten, but estimates range as high as thirty) of unarmed, Iranian piloted Chinook transport helicopters. These, according to well informed sources, played an extremely minor role in the fighting and were returned to Iran in may 1974 after only eight months or so in Baluchistan. They played absolutely no role, incidentally, in the battle at Chamalang, which took place months after the Iranian helicopters had been withdrawn.
Though its authenticity was questionable at best, Harrison's evocative tale of the gunship helicopters was picked up and repeated for years thereafter by a wide variety of commentators on Pakistan. The picture he painted of the dread American killer cobras raining death upon the practically defenseless Baluch insurgents inevitably made a powerful impression in a population that had only a few years earlier forced its government that abandoned a much bloodier counterinsurgency war in Vietnam....
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Harrison's more current accounts of Chamalang are noticeably more "fantastic" in the language used to describe the atrocities, and their scale, compared to the accounts in
Afghanistan's Shadow, written closer to the time of the events and therefore presumably more accurate in terms of recollecting details.
Conversations with some former Pakistan Army and Air force officers who recollect the Chamalang incident are also counter to what Harrison described.
Their recollections indicate that the Baloch camps and villages were not deliberately attacked, however small skirmishes were
staged to draw the militants out from the mountains.