Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  A perusal of the record of war in South Asia suggests that most of the wars (1947–1948, 1965, 1999) were precipitated by Pakistani actions (although India’s position was also occasionally hostile to Pakistan’s purported equities in the region). Thus, if one were to rely on the scholarly accounts of the region’s history, Pakistan would appear to have initiated all of these wars, with the possible exception of the 1971 war, depending on how one defines the start of the conflict. But Sarwar (1995) uses a technique common in the Pakistani defense literature to paint India as the perennial aggressor. He points to India’s “recurrent use of force to impose solutions, i.e. annexation of Junagadh, Hyderabad, Sikkim, Bhutan, use of force in Maldives and Sri Lanka, etc.” and explains that “Pakistan is apprehensive of India’s long-term objectives of becoming a global power and its hegemonic designs in the region including dismemberment of Pakistan” (64–65).

  The use of these themes of Indian hegemonic aspirations and desire to dominate, if not dismember, Pakistan has not abated in recent years. In a 2011 essay in Hilal, Col. M. Khan, the head of the international relations department at Pakistan’s National Defence University, argues that “at the regional level, the pursuit of domination by one state (India) over its neighbours is the main cause of insecurity and instability of South Asia. Certainly, attempts of regional domination leads [sic] towards a highly dangerous situation” (18–19). To buttress these claims of Indian hegemonic activities, the author claims that India had sponsored the Sri Lankan terrorist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers) as well as Maoist insurgents in Nepal. The author notes India’s maltreatment of Bangladesh in their ongoing border dispute and its use of the waters of the River Ganges as leverage to coerce Bangladesh to acquiesce to India’s designs. While these allegations are certainly hyperbolic, some are not entirely void of merit. In the early 1980s, under Gandhi, India did support Tamil militants operating in Sri Lanka, providing them with military assistance and training and access to Indian territory (Destradi 2012). While there is no robust evidence that India supported the Maoist rebels in Nepal’s insurgency, Bangladesh has frequently been disquieted by what it views as India’s “big brotherly” approach (Vinayaraj 2009). India’s excessive use of force along the Bangladesh border has been detailed by various media reports and human rights organizations alike (Human Rights Watch 2012).

  M. Khan (2011) also dilates on the growing “nexus” between India, Israel, and United States, which he believes to be principally aimed at advancing American global domination. (“Nexus” invariably implies something nefarious.) As evidence that India serves US interests, he points to India’s “growing involvement in Afghanistan [as] yet another concern both at regional and global level [sic],” and argues that the United States is “acting as a guarantor for detrimental role of India in the future set of Afghanistan” (19). Khan believes, in advance of its planned departure from the country in 2014, the United States is “preparing India as its successor state in Afghanistan” (ibid). India’s role in Afghanistan—both real and imagined—is a source of extreme anxiety in Pakistan. Khan hints at this discomfiture when he notes that “for countries like Pakistan, this growing Indian influence in Afghanistan is enhancing its security concerns. Already Indian intelligence set up has created internal instability in FATA and Balochistan” (ibid.). Khan takes some pride in the fact that “Pakistan is the only regional country, which resist [sic] the Indian regional domination,” even though doing so presents “threats to its security and domestic stability” (ibid.).

  In the Pakistan Army Green Book 2010, dedicated to information warfare, Brig. U. Durrani (2010) claims that India is employing its own information offensive to influence Pakistan’s standing in the international community. India’s goals in this regard include ensuring that Pakistan is labeled an “irresponsible, rogue and failing nuclear state whose arsenal is not safe,” propagating the notion of Pakistan’s tribal areas as “safe havens and epicentre of Islamic terrorists,” sustaining the concept that “Pakistan is likely to be overrun [sic] by Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists in near future,” and “eventually creat[ing] the conditions whereby the international community acts and seizes control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal or considers Indian aggression against Pakistan as a justified act” (4–5).

  Rasul Baksh Rais (2011), one of Pakistan’s most well-regarded political scientists who frequently writes for Pakistan’s defense publications, offers a similar view. Discussing the October 2011 strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan, which both actors have hailed as a landmark treaty that will ensure India–Afghan cooperation in the coming years, Rais argues that the two states’ collaboration on security issues is an ominous sign of their hostile intentions toward Pakistan. He notes with concern that this agreement is “the most comprehensive of all agreements that Afghanistan has signed with any country in the modern history [sic]. Under the agreement India will train the Afghan security forces, equip them and the two countries will have sustained high-level consultations on security and political issues” (5). Rais draws the “obvious conclusion … that India is stepping in a big way in Afghanistan as the United States and its allies begin withdrawing from the country. This role fits well into India’s regional ambitions of playing a greater role in what its security establishment conceives as a wider and larger neighbourhood” (6). Drawing on Pakistan’s experiences with Afghanistan, he concludes that this recent agreement between India and Afghanistan is “historically consistent with [the] conventional Afghan game of seeking powerful external levers to keep Pakistan at bay” (ibid.).

  In Rais’ (2011) formulation, the Karzai government is behaving irresponsibly by courting India, since doing so poses obvious dangers to Pakistan’s interests. Rais goes as far to suggest that this partnership may even provoke another round of the Great Game, noting that Pakistan “will definitely feel insecure with India digging its heels in Afghanistan. In the past, sovereign decisions by Afghan governments have brought in foreign forces through bilateral security arrangements that have caused tremendous damage to Pakistan’s national security” (6). This time, he argues, will be no different, because India is Pakistan’s historical rival and the source of Pakistan’s threat perceptions. Given the realities of the Indo-Pakistan security competition, Rais warns that India’s “ ‘security cooperation’ with Afghanistan may not be perceived [to be] as innocent as the Afghan authorities might think” (ibid.).

  While some US analysts point to the recent improvements in Indo-Pakistan relations, particularly the easing of restrictions on trade and travel, Brig. (Ret.) U. Saeed (2012) is not persuaded that these materially alter the fundamental security competition between the two states. After explaining that “India has largely succeeded in convincing US and allies of her ability to fill the power vacuum” in Afghanistan, he warns that India’s “recent change in posture from confrontation to reconciliation with Pakistan in no way indicates her abandonment of [a] policy of cultural, political and economic domination of her region backed by superior military capability” (15). If this is not sufficiently sobering, he warns that Indian contributions to the “modernisation and indoctrination of [sic] Afghan Army to undertake combat operations at the operational and tactical level with assistance of [sic] Indian Military Command will become [sic] dilemma to our sovereignty” (ibid.).

  THE PERFIDIOUS INDIAN

  Much of Pakistan’s defense literature is dedicated to negative depictions of India and Indians, who are almost invariably reduced to their supposed Hindu nature. One prominent element in this approach, painting India as the aggressor in a security competition, was discussed already, in the chapter on the ideology of the Pakistan Army. This rhetoric is critical to supporting the larger argument: that Pakistan’s wars with India have been defensive jihads. The arguments proffered by Pakistan’s defense publications, which often appear to be at odds with the scholarly literature, merit serious attention. They attest to the durability of this highly stylize
d history, which is replicated in Pakistan’s school curriculum and cultural products aimed at a popular audience, including civilian government officials’ accounts (e.g., Hamoodur Rehman Commission 2001; Siddiqi 1964).

  Gen. Mohammad Musa, the army chief during the 1965 war, recounts this conflict in his 1983 book My Version: India-Pakistan 1965. Musa does not have universal praise for Pakistan: he is extremely critical of the poor intelligence that led Pakistani officials to believe that the agitation surrounding the missing relic had made Kashmir ripe for an uprising. He concedes that in the aftermath of the 1963 Hazratbal crisis, the commander of Pakistan’s troops in Azad Kashmir, Maj. Gen. Akhtar Husain Malik, “pressed the Government to take advantage of the disturbed situation in the valley and direct the Army to send raiders in Indian-held Kashmir for conducting guerilla activities there and to help, on a long-term basis, the locals in organizing a movement with a view to eventually starting an uprising against the occupying power” (2). He is very critical of the way the Kashmir Cell developed its various potential strategies for Kashmir and claims that he, like Ayub, was apprehensive about the final strategy and believed that it would indeed devolve into a general war. Finally, while he applauds the efforts of the 7,000 mujahideen, he admits that they generally failed to mobilize a guerilla movement in Kashmir, attributing their failure to poor planning and preparation by army headquarters.

  However, despite fully acknowledging the extent to which Pakistan planned Operation Gibraltar and despite his frank admission that India would not tolerate such efforts, Musa (1983) still argues that on September 6, 1965, “India invaded Pakistan” because India chose to operate across the international border instead of restricting its operations to Kashmir (42). Even more surprising is his claim that India did not have any justification for invading Pakistan because “Pakistan had not embarked on the path of aggression. We merely defended our homeland when it was attacked” (96). Despite his extremely candid account of Pakistan’s machinations, Musa condemns India’s decision to move across the international border as lacking justification (see also Ahmad 1992; Gilani 2003; Majeed 1993–1994).

  Pakistani accounts of the 1971 war portraying India as the aggressor are on more solid ground, despite the fact that Pakistan made (what even Pakistani writers admit to be) a preemptive strike on Indian airfields on December 3, 1971 (Rahman 1976). Most Pakistani accounts are generally candid about West Pakistan’s malfeasance in the east. Nonetheless, with few, if any, exceptions, they attribute the war and East Pakistan’s secession to Indian involvement. Commodore (Ret.) Tariq Majeed, for one, dismisses India’s concerns about the millions of refugees who fled into India, arguing that India exaggerated the magnitude of the refugee problem and furthermore that since the refugees were predominantly Hindus they were simply returning to their true homeland. He also contends that India’s support to the Bengali insurgents began in 1966, substantially earlier than the scholarly record suggests (Majeed 1993–1994). Brig. C. M. A. K. Zahid (1989) shares Majeed’s views, writing that India was involved in the insurgency from the start: “insurgents from the hard core of potential secessionists were trained, equipped and financed by India. A campaign was launched to impair the loyalty of the citizens through brainwashing, temptation and coercion. This was followed by expanding the ‘Sympathy Zones’ and initiating violence and sabotage to create panic and insecurity” (52). Although Zahid acknowledges that West Pakistan mismanaged Bengali political aspirations, he still attributes the ease with which India fomented insurrection to the inherent Hinduness of the East Pakistani Bengalis.

  Lt. Gen. A. A. K. Niazi (2009), who was in charge of the Pakistani armed forces in East Pakistan during the war and who tendered Pakistan’s acceptance of defeat, authored his own book about the war in an attempt to redeem himself and the force he commanded. His account of West Pakistan’s civilian and political elites is scathing, but at the same time he also displays a fundamental hostility to and distrust of Hindus. In his effort to explain the impasse in East Pakistan, for instance, he explains that whereas most of the Hindus living in West Pakistan had migrated to India, many Hindus living in the east, particularly the “rich and powerful,” chose to remain. Thus the “Muslims were in the majority but were mostly subservient to the Hindu landlords and businessmen” (33). Moreover, he contends, “due to the higher incidence of education amongst the Hindus, the vast majority of teachers in schools and colleges were Hindus. The teachers played an important role in moulding the ideas of the youth in their formative years. The West Pakistanis were painted as imperialists, exploiters, and tyrants. The seeds of discontent were sown” (ibid.).

  According to Niazi’s (2009) account, the Hindu presence in the east frustrated West Pakistan’s efforts to integrate its Bengali population. This claim is ironic because even Niazi acknowledges that West Pakistani elites’ fears of Bengali dominance set the stage for the political collision. For example, he notes with some criticism the West Pakistani fear that with “twenty per cent of the population being educated Hindus, and given their dominance in all facets of life, who could have stopped them from dictating the national policies? The government would be formed by Bengalis, the iron fist in the velvet glove would be that of the Hindus” (34). In his assessment, the One Unit Scheme introduced in the 1950s was designed to protect “the interests of the West Pakistanis from exploitation by the Hindu-controlled Bengalis” (ibid.).

  It should be noted that some writings contradict elements of this general narrative. For example, M. Attiqur Rahman (1976) is extremely critical of Pakistan’s planning for the 1965 and 1971 wars. However even he, reflecting on India’s decision to keep prisoners of the 1971 war for more than two years, admits that “we have always taken the Indian to be intelligent but wily; however this guile was dishonourable” (58).

  INDIA: A PAPER TIGER

  While some defense writers set out to construct India and Indians as perfidious and others concentrate on denigrating the strength of Indian armed forces, others still try to do both at the same time. Lt. Col. Mohammad Zaman, for example, wrote in 1992 of “India’s False Image,” mocking what he saw as India’s belief that it is an “equal of China and Japan and an emerging Asia Pacific power.” He attributes Indian delusions of grandeur to the influence of the United States and suggests that India is “unnecessarily being pumped like a hollow balloon and made to purchase weapons at colossal cost from the west” (25–26). Commodore Tariq Majeed, in a 1992 essay titled “Weaknesses and Limitations of Indian Naval Capability,” argues that India’s navy is inferior according to every metric used. One of his reasons for the Indian Navy’s ostensible inferiority to that of Pakistan is that it has been forced to induct women.

  Hassan (1990) offers one of the most infamous accounts of India’s numerous shortcomings in India: A Study in Profile. (Recall that he was one of the four authors of the Kargil misadventure.) Hassan researched and wrote the book while he was a member of the Faculty of Research and Doctrinal Studies (FORAD) of the Command and Staff College, Quetta. In the foreword to the volume, Maj. Gen. M. Amin Khan Burki explains that FORAD was set up at Quetta in 1984 as a separate cell “devot[ed] … to the pursuit of research on doctrinal matters and undertake special study projects assigned to the College by the General Headquarters or selected by the [Command and Staff] College” (i). Burki, who laments the paucity of studies about the personality and mind of the Indians, writes that Hassan’s book will fill this lacunae and “unfold the mystery and enigma that is India” (ibid.). This foreword indicates the importance of Hassan’s work for the Command and Staff College.

  Hassan’s (1990) book frequently deploys such tropes as the “Hindu psyche” and other patently Orientalist, if not outright racist, concepts. Given Hassan’s delight in dated and uncouth stereotypes, it is tempting to dismiss this book as the musings of an eccentric. Yet it continues to be recommended reading at Pakistan’s defense educational institutions. I was given my personal copy while visiting what was then called the National Defe
nce College in 2000. Not only is India: A Study in Profile widely cited by Pakistani military personnel, but it is also one of only four books on India included by the National Defence University on its “Important Books to Read” list (National Defence University, n.d.).

  Hassan (1990) believes that Pakistan has two starkly different, but equally dire, choices as regards India: “Either she acquiesces to the designs of Indian hegemony or she stands up to the challenge; which would mean, as an ultimate, a military conflict provoked by the stronger military power” (xiv). However, he is not fooled by the claims, made by India or others, of India’s greatness. “Recorded history bears testimony that whenever assailed by a determined outside power India has been unable to resist the pressure. … At the eve of each of these invasions the Indian rulers fielded much larger armies which, if not better, were at least as well-equipped as those of the invading adversaries” (49). Not only has India’s military acquitted itself ignominiously, but also another “dismal feature of India’s past is the near total absence of any popular resistance against foreign domination or rule” (ibid.).