Akram (1964) never articulates what he means by moral strength. But given what we have already learned about Pakistan’s strategic culture and the ways the army has historically viewed the conflict in Kashmir, we can assume that with moral he is referring to the rectitude of Pakistan’s cause: liberating Kashmir from Indian occupation, seen as “immoral” in Pakistan’s defense literature. Indeed, this view played an important role in Pakistan’s decision to launch Operation Gibraltar in 1965.
A second set of concepts that figures strongly in Pakistani defense writing of the 1960s is the notion of a citizens’ army and the concomitant people’s war that such an army would wage. Defense writers argue for a critical study of these concepts and of those who have effectively employed them, in hopes that Pakistan will be able to develop doctrines that will allow it to “beat the enemy in conventional and unconventional warfare or in both” (El-Edroos 1962, 40; see also Adram 1971; El-Edroos 1964a, 1964b; Qazi 1964; Shafi 1964; Siddiqi 1964). Perusal of these writings underscores the relevance of Cohen’s 2004 observation: while the United States was training the Pakistan Army to combat a people’s war, Pakistan’s defense writers were equally interested in understanding how Pakistan could wage one.
In 1964, for example, El-Edroos published a study of General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnam People’s Army, a principal commander in the fight against both the French, during the Indo-China war (1946–1954) and the United States during the Vietnam War (1960–1974). Giap commanded the North Vietnamese in significant battles during both of those conflicts, including Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the Tet Offensive (1968). Both the timing and subject matter of El-Edroos’ article are interesting. Recall that in 1954, Pakistan and the United States signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. Pakistan joined the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the same year and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955. Pakistan withdrew from SEATO in 1971, after it concluded that membership (which could not prevent the loss of half of Pakistan’s territory) offered few benefits. Pakistan remained a CENTO member until 1979, when the organization dissolved following the Iranian Revolution. While Pakistan has long complained that the United States did not support it in its 1965 war with India and even aided India in its 1962 war with China, the United States had no treaty obligation to defend Pakistan in 1965. Pakistan, however, did have an obligation under SEATO to participate in the Vietnam War, an obligation that it deftly dodged (see Pande 2011). Thus, El-Edroos’ fawning treatment of the Vietnam People’s Army is at odds with Pakistan’s own treaty commitments.
El-Edroos (1964a) provides a flattering biographical sketch of Vo Nguyen Giap’s early childhood and describes his “revolutionary zeal” as a “family characteristic” (10). He describes, in heroic terms, Giap’s various victories against the French in several campaigns in the early 1950s, culminating in the French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (March 13–May 7, 1954). The essay reads more like a biographical sketch of Giap than a thoughtful analysis of his strategies. Nonetheless, the author makes the case that the “entire concept and application of a Revolutionary People’s War needs to be thoroughly studied and analysed, as this form of war could be effectively used by any weak country against a vastly superior and sophisticated enemy” (16). Later the same year, El-Edroos (1964b) published a similar study of Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The implications of El Edroos’ thesis are obvious: a people’s war could be used effectively by Pakistan against India. But the author stops short of direct application, leaving it unclear whether he is envisioning a people’s war to fend off a future Indian occupation of Pakistan or to dislodge the Indian “occupiers” of Kashmir.
In the same issue of the Pakistan Army Journal, Lt. Col. Shamsul Haq Qazi (1964) makes the case for what he calls a citizens’ army. Qazi is concerned that even though Pakistan has few economic resources, it “enjoys the distinction of being one of the very few nations who spend the major portion of their public revenue on national security … spending 50 to 60 per cent of [its] budget on defence, whereas some very rich countries devote only 3 to 15 percent” (18). A poor country like Pakistan must divert funds needed for development to defend itself against India, which has been overtly hostile from the moment of Pakistan’s inception. In addition to the threat from India, which he calls a second-class military power, Qazi also identifies the expanding Russian presence in Afghanistan as another source of concern. He acknowledges that in light of Pakistan’s evolving threat environment it must revise its defense policies. But he wisely cautions that “even a policy of over-mobilization cannot keep pace with such monstrous armies as our northern neighbors possess” (19). Given Pakistan’s current economic circumstances and prevailing threat environment, he argues, “there is a case for organising a strong citizen army for the effective defence of Pakistan” (ibid.).
In terms reminiscent of writers (discussed in Chapter 4) who argue that every Pakistani must be prepared to wage jihad, Qazi (1964) maintains that the Pakistan Army should prepare its defense plans on the assumption that “every Pakistani is a soldier” (20). This would allow Pakistan to avoid needless expenditures on a large peacetime force. In fact, the size of Pakistan’s “standing regular army should be just enough to absorb the initial shock of attack and to provide the necessary leadership and training facilities for the citizen army” (ibid.). To prepare Pakistan for a defensive war against superior forces, citizens must become “soldiers in plain clothes, and the soldiers become citizens in uniform” (22). Qazi notes that in some measure this system already operates successfully in “districts close to tribal areas where villagers are given public arms for their collective defence” (ibid.). He concludes that the “terrain conditions in both East and West Pakistan are ideally suited for unconventional fighting” and that “unorthodox fighting behind the enemy lines can make this enemy build-up very expensive. Once our unconventional forces effectively cut the enemy’s rear it would be comparatively an easy job for our reserve echelons to destroy the entrapped enemy” (23).
Qazi (1964) also discusses the utility of a citizens’ army under nuclear conditions: “ground action by smaller combat teams would be a normality rather than an exception” and citizen armed forces would be ideal for such employment (24). In short, he concludes that although the shape and size of Pakistan’s standing army are dictated by a “second rate military power, because of [Pakistan’s] limited resources she is already suffering from the evils of over-mobilization” (ibid.). Moreover, even Pakistan’s “presently over-mobilized standing army would be a mere drop in the ocean if ever a threat is posed from any of her powerful neighbours [Russia and China]” (ibid.). The most feasible way forward is thus a citizens’ army that can provide more comprehensive protection against external aggression.
Maj. Mohammad Shafi (1964) offers the most detailed exposition of guerrilla warfare and its utility to Pakistan. Like other writers in Pakistan’s defense journals, he extols the virtues of the guerrilla who can successfully “demoralize the regular army by inflicting steadily mounting losses on it, thus bleeding it white slowly but inexorably. Meanwhile, guerilla forces gather the necessary strength to give the exhausted army the finishing blow” (5). Shafi also notes that because guerrillas live off the land they are not plagued by the resupply issues that bedevil regular armies. He is so persuaded of the value of subconventional conflict that he believes it should actually take precedence over regular warfare, “especially in countries which lack the means of equipping and maintaining the costly and sophisticated regular forces of modern times” (7). (In this sense he tends to agree with Qazi’s assessment.)
Shafi (1964) presents a list of “Essential Ingredients of Guerilla Success.” The first is a worthy cause; mere wrath or indignation is inadequate. This echoes the “moral dimension” identified by Lt. Col. Muhammad Akram (1971). Second, Shafi thinks that difficult terrain, such as mountains, jungles, or even deserts, is best for such warfare. Third and fourth, guerrilla warfare requires
a warlike people and a sympathetic population; fifth, it requires outside assistance. High-quality leadership and strict discipline are also prerequisites. While “in the secure environments of a regular army … a mediocre leader may fill the bill … in a guerilla force, only dedicated, self-sacrificing, and outstanding leadership can hold the mixed crowd together” (Shafi 1964, 10). Curiously, and perhaps recalling the experiences of the so-called tribal marauders of 1947–1948, he writes that the guerrilla leader must “reckon with a number of shady characters who may drift into his command not out of high idealism, but to satisfy base motives of loot and plunder” (ibid.). He recognizes that such characters may be “good fighters, but their rapacity must be held in check by the leader as otherwise they can antagonize the local population and weaken the popular goodwill on which a guerrilla movement leans so much for its survival and success” (ibid.). Finally, the subconventional combatant must learn proper guerrilla tactics.
As with other writers, Shafi (1964), too, stops short of specifying where or how Pakistan should employ guerrilla warfare. But Pakistan’s past dalliance with guerrilla warfare in 1947–1948 and its similar misadventure in 1965 provide abundant clues to the theater Shafi had in mind: Indian-administered Kashmir. As has been discussed throughout, Pakistan’s army, and even its general population, believes that Pakistan’s position on Kashmir is moral and, moreover, that Kashmiris living under Indian occupation share this view. Second, the terrain of Indian-administered Kashmir is both mountainous and covered in jungle. Pakistan can augment the faltering Kashmiri rebels with its own warlike populations, who enjoy the support of Pakistan and supposedly of the Kashmiris themselves; Pakistan clearly can provide outside assistance as well as the necessary leadership and discipline to ensure that the subconventional combatant stays the course; and the Pakistan Army can provide training in the appropriate guerrilla maneuvers. In some measure, this is exactly what Pakistan sought to do in 1965.
It should be noted that the focus on infiltration and a people’s war during this period was not exclusive to the military. After all, Z. A. Bhutto strongly supported the Operation Gibraltar misadventure, which escalated to a general war. And Aslam Siddiqi, a civilian bureaucrat in Ayub Khan’s National Reconstruction Bureau, devoted a significant portion of his 1964 book A Path for Pakistan to a discussion of the utility of people’s war. In fact, Siddiqi goes even further than the military writers by explicitly invoking the language of jihad to describe this people’s war. A Path For Pakistan contains an entire chapter on jihad. Although it begins with three paragraphs on nonviolent jihad, the chapter spends far more time (some 15 pages) on militarized jihad (98–113).
Echoing the military writers’ call for a citizens’ army, Siddiqi (1964) demands a jihad in which “every able-bodied person is expected to participate. The penalty is rejection by God and replacement by another folk” (113). He chastises Carl von Clausewitz for allegedly failing to recognize the virtues of such a war and explains that had Clausewitz “studied the warfare conducted by the Prophet and his immediate successors, he might have changed his opinion. The prophet organized his ‘people’s war’ which did consume the enemy totally” (113–114). Siddiqi, who suspects that Clausewitz “was perhaps unmindful of the power of faith” (114), situates irregular warfare within the prophet’s own military history and claims (without evidence) that “in the Prophet’s strategy of war, three elements, namely political, regular and irregular war techniques, were present in descending order” (ibid.). Siddiqi also believes that historians have generally downplayed the prophet’s reliance on irregular warfare. After all, the prophet’s base in Medina was a known soft target. Given that the Muslims were few in number and thus could not be dispersed, the prophet was “driven to adopt the technique of irregular warfare” (ibid.).
Siddiqi (1964) agrees with his military counterparts that, given Pakistan’s weakness vis-à-vis India, “the best defence” requires “every able-bodied national” to participate, eliminating “the difference between a civilian and a soldier” (133). Conveniently for Siddiqi, “jihad envisages this arrangement” (ibid.). Also like his officer contemporaries, Siddiqi examines various historical instances of irregular warfare: Chinese resistance to the Japanese; Mao Tse-tung’s fight against Chiang Kai-shek; Korean militias; Yugoslavia’s war of liberation; and even Chinese operations during the 1962 war with India. He draws several lessons for Pakistan from this review. First and foremost, he concludes that a weak country must train “irregular fighters, intensely devoted to the national cause” (132). Second, Pakistan needs “armaments which the people at large should be able to make or procure. Inferior armaments have to be compensated by superior skill in their use [sic]” (ibid.). Third, Pakistan needs to exploit space. Irregular fighters under Pakistan’s command and control should “be able to disperse widely and thus force dispersion on the enemy” (132–133).
Siddiqi argues that the civil–military divide is fundamentally a Western concept. Islam does not bifurcate the umma into military and nonmilitary spheres. On the contrary, Islam “obliges all Muslims to stand together in defence. … The military is an instrument to carry out political tasks when other means fail. Politics is no more than the application of ideology of day-to-day affairs. Soldiering should, therefore, be raised from the status of a profession to service of the ideology. … Only on the basis of ideology can the military hope to lead the entire people during a crisis. Soldiers should in fact become the warriors of the faith” (134). Siddiqi supports his military contemporaries in calling for a “new wing to prepare the people for war. … Their primary duty should be able to teach the people how to resist internal subversion and also to conduct generalized guerrilla warfare in case the enemy occupies the territory. … The doctrine of Jihad provides the background to the entire activity” (135).
Siddiqi (1964) argues that guerrilla warfare, despite its numerous advantages, also has some limitations and that it should only be attempted when the enemy is so superior in number or in equipment that Pakistan is unlikely to prevail in a positional war. Successful guerrilla warfare-cum-jihad, in Siddiqi’s view, has several nonnegotiable requirements (many of which overlap with Shafi’s [1964] list of prerequisites). Most notably, it requires political preparation. This is perhaps the most important step because it is “the people who pay for the successes of the guerrilla fighter. They should be identified with the cause so much that they can face suffering and still continue supporting the fighters. [Political preparation] aims at informing the fighters and the people of the stakes involved in the war. This will build morale and inspire them to fight the enemy most vigorously” (136). Second, such guerrilla warfare requires large numbers of trained guerrilla and regular fighters (138). Siddiqi even proposes a similar strategy for naval defense, as atomic submarines have “rendered almost all surface ships useless;” thus he suggests training “fishermen” as “potential sea warriors” (139, 142). Last but not least, ideology must be used to motivate the mujahideen to fight.
Siddiqi (1964) presciently anticipates a problem with harnessing the power of ideology: “emphasis on ideology creates ideological minorities which tend to become stones in the stomach. … It is, therefore, necessary to find ways to win over the minorities” (170). After all, “in guerrilla warfare, the stake is not so much the territory as the people. Minorities with counterfeit loyalties must severely restrict fighting, subvert and even defeat it” (ibid.). Pakistan’s use of Islam, and of Sunni Islam in particular, has indeed resulted in such ideological minorities. This approach alienated the Hindus and eventually the Muslim Bengalis in East Pakistan, and, as described later in this chapter, it has fanned the flames of a violent sectarianism that continues to claim lives.
As a new decade dawned, articles on these issues ceased to appear in Pakistani defense publications. The last notable effort was Akram’s (1971) article. However, he took a tack different from his 1950s and 1960s predecessors. His article uses the battle of Dien Bien Phu to explain how the Vietna
mese defeated the French. At Dien Bien Phu, “a weak nation … defeated a powerful and arrogant colonial power equipped to the teeth with an arsenal of sophisticated weapons” (29). He thus concludes that ultimately “it is the determination of a nation, reighteousness [sic] of its cause, dynamic faith, skill, courage, discipline and training which determine the outcome of any war” (36). This conclusion is not without irony. After all, Akram’s article appeared amid the insurgency in East Pakistan, which would eventually grow into the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. One cannot help but wonder whether the piece was intended as a deliberate criticism of Pakistan’s military and civilian approach to the looming East Pakistan problem. As Akram writes (with considerable relevance to Pakistan’s coming defeat in the east), “The French were out-witted and defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu because of poor leadership, lack of motivation, inadequate preparation of defences, faulty intelligence, unrealistic reliance on the air … and above all, the blunder of occupying a remote basin, unmindful of the heights around—an unsound proposition, both strategically and tactically” (ibid.).
From People’s War to Low-Intensity Conflict under a Nuclear Umbrella
In the mid-1970s, following the 1971 war and India’s 1974 explosion of a nuclear device, Pakistan’s defense writers moved away from the themes of infiltration and people’s war to focus on deterrence and low-intensity conflict (LIC). A number of authors explicitly identified the link between LIC and the nuclear environment. Anwari (1988, 47), who argued that Pakistan should develop nuclear weapons and means of delivery to “avoid being presented with a fait accompli,” also believed that guerrilla warfare should be part of Pakistan’s deterrence package and that India must be aware of this capability. But while Anwari retained some delicacy in his handling of this issue, Maj. Gen. Asif Duraiz Akhtar sought to leave nothing in doubt. Writing in the 2000 edition of the Pakistan Army Green Book, he explains that the “nuclear explosions of 1998 have brought a semblance of equilibrium in the region … [and have] put the conventional all out war scenario on the back burner” (1). But, as he makes clear, “This situation leaves the room open for low intensity conflict (proxy war) or the war with limited aims restricted to confines of disputed areas e.g. Indian-held Kashmir and Siachin” (1).
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