The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Major General Malik, a tall, hefty, mustached man with receding gray hair, worked with Brigadier General Riaz Hussain, director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, to recruit volunteers for a new force, Mujahid Companies. Armed and trained as guerrillas and saboteurs, it was to be led by Pakistani officers. Malik formed six task forces, each five hundred strong, and gave them names of outstanding Islamic generals of the past. Each contingent consisted of Azad Kashmir troops and Mujahedin irregular volunteers, all in civilian clothes. Their tasks were to blow up bridges, cut communication lines, raid supply dumps, and attack military units as a prelude to an armed uprising scheduled for August 9, 1965. That day would coincide with the twelfth anniversary of the first arrest of Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and was chosen by Plebiscite Front leaders to protest his latest incarceration.

  According to this plan, Mujahideen ranks were scheduled to cross the cease-fire line in small groups between August 1 and 5, and assemble at prearranged places to set up camps as a preamble to infiltrating the Kashmir Valley at many points during the following three days. This phase would be facilitated by Pakistani troops firing along the truce line to distract their Indian adversaries.

  The envisaged capture of Srinagar airport and radio station by the Ghaznavi Task Force on August 9 would set the scene for the declaration of the establishment of a Revolutionary Council, which would proclaim the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir.

  In practice, however, on August 5 a shepherd boy informed the police of the presence of strangers, wearing green salwar kameez in the border town of Tanmarg, twenty-four miles from Srinagar, who offered bribes for information. He led the police to the base camp of the Salahuddin Task Force. The same day a local man in Mendhar, sixty miles from Srinagar, informed the nearby army brigade headquarters of a few foreigners who sought intelligence from him. But it was not until August 8 that the army troops arrested two commanders of the infiltrators near Narain Nag, five miles from Srinagar, that they learned about Pakistan’s plan.3

  By then, however, the Ghaznavi Task Force had managed to reach a suburb of Srinagar. Gunfights soon broke out in the capital. Taken by surprise, the Kashmiri authorities urged Delhi to declare martial law in the valley. But the Lal Bahadur Shastri government refrained from doing so. The sabotage and shootings by the armed infiltrators in Srinagar continued until August 12–13. “The streets in Srinagar were deserted,” noted Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh, the commanding officer of India’s Western Command. “There were visible signs of anxiety and tension on the faces of the residents gaping through the windows.”4

  All India Radio broadcast the confessions of the two captured officers outlining Pakistan’s extensive plan.5 The Indian government protested through diplomatic channels. Pakistan replied that Kashmir was a disputed territory and violent disturbances there could not be attributed to it. On the other hand, as preplanned, Pakistan’s state-run radio broadcast on August 9 that a rebellion had broken out in India-occupied Kashmir. It added that, according to the Voice of Kashmir radio station, a Revolutionary Council had assumed full power over the state.

  In Delhi, the chief of army staff (COAS) General Joyanto Nath Chaudhuri informed the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet that though the infiltrators were being apprehended, further sabotage could still be carried out by those at large. Indeed shoot-outs and subversive activities in Indian Kashmir continued until August 13.

  On that day, Shastri authorized the army to cross the cease-fire line to destroy the infiltrators’ bases. If regular Pakistani troops intervened, then the army would be free to retaliate at any suitable place of its choice, he added. In his August 15 Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, he declared that the “resort to the sword will be met with the sword.”6 His valiant words helped portray him as a resolute leader. That day the Indian soldiers crossed the cease-fire line in the eastern Kargil region.

  India’s far more ambitious objective was to cut off Pakistan’s main infiltration route into the Kashmir Valley. It passed through the 8,652-foot-high Haji Pir Pass on the western Pir Panjal mountain range three miles inside Azad Kashmir. The operation required meticulous planning and execution over several days. On August 24 the Indians prepared to capture the Haji Pir Pass.

  That day, Major General Malik sought permission of the Rawalpindi-based general headquarters to launch the preplanned Operation Grand Slam. The director of military operations, Brigadier Gul Hassan, passed on the request to the COAS, General Muhammad Musa Khan. When nothing happened, Hassan reminded the COAS the next day. The COAS needed to get the permission of President Field Marshall Muhammad Ayub Khan, who was then vacationing in the picturesque Swat Valley two hundred miles away. So Musa Khan dispatched Foreign Minister Bhutto to Swat. Pakistan was on the verge of an all-out war, but the COAS, a Baluch by ethnicity, was unwilling to make decisions while the Pashtun executive president was on vacation. On August 29 Malik received the green light. By then the Indians had captured the Haji Pir Pass and bolstered their forces by adding three infantry units and an artillery regiment in that sector. Following a further thirty-six-hour delay at the headquarters, the launch of Operation Grand Slam started at five am on September 1.

  Ayub Khan’s Midstream Somersault

  When Malik advanced the Twelfth Infantry Division, he had a six-to-one advantage over the Indians in armor, with his Patton tanks being hugely superior to the enemy’s lesser (American) Shermans and (French) AMX-13s. He enjoyed a similar advantage in artillery. His infantry was twice the size of the Indians’.7 It was no surprise, then, that before the day was over, the Pakistanis had captured all their targets. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Indians suffered heavy losses. They withdrew rapidly, while the strategic Akhnoor remained lightly defended by four infantry battalions and a squadron of tanks.

  At this point an inexplicable change of command occurred in Pakistan. General Musa Khan arrived at the theater of operations in a helicopter and transferred the command of the Twelfth Division from Malik, a Punjabi, to Major General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, then commander of the Seventh Infantry Division. A burly, double-chinned, bushy-browed, slothful Yahya Khan was, like Ayub Khan, an ethnic Pashtun. Malik was asked to leave with Musa Khan in his helicopter.

  Yahya Khan altered Malik’s strategy and thus lost more time. Malik had planned on bypassing strongly defended Indian positions and subordinating everything to capturing the bridge over the Chenab River at Akhnoor with the least possible delay. But Yahya Khan opted for a different route. He crossed the Tawi River and went straight into Troti, thereby losing crucial hours.

  Why did Ayub Khan change horses midstream? He was overconfident of the glorious victory that Operation Grand Slam would deliver and wanted the kudos to go to his fellow Pashtun, Yahya Kahn, rather than Malik, who had masterminded the interlinked operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam.

  Ayub Khan’s egregiously unprofessional decision allowed India to shore up its defenses of Akhnoor. Its military high command deployed warplanes to blunt the attack at a time when the enemy was about ten miles from Akhnoor. The air strikes destroyed a number of Pakistani Pattons and slowed the advance of the rest. In response, the Pakistani planes targeted India’s air bases not only in Kashmir but also in Punjab.

  On September 3 the UN secretary-general U Thant conveyed to the Security Council the gist of the report he had received from the head of the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP). There had been a series of cease-fire line violations in Kashmir from the Pakistani side by armed men in civilian clothes for “the purpose of armed action on the Indian side.”8 Three days later the Council passed a resolution authorizing the secretary-general to strengthen the UNMOGIP and inform it on the situation in the area. U Thant dashed to the capitals of the warring nations.

  On the battlefield, the Indian generals concluded that the Pakistani tank advance could not be halted by air strikes alone. So the Emergency Committ
ee of the Cabinet pondered the question: Should we attack Pakistani soil across the international border to compel its military high command to redeploy its forces away from the Kashmir front? The ultimate decision lay with Shastri. He said, “Go!”

  The Shortest Leader’s Tallest Order

  On September 6, when the Pakistan Army was only three miles from Akhnoor, the Indians opened a new front by attacking the Lahore and Sialkot sectors inside Pakistan. This compelled headquarters in Rawalpindi to rush its men and weaponry from the Kashmir front to blunt the Indian incursion toward Lahore, only fifteen miles from the border. For all practical purposes that move marked the end of Operation Grand Slam. “The [Indian] Army could never forget the tallest order from the shortest man,” remarked Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh later.9

  Actually, Shastri had made a more critical, but super-secret, decision in November 1964 by giving the go-ahead to India’s nuclear weapons program—a fact that became known only a decade later. This was Shastri’s response to the successful testing of an atomic bomb by China near Lop Nor, Kansu, in the previous month. That groundbreaking event in China had been the result of Mao Zedong’s order to accelerate his country’s nuclear arms program in light of the military and diplomatic backing that both Washington and Moscow accorded Delhi during the Sino-Indian War.

  On the Pakistani side, addressing his compatriots on September 7, Ayub Khan said, “[The earlier] Indian aggression in Kashmir was only a preparation for an attack on Pakistan. Indian rulers were never reconciled to the establishment of an independent Pakistan where the Muslims could build a homeland of their own. . . . But their defeat was imminent because the 100 million people of Pakistan whose hearts beat with the sound of ‘La ilaha illallah, Muhammad ur rasul Allah’ [‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is messenger of Allah’] will not rest till India’s guns are silenced.”10

  In the diplomatic arena, as soon as the Indians penetrated the Indo-Pakistan frontier, Ayub Khan and Bhutto appealed to Washington to honor the 1959 Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement to assist their country in resisting Indian aggression. President Lyndon Johnson’s administration pointed out that the concord referred to armed aggression from any country “controlled by international communism” and that India did not belong to that category.11 Johnson suspended military aid to both Delhi and Rawalpindi. That hurt Pakistan, solely dependent on Washington, more than India. (Britain followed suit.) Pakistan’s appeal to the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) headquarters in Bangkok also failed because it was not a victim of communist aggression.

  Patriotic Surge in Warring Nations

  In Pakistan, patriotic emotion gripped the nation—from Karachi to Lahore to Dacca, with people attending huge rallies in support of the army. “Every Pakistani wanted to contribute,” recalled Mahmood Shaam, then a reporter with the Lahore-based daily Nawa-e-Waqt (Urdu: New Times).

  Poets wrote nationalist poetry. The radio became the medium of the masses. Television was accessible only in Lahore. Popular singer Malika-e-Tarnoom (Queen of Melody) Nur Jahan went to the Lahore television station, requesting them to allow her to sing for Pakistan. . . . Outside the Lahore radio station a post box was kept in which people would submit patriotic poetry. . . . A poem I wrote for the Pakistan Air Force became very popular: Yeh hawa ke rahion / Yeh badalon ke sathion / Harfan shan Mujahideen / Apni jaan pe khel kar / Tum bane salamati (Oh guides of the air / Oh companions of clouds / You glorious Mujahedin/Playing with your own life / You become robust). Rulers and opposition were united. . . . It was the first time we gave blood for our borders. From 1947 to 1965 . . . we were struggling to become a nation. But during the 1965 war all of us were one: Pakistanis. Hostility and enmity against India solidified.12

  For the Pakistani public, this was the first full-scale war with India, the 1947–1948 conflict in Kashmir having been a minor affair and confined to that princely state. This time the antagonists deployed two-thirds of their total tank arsenals (Pakistan, 756; India, 620). What followed were some of the most intense armored battles since the end of World War II, often in sugarcane fields along the Punjab border. To boost morale, the public was bombarded with stories of victories on the battlefield embellished with heroism of individual soldiers and their units.13

  The battle around the small town of Khem Karan, a few miles from the international border inside Indian Punjab, gripped popular attention on both sides. The Pakistani armor and infantry had seized it on September 7. The Indians resolved to retake it against heavy odds. They could marshal only three armored regiments equipped with a mishmash of inferior tanks against Pakistan’s six armored regiments driving versatile Pattons. But they compensated for their disadvantage in hardware with superior tactics, surprising the enemy force and encircling it.

  Their field commander, Major General Gurbaksh Singh, arrayed the tanks in a U-formation in unharvested sugarcane fields outside the village of Asal Uttar during the night of September 9–10. Then he flooded the surrounding area. The next morning the advancing Pakistani armor divisions got trapped within the enemy’s horseshoe formation and found it hard to turn around because of the marshy terrain. The Indian gunners opened fire from their camouflaged locations only when the Pakistani tanks came close, thereby managing to penetrate the Pattons. By the time the fierce battle was over, India had lost thirty-two tanks while destroying or capturing ninety-seven of Pakistan’s tanks, including seventy-two Pattons.14 “So many tanks lay destroyed, lying in the battlefield like toys,” wrote Lieutenant General Harbakhsh Singh in his memoir In the Line of Duty.15

  On the opposing side, Pakistanis were regaled with their army’s capture of Khem Karan on September 7. “We were also taken to Khem Karan,” recalled Mahmood Shaam four decades later. “We felt proud to see the battleground where we won. Even Time magazine reported that ‘despite claims from both sides the awkward fact is Khem Karan is under Pakistan administration.’”16 What followed next—a debacle—was censured.

  While censuring such news as enemy warplanes bombing targets in Peshawar and Dacca, Radio Pakistan announced raids on the famed Chandni Chowk shopping area of Delhi—a mood-enhancing tonic for Pakistanis. “When I went to Rawalpindi in January 1966 to cover a ministerial conference between India and Pakistan, Pakistani journalists asked me how badly Chandni Chowk . . . [had] been damaged by bombs,” wrote Kuldip Nayar in his book India: The Critical Years. “My reply that not a single bomb had been dropped in Delhi was greeted with derisive laughter.”17

  Equally, Indian journalists were in a triumphalist mode. At the daily press briefings in Delhi, the most frequent questions were: “Has Lahore airport fallen? Is Lahore radio station under our control?”18 The reality was that though India’s tanks had reached Batapur near the Allama Iqbal international airport—halfway between the international border and the city center of Lahore, twenty miles from the Wagah border post—causing an exodus, its generals had no intention of seizing the city of one million. It would have involved hand-to-hand fighting and later burdened the occupying army with the taxing tasks of maintaining law and order and feeding the people.

  Overall, a comforting belief had taken hold in Pakistan that the war was going well and that Hindu India was paying a punishing price for its unprovoked attack on their hallowed territory. The popular perception clashed with reality on the ground, as noted by general headquarters in Rawalpindi. By the third week of hostilities, it became evident to Field Marshal Ayub Khan and his close aides that the army’s supply of bombs, bullets, fuel, and food was dangerously low, and that no military assistance by a foreign power was in the offing.

  Diplomats at Work

  Following the rebuffs from the United States and SEATO, Pakistan ruled out approaching Moscow, given its close ties with Delhi. On his part, however, in early April 1965, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin had welcomed Ayub Khan and Bhutto during their eight-day tour of the Soviet Union in a move to counterbalance the influence America and China enjoyed in Pakistan
. The Kremlin then hosted Shastri on a weeklong trip in mid-May to highlight the Indo-Soviet friendship forged by Jawaharlal Nehru.

  In the war, China resolutely backed Pakistan. It warned Delhi against any Indian incursion into Pakistan’s territory. And when that happened, it condemned India’s move. In its message to the Shastri government in Delhi on September 16, it stated that it would go on supporting Pakistan in “its just struggle” as long as Indian aggression against it continued.

  Facing a dire situation on the battlefield, on the night of September 19–20, Ayub Khan and Bhutto flew from Peshawar to Beijing for a clandestine meeting with top Chinese leaders. Mao Zedong coupled his earlier promise of assistance with advice that Ayub Khan should prepare contingency plans to withdraw his army to the hills and fight a long guerrilla war against India.19 Such counsel washed over the Sandhurst-trained Ayub Khan and the Berkeley-educated lawyer Bhutto. In practice, all Beijing did was to threaten to open a second front against India.

  In the leading world capitals there was considerable apprehension that any direct Chinese involvement in the conflict would draw other powers into the conflict. Western ambassadors therefore kept pressing Pakistan not to encourage China to go beyond rhetorical statements. Equally they pressured India not to attack East Pakistan, which would have drawn Beijing into the bilateral war.

  After his shuttle diplomacy in South Asia, U Thant reported to the UN Security Council on September 16 that each of the warring countries had expressed its desire to cease hostilities under certain conditions that were unacceptable to the other side. Among the few suggestions he made to the Council was a request to the leaders of the sparring nations to meet in a mutually friendly country to discuss ending the present conflict and other outstanding differences. On September 18 Kosygin addressed letters to Ayub Khan and Shastri to meet in Tashkent in Soviet Uzbekistan or any other Soviet city for negotiations on the Kashmir issue, and offered to attend the bilateral meeting if so wished by both sides. Shastri accepted the suggestion on September 22 and informed the parliament. Ayub Khan prevaricated, replying a week later that such a meeting would not be fruitful “at present.”20