In the near-term, this was seen by the commitment of additional aircraft and divisions to Afghanistan. This was soon reflected by a change in military action.
The Crisis Shifts to Pakistan
In effect, the second Carter administration redefined the locus of the crisis from Afghanistan to Pakistan. It accomplished this by accepting the inevitability of a regime in Kabul acceptable to Moscow. It saw the value of opposition as being limited to forcing Moscow to accept a regime more nationalist than it would otherwise wish. Despite his support for human rights, Carter was willing to make the world safe for Titoism.
Pakistan saw that it was a likely loser in the second Carter administration’s attempts to revive détente. Pakistan had provided a haven for the massive flow of Afghan refugees that had started after the communist coup of April 1978. It had started providing arms and political support for the first Afghan guerrillas soon after that, opening its arms stockpiles for old Lee Enfields and more modern Self Loading Rifles (captured from India in 1965 and 1971).
General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s chief of state following a military coup against the failed regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had famously dismissed an initial Carter aid offer as “peanuts,” but after the strong US response of early 1980 had buoyed Pakistan he had worked to oppose the Soviet invasion. What concerned Pakistan in the second Carter administration was not so much its own position, but relations with the Soviet Union. General Zia saw that, whatever aid was being covertly sent to the resistance through Pakistan, the overall trend in East-West relations was towards détente. He realized that the US policy, as originated by Carter and implemented by Vance, would seek to maintain the basic coherence of NATO by making concessions to accommodate European desires for cheap energy and increased trade and by trading away security issues outside of Europe that did not concern the alliance. He realized that the security of Pakistan was, to Washington, just such a peripheral issue. Zia also realized that Pakistan gave the US an opportunity to exhibit its human rights concerns which its goal in reviving détente prevented it from strongly pressing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Zia realized that, as a military dictator with a poor human rights record, he was a prime candidate to follow the Shah of Iran as a US ally-turned-victim.
Zia also read—it had, of course, been leaked to The Washington Post—of Vance’s defeat of Brzezinski. He was also a realist enough to know that without a multi-year high-dollar defense buildup—which Carter, by 1981–82, was disinclined to support—the “Carter Doctrine” would remain unimplementable and that this meant explicitly that he could not count on the US to back up Pakistan with its military if the Soviets were to reinforce their troops in Afghanistan and threaten military action against Pakistan. Zia was afraid that this would be the long-term Soviet strategy, coordinated with India. The Soviets would wait for the next India-Pakistan crisis to press Pakistan. India had already detonated a nuclear “device” and was in the process of a large-scale military build-up, bringing in new Soviet-built weapons to replace the older generation, often Western-designed, hardware used in the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan. Pakistan would eventually be faced by a two-front war. Indeed, Pakistan had kept its security focus on the threat from India, especially in the Punjab. Even after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the two weak corps headquartered at Peshawar and Quetta, plus a division-sized force between, sufficed to cover the traditional invasion routes from the west.
To counter this, Pakistan looked to its foreign friends. Saudi Arabia could provide oil and money and leverage in the Islamic world, but little else to counter the threat. China’s military credibility was badly undercut by its poor performance in its 1979 invasion of Vietnam. Without US support, Pakistan was risking delayed but inevitable defeat and dismemberment because of its support for the Afghan resistance.
The Soviet forces became more active on Afghanistan’s western border near Pakistan. More disturbingly, the Soviets started cross-border airstrikes and special operations against Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan that were also used to shelter resistance fighters. Actions by the US and Pakistan in the United Nations were met by the Soviet veto in the Security Council. Off the record, Soviet diplomats talked of “Israeli rules-of-engagement” being put into effect, that borders would not provide immunity following attacks on Soviet forces and their allies. Pakistan was subjected to increasing Soviet threats, and told that it could not rely on its outside allies to defend it if it were to be subjected to Soviet military action as a result of supporting the Afghanistan resistance.
On the ground, the Soviets also started sending strong signals. Soviet officers were photographed training Baluchi separatist insurgents who had crossed the border from Pakistan in the 1970s. Patrols of the Pakistani Frontier Scouts started to fall victim to well-planned ambushes inside Pakistani territory. There was no effort taken to conceal the evidence, with piles of new-issue Soviet 5.45mm cartridge cases left behind with the bodies. When one ambush—the result of over-confidence—went awry, it left the victorious Tochi Scouts a half-dozen Spetsnaz corpses in standard Soviet camouflage uniforms. It was not a message delivered with great subtlety. Andropov placed little value on subtlety.
Pakistan was the target of a “carrot and stick” campaign of overtures from Moscow combined with internal penetration, subversion and terrorism. Offers to provide cheap hydro-electric dams were matched by funding for the many groups inside Pakistan dissatisfied with the Zia regime. Whether this discontent was ethnic (such as the Baluchis who had been suppressed by the Pakistani military in the 1970s), political (such as supporters of the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, still seething over his ouster and execution by Zia) or economic (rural Sindhis marginalized by large landowners), all received large amounts of Moscow funding. They also had their leaders taken over the border to Afghanistan or to Moscow to learn the hard disciplines of political warfare: how to manage a cell-based organization, how to operate a clandestine press for a pre-literate peasantry, when to demand elections, and when to open the Moscow-supplied arms cache.
Pakistan’s response to this internal penetration was the only one it knew how to do well, internal repression. This led to increased tension with Washington, inflaming the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights concerns and reluctance to be seen backing authoritarian states, however important they might be geo-politically to the United States.
Pakistan was faced with external and internal pressure. It knew it could not count on help from the US above its limited-liability support of the Afghan resistance, continued from the first Carter administration. The Afghan resistance fighters, for all their undoubted bravery and devotion, were poorly trained and organized. The Afghan resistance was extensively divided, reflecting Afghanistan’s ethno-linguistic diversity as well as the competition for power between secular leaders, traditional religious figures, and Islamist political movements, both modernizers and revolutionaries. With the US looking for stronger détente, these did not appear to General Zia to be the people who would defeat the Soviet Union single-handedly.
Pakistan also faced a danger that the US could not help it with even if it wished. Pakistan was now home to the largest refugee population in the world, over three million Afghans. With the availability of arms to the resistance, these had the potential to become in Pakistan what the Palestinians had been in Jordan in 1970 or Lebanon in 1975, an armed state-within-a-state, able to launch armed insurrection. Zia had in fact been military attaché in Amman during “Black September” 1970 and he was resolved never to see anything like it happen in Pakistan.
Pakistan insisted that it distribute the weapons aid intended for the Afghan resistance. Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) took charge of the process, which it had been involved in from the start on an ad hoc basis. It brought to this task a great deal of sympathy and support for the Afghan resistance, but also a limited strategic vision. The Pakistanis realized that whatever happened in Afghanistan was secondary to the balance of forces with India, w
hich constituted the main security threat to Pakistan’s continued existence. The ISI also cared little about Afghanistan outside of the areas inhabited by ethnic Pushtuns. Because of the large Pushtun populations in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier and Baluchistan provinces, Pakistan wanted both to support these groups and prevent the emergence of a regime in Afghanistan that might revive the call for “Pushtunistan,” which included a claim on the territory of Pakistan up to the Indus (Afghanistan had been the only country to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the UN for that reason). Groups in northern Afghanistan and in the Hazara Jat received little support.
To address Zia’s concerns about the possible emergence of a PLO-like Afghan presence in Pakistan, the ISI would deal only with seven Afghan political parties. Secular leaders—whether military officers or government officials—were discouraged by the ISI. Instead, the parties were led by religious figures, traditional or Islamist. This also reflected the increasing turn towards Islamism as Pakistan began to look to a wider base for international support in its security dilemmas. The Afghan resistance was badly divided going into the conflict with the Soviets. The Pakistanis ensured that it remained so.
Playing the India Card
The most significant Soviet move against Pakistan in 1982–83, however, was being carried out not by cross-border Spetsnaz or bombers but by diplomats in New Delhi. The Soviet security relationship with India had been significant since the 1971 friendship treaty. Now, Andropov intended to persuade the government of Indira Gandhi that India needed to support the Soviet moves against Pakistan. India had not seen the Soviet moves against Afghanistan as hostile and had abstained in the UN when called on to condemn the invasion. India had strongly condemned the limited US and Chinese security aid to Pakistan starting in 1980. India was also willing to line up behind the Soviets on issues when there was no cost for doing so, such as in its support for Soviet warships operating in the Indian Ocean or in recognizing the pro-Moscow Hen Samrin regime in Cambodia.
India was not, at first, eager for another conflict with Pakistan. But as deliveries of new T-72 main battle tanks and tankers full of Soviet fuel oil started to increase throughout 1982–83, Indira Gandhi’s government began moving towards a military confrontation in coordination with the Soviets.
Motivating India was the continuing concern over Pakistan’s work at developing nuclear weapons. It was an open secret that, at its nuclear facility at Kahuta, Pakistani scientists were frantically working to achieve a nuclear capability comparable to the one which India had demonstrated with its first nuclear device. Mutual pledges by both India and Pakistan to avoid pre-emptive strikes on each other’s nuclear production capabilities had been considered but had, significantly, never been enacted.
There was also the long-standing Kashmir issue. The remote Siachen Glacier, on the “roof of Asia” where Indian and Pakistani forces were confronting each other at high altitude, started showing up with increasing frequency on high-level briefing maps.
Problems of internal strife were increasing, with a crisis in Assam in 1982, increasing levels of Hindu-Moslem violence and, most significantly, increasing levels of violence in the Punjab, threatening to involve the Sikh population. There was already evidence that Pakistan’s ISI had at least contacts with all of these. The KGB found a receptive audience as it turned over a stream of plausible but falsified information that Pakistan was seeking to counter India’s increasing conventional military strength with an “asymmetric” approach, seeking to use India’s internal divisions against it.
India also had a record of looking to foreign conflicts to deal with internal or external problems, dating back to the years when Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was prime minister. This had been done both successfully—as in the 1961 occupation of Goa—and unsuccessfully—as when India provoked a Chinese military reaction in 1962. But it was 1971, when Indian military action resolved the East Bengal crisis and created the independent nation of Bangladesh from part of Pakistan, that the utility—and efficacy—of military force as both a unifier and remover of problems was impressed on the Indian government in general and on Indira Gandhi in particular. The military, which had been conservative in its willingness to use armed force and reluctant to invest in a large-scale nuclear capability, lost power as part of the security making process in the decade after 1971. They were unable—or unwilling—to put a brake on the move towards war.24
In the final analysis, India was willing to prepare to confront Pakistan militarily because it saw domestic benefits—the removal of a future nuclear threat, an improved relationship with the Soviet Union (including increasingly large amounts of basically free fuel and weapons)—and because it did not seem credible that Pakistan’s external supporters, the US, China and Saudi Arabia, would be able to intervene militarily. As Indian planning progressed, it was seen as being a limited liability conflict, not intended to destroy Pakistan, as some had called for. Rather, it would remove Pakistan as a claimant to Indian-occupied Kashmir and as a potential nuclear power.25
Throughout 1983, the Indian military looked at changing its operational approach to one more likely to yield politically important results in the limited time before international intervention developed the potential to shut down the conflict. Even though the Indians could count on the Soviet veto in the UN Security Council, there was concern that the US would apply pressure that was more likely to be effective than the well-remembered gesture of dispatching the carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 War. However, in assessing the second Carter administration, Gandhi realized that the US decision for a “limited liability” relationship with Pakistan led to an inability to deter military action against it.
The Indian Army moved stockpiles towards the frontier. In the 1983 Dig Vijay exercises, the Indian Army looked at the problems of large-scale desert offensive operation with combined arms forces.26 The Indian Air Force trained with its new Soviet-supplied equipment and weapons. In Afghanistan, the Soviets brought additional supplies and forces forward to Kandahar and Samarkhel, near Jalalabad. Soviet forces made a practice of advancing to the border at Spin Baldak and Torkham and then retiring. By early 1984, however, the forces engaged in these moves—part of the diplomatic offensive against Pakistan—were staying in forward assembly areas rather than retiring to their original garrisons.
The 1984 India-Pakistan War
The 1984 India-Pakistan War followed, like its 1965 and 1971 predecessors, a lengthy mobilization and a failed series of international attempts to reduce tensions. The Soviets ensured that international efforts remained inadequate. It soon became apparent that India intended to strike while the passes to China remained blocked, preventing the Chinese opening a second front to relieve pressure on Pakistan or sending supplies over the Karakoram Highway.
The signs of an Indian offensive led Pakistan to mobilize and plan a preemptive strike of its own. But before it could move, the Indians opened the conflict with an airstrike by MiG-27 Flogger-F fighter-bombers against the Pakistani nuclear facilities at Kahuta and Kamra. The timing of the attack—made before Indian mobilization was complete—managed to secure some element of surprise. The attack, obviously inspired by the Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facilities in 1981, made extensive use of Soviet-supplied air-to-surface missiles.
Afghanistan, Pakistan and India: the 1984 War
But the real surprise had been in India’s pre-mobilization deployment. In the years 1971–84, the balance between Indian and Pakistani forces had become static, especially in the critical sectors in the heavily populated Punjab, with both sides’ major cities, agriculture, industry and transport assets within striking distance.27 Both sides also had well thought out defense plans, barrier and demolition plans, and fixed defensive positions. This prevented either side from massing a decisive concentration of force that might have been able to secure a breakthrough. The change, in 1983, was that India had decided to shift significant forces to the
two flanks of the India-Pakistan confrontation, the far south of the Rajastan desert, and the far north of Kashmir, including the Siachen Glacier.
India concentrated its armored forces in the Rajastan Desert for a rapid advance into Sind, aiming for Karachi, with the goal of holding on against a Pakistani pincer attack in the Punjab.28 The Indian advance was a two corps operation. The main blow was delivered by I and II Indian Corps. Each was organized with three divisions and together they made a two-pronged thrust in a broad arrowhead formation. This mechanized thrust was backed up by two infantry divisions in reserve. The 54th Air Assault Division was ready to be inserted by airdrop and airlift as required. A brigade was to make an amphibious landing deep in the Pakistani rear, at Korangi Creek west of Karachi. These two corps were initially to advance 150 miles to Hyderabad and then a further 60 miles to the Rahimyar Khan—Reyti line before either consolidating for a push on Karachi or demanding a cease-fire on favorable terms.29
Flank security for the main thrust would be provided by two corps, each of two infantry divisions, advancing north and south into Pakistan, to block Pakistani units moving from the Punjab and central Sind from counterattacking.
Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War Page 28