How Ayub Wasted
the China Card
By Ahmad Faruqui,
PhD
Dansville, CA
Slowly and steadily, the 1965 Indo-Pakistan has
shed its mysteries. But it is still not clear
why it ended so suddenly.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub’s foreign minister,
claimed that Pakistan was winning the war when
Ayub succumbed to foreign pressure. Bhutto also
said that the Tashkent Agreement contained a secret
clause that compromised Pakistan’s national
security and he threatened to “let the cat
out of the bag.”
But he never followed through on this threat,
since just talking about the cat gave his budding
political career a boost. Toward the end of his
life, Ayub told G. W. Choudhry that there was
no such clause and the only secret was Bhutto’s
childish behavior at Tashkent. No secret clause
has surfaced thus far.
Another mystery has been China’s role in
the conflict. Air Marshal Asghar Khan in his 1979
book, “The First Round,” said that
a key reason for the war’s indecisive outcome
was Ayub’s failure to avail himself of his
newfound friendship with China. Asghar Khan flew
to Beijing on September 9th on a secret mission
to procure arms and ammunition and met Chinese
Premier Chou En-Lai.
Chou was up on the military aspects of the situation
and assured him that the Chinese would immediately
fly the needed combat aircraft over the Karakorums
to Pakistan. But to Chou’s surprise, that
was not acceptable to Ayub, who wanted the aircraft
crated and shipped to Indonesia and then re-shipped
to Karachi in order to hide the transfer from
the Americans.
Asghar Khan also conveyed Ayub’s request
that the Chinese move the People’s Liberation
Army toward the border with India. This deeply
concerned the Chinese, because it would have international
ramifications. They invited Ayub to Beijing so
that Mao could “look him into the eye”
and verify that Ayub intended to see the whole
thing through. Alternatively, Chou was prepared
to visit Pakistan. In the end, Ayub neither visited
China nor did he invite Chou for a visit, knowing
that his eyes would have given the show away.
Asghar Khan’s account of how Ayub failed
to play the China card has received little attention
in the scholarly literature, perhaps because it
was based on unsubstantiated evidence. However,
a quarter century later, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
have substantiated it. They are the co-authors
of a major new biography called “Mao: The
Unknown Story.”
This meticulously documented expose portrays the
grave harms caused to the Chinese people by a
man who was supposedly acting in their interest
but who in practice was carrying out a megalomaniacal
agenda that took more lives than Stalin’s
in the Soviet Union.
Regarding the 1965 war, it says that Mao was anxious
to score another victory over India, having trounced
it conclusively in 1962 in the northeastern portion
of the border between Tibet and India.
The authors say that China actually came through
on Ayub’s request and moved its troops closer
to the border with India. It went a step further
and issued two ultimatums to India, demanding
that it dismantle alleged outposts on territory
claimed by China. India was put on the defensive
but the plan collapsed when Pakistan suddenly
accepted a UN call for a ceasefire before China’s
deadline had expired.
Ayub told Mao that the costs of continuing the
war were too high for Pakistan to bear, both diplomatically
and economically. However, Mao pressed Ayub to
fight on, saying: “If there is a nuclear
war, it is Peking and not Rawalpindi that will
be the target.” But Ayub demurred.
This episode of history is rich in lessons. First,
Ayub should not have gone into a war without thinking
through the consequences of sending his forces
into Kashmir. He made a fatal error of generalship
when he assumed that India would not retaliate
against Lahore. This strategic myopia would be
imitated by Yahya and Musharraf.
Second, Ayub failed to avail himself of the new
ties that Pakistan had cultivated with China and
remained a prisoner of the old ties with the US,
even though they had gone stale once the US placed
an arms embargo on both India and Pakistan just
as the war began. The embargo was one sided since
it crippled the Pakistani military, whose equipment
then was almost entirely of US origin, without
making much of a dent in the Indian ability to
make war.
Third, Ayub should have thought through the consequence
of going to war with India at a time when Pakistan’s
major allies were each other’s sworn enemies.
Ironically, when Pakistan desperately needed China’s
aid six years later, it would find that the China
card had expired.
It had been disabled by the long-term defense
pact that India had signed with the Soviet Union
in August 1971. The USSR moved several army divisions
to its border with China in Manchuria. China was
forced to tell Pakistan that the Soviet Union
did not fear China, which—translated from
the Mandarin—meant that China feared the
Soviet Union. It could not put pressure on India.
Ironically, by then China and the US had reconciled
their differences. Both had a common interest
in saving Pakistan. The US moved the aircraft
carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal
but this did not deter Indira Gandhi from moving
ahead with her war plans to invade Dacca.
According to an interview given many years later
by General Sam Maneckshaw, who was then the Indian
army chief, Indira Gandhi dismissed the American
threat as irrelevant, saying everyone would be
dead if Delhi was nuked. Later, the American revealed
they never intended to attack Delhi. Their goal
was simply to rescue American servicemen trapped
in East Pakistan.
In the meantime, GHQ was telling Gen. Niazi that
he would be bailed out by yellow from the north
(Chinese) and blue from the south (Americans).
When paratroopers began to land around his HQ,
the feckless general sent his assistant to out
to check their colors. He came back with really
bad news. They were brown.
The fourth lesson is that it is always a bad idea
to pick a fight with an adversary who is several
times bigger and who has further armed himself
with a cogent diplomatic strategy. And the final
lesson is to say you won when you did not.
One would think that Pakistan’s military
rulers would have figured out these lessons. Alas,
evidence is scant. Georges Clemenceau famously
said, “War is too serious a matter to entrust
to military men.” He could well have added,
“Especially to the men in khaki who are
moonlighting in muftis.”
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