Inside the
Military Mind
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA
After
having governed for nearly a decade, a pro-American
military ruler in Islamabad is losing his grip
on power. People are rioting on the streets. Protestors
are being sent off to jail and the threat of an
emergency hangs in the air.
If you think this describes the drama that is
unfolding in Pakistan today, think again. It is
a description of the extraordinary events that
took place in 1969 when President Ayub was at
the helm. We owe a debt of gratitude to the field
marshal’s son for having produced a brilliant
expose of the army in his memoirs “Glimpses
into the corridors of power.”
Gohar’s picture appears on the book’s
cover. In the background looms his father’s
in military uniform. That is entirely appropriate
since the book is as much a biography of the field
marshal as it is an autobiography of the captain
(both Sandhurst graduates).
Those expecting a scholarly exposition will be
disappointed. There are no footnotes and only
two references. A lack of chronological developments
mars the narrative. It even affects the photographs
in the book, some of which are quite remarkable.
But, even with these shortcomings, the book is
a must read for anyone with a serious interest
in Pakistan.
The insights flow from the author’s close
working relationship with his father. Gohar served
as the president’s ADC for many years, giving
him unusual access to the top brass and their
lieutenants in mufti.
A classic instance is Gohar Ayub’s discussion
of President Ayub’s final days. He was suffering
from acute heart disease but that fact was known
only to a few confidants, including his handpicked
army chief, General Yahya. Gohar had disclosed
Yahya’s real intentions to his father, only
to be told, “You have served in GHQ and
should know that if the Commander-in-Chief of
the Pakistan Army gets it into his head to take
over, then it is only God above who can stop him.”
Who would have known this better than Ayub? In
October 1958, he had deposed the man who had made
him chief martial law administrator, Iskander
Mirza. Even that deed, Gohar tells us, had Yahya’s
fingerprints all over it. Yahya had convinced
Ayub that Mirza feared all the powers he had placed
in Ayub’s hands and planned to arrest him.
However, Gohar reminds us, unlike many others
who governed Pakistan after his departure, Ayub
gave Mirza a safe passage to London where he continued
to earn two Pakistani pensions (one can safely
assume that Nawaz Sharif is not getting any).
After India attacked Lahore on the 6th of September,
1965, Pakistan hit back with its mailed fist.
The First Armored Division commanded by Major-General
Naseer Ahmed was sent in to out-flank four Indian
divisions in East Punjab and three in Jammu and
Kashmir.
Whether this bold maneuver would ever have succeeded
will never be known because it ended in ignominy,
even though Pakistan had much superior weaponry,
including the US-supplied Patton tank. It failed
for three reasons:
• Sheer incompetence. In the beginning,
a Patton flipped over a bridge, created a logjam
and slowed the advance.
• Poor intelligence about the terrain on
the Indian side of the border. The Pattons lost
the momentum when the Indians breached a levee,
flooding the sugar field they were traversing.
• Lack of amour-infantry coordination. This
allowed Indian jeeps mounted with recoilless rifles
to pick off the mired-in-mud Pattons one by one.
Afterwards, Naseer told another divisional commander
that he wanted to shoot himself. When the news
got to the field marshal, he said it would have
been nice if Naseer had indeed done so.
Ayub had gradually built up the Pakistani military
since taking over as the army chief in 1951. He
had succeeded in equipping the military with modern
weaponry from the United States, much of it acquired
at below-market price and financed with American
aid. Indeed, as Gohar tells us, two dozen B-57Bs
bombers were provided free of charge. It pained
Ayub greatly to see all this go to waste in the
war with India, especially when he had emerged
victorious earlier in the year against Fatima
Jinnah.
Gohar accepts the war’s criticisms that
have appeared from well-placed individuals such
as Air Marshal Asghar Khan. He says that it was
a disaster for Pakistan, being based on unfounded
assumptions about a Kashmiri uprising and about
India sitting still on the international border.
But he loses credibility when he says that the
war was not Ayub’s idea.
Not only was Ayub the president, he was still
in uniform. Gohar conveniently blames the fiasco
on Z. A. Bhutto and the divisional commander in
Kashmir. He says Ayub wrote in his diary on the
first anniversary of the war that an inquiry should
be held (which of course was never held because
Yahya did not want it). This does little to improve
Ayub’s image as supreme commander.
Gohar concedes that the celebration of Ayub’s
Decade of Development was ill-conceived but places
the blame for its observance on the shoulders
of the information secretary, Altaf Gauhar. This
just highlights Ayub’s gullibility.
As the Ayubian denouement neared its end, people
rioted. Gohar tells us that an advisor suggested
that Ayub should kill 5,000 people to restore
the writ of the state. However, Ayub replied that
he could not even kill 50 chicken, let alone 5,000
people. He added, were he to begin killing people
just to stay in power, four times that number
would come after him to take revenge.
The fact that Pakistan was not turned into a killing
field on Ayub’s watch speaks of his sagacity.
However, the fact that Ayub had appointed Yahya
the army chief a few years earlier speaks poorly
of his ability to pick lieutenants.
As events got out of control in East Pakistan
in 1971, Ayub counseled Yahya through a back channel
that he should negotiate a withdrawal of Pakistani
forces with Shaikh Mujib (then Yahya’s prisoner)
and seek to preserve Pakistan as a confederation.
He had rightly concluded that after the army action,
it could not survive as a federation. But Yahya
was not in the mood to listen to anyone. When
the inevitable happened, he blamed it on the “treachery
of the Indians.”
Gohar’s discussion of the war in Kargil
leaves little doubt that the Pakistani army, once
again, did not expect a counter-response from
India or the international outrage that ensued.
One has to conclude that the Pakistani military
mind is prone to gambling, not exactly a quality
associated with statecraft. - faruqui@pacbell.net
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