The myth of September 6, 1965

Every year we Pakistanis celebrate September 6th with a lot of ‘national fervour’ and laud the armed forces for being ‘victorious’ against the Indian forces back in the 1965 war. The state commemorates the ‘Defence Day’ by holding various ceremonies and special programmes. Milli naghmay (patriotic songs) are aired on the local television channels and radio stations, while the newspapers bring out special supplements to mark the day. This is all very well, but I wonder if our people know that in actuality we are not celebrating a victory. Not only did we lose militarily in 1965 – state propaganda aside – but we also lost our national unity in the process. Forty-two years down the road, ours is a country that is on the verge of dismemberment, again.

August 1947 gave birth to two independent states, India and Pakistan. It also gave birth to territorial disputes that haunt both South Asian neighbours to date. Kashmir is one of the main disputed territories. The two infant states fought a war in 1948 on the Kashmir issue, but despite a ceasefire, the issue was never resolved. At the beginning of 1965, skirmishes between the two neighbours erupted once again on another disputed territory – Rann of Kutch. Having no real economic value, the Rann conflict was only rooted in the overall contentious relationship between the two sides. Fortunately, the Pakistan army was successfully able to defend itself against the Indian army and in fact gave it a bloody nose. This served as a morale booster for our military.

The high morale of the military, egged on by Ayub Khan’s overambitious foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, led to a misadventure that cost Pakistan its dignity. In the late summer of 1965, Pakistan launched ‘Operation Gibraltar’. Pakistan sent infiltrators – military commandos in civvies – into Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) to ‘liberate’ it, and expected that the ‘downtrodden’ Kashmiris would support the insurgency. Little did we know that the plan would crumble like a house of cards.

It was not only a plan fraught with miscalculation, but a foolish one to begin with. There was no proper reconnaissance, no political intelligence, and the Kashmiris in IHK were not even taken into confidence. “Whatever his [Ayub’s] reasons, Pakistan went into Operation Gibraltar without any preliminary preparations and undertook a guerrilla operation inside IHK with a large number of regular soldiers, some SSG elements and a smattering of irregulars, expecting to be welcomed by the local population and raise them up in arms against the Indian government. They were destined to be rudely disillusioned. Far from rising up in arms, the local population denied any support and, in many instances handed over the infiltrators to Indian troops” (Qadir, Brigadier (retd) Shaukat, ‘Operation Gibraltar: Battle that never was’, Rediff.com).

Before the operation was launched, Z A Bhutto somehow managed to convince Field Marshal Ayub Khan that even if India responded to the incursions in Kashmir, it would not cross the international border. Thus there was no question of a full-fledged war. But as soon as India had brutally crushed the insurgency in IHK, it launched an attack on Pakistan on September 6, 1965. The public was led to believe that India had launched a ‘surprise attack’ on Pakistan, and that ‘Hindu India’ would be taught a lesson. Thus the armed forces had full public support.

It is to the credit of our air force and the jawans fighting in the battlefield that they put up a strong fight against a superior enemy. But it is the generals who let the country down. “Ayub had attempted to save his forces in Kashmir; more importantly, he wanted to avoid a general war. But the war he sought to avoid had come to Pakistan, and the nation had to be rallied to efforts not envisaged in the plans to capture Kashmir. The vast majority of Pakistanis knew virtually nothing about the course of the hostilities. All they knew came from Radio Pakistan, and in the name of national morale, the public was informed over and again of the successes on the battlefield, or at the very least, the heroism of units and individual members of the armed forces who had fallen in combat. The fact that Pakistan itself had been targeted by Indian forces, that air raids had ranged to Peshawar on the one side and Dhaka in East Pakistan on the other, did not shake the Pakistani public’s belief that the war was going well and that India was paying a heavy price for its audacious assault on Pakistani territory” (Ziring, Lawrence, Pakistan in the Twentieth Century: A Political History, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 293).

The reality of the much-touted ‘friendly’ relations between Pakistan and the US was also exposed during the 1965 war. Pakistan had allied itself with the US during the Cold War era, and in an effort to please the US, Pakistan joined the South East Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954 and later the Baghdad Pact in 1955, which was renamed the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) in 1959. Being a signatory to these treaties gave Pakistan the necessary means and resources to strengthen itself militarily and economically. When the war broke out in 1965, Pakistan expected that the US would come to its aid and used US-supplied weaponry against India. The US never came to Pakistan’s help, because it perceived communism to be the threat to its interests, hardly India. Thus a military embargo was imposed on Pakistan and military supplies were cut off by the US.

A little more than two weeks into the battle and it was quite evident to Ayub that the army was running out of logistics – ammunition, fuel, food, etc. It is reported that during the war, the American ambassador said to Ayub Khan, “They [the Indians] have got you by the throat Mr President, don’t they?” or words to that effect. It is ironic that when our fairweather ‘friend’ the US decided to leave us in the lurch, the communist Soviet Union came to our aid and helped broker a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

The Pakistani nation was left bewildered about why Ayub Khan opted to end the war that we were ‘winning’ and instead signed the Tashkent Agreement. Since the public was kept in the dark about the real reasons behind the war and its actual progress, it was hard for them to understand that Ayub had indeed made a wise move by ending the war. The public considered it a sell-out and a betrayal. Little did the public know that had the war gone on, we would have lost much more than our ‘pride’.

There are some lessons to be learnt from the experience of 1965. One of the main lessons is that subjective and wishful thinking in politics and war is no substitute for objective analysis. It would be useful in this context to recall the old Clausewitzian adage: ‘War is the extension of politics by other means.’ It is also time we reflect on the loss of our national unity. Back in 1965, the nation stood behind our military. Today, the situation is quite different. Why is it that today we are not as emotional about our ‘sons of the soil’ as we were back in 1965? These are the wages of repeated military interventions at the cost of national unity. When the military took away the sovereign right of the people, the right to rule the country themselves, it took away the respect it rightfully deserved. We can still rediscover this unity if the military goes back to the barracks and allows the civilians to exercise their democratic rights.