Pakistan's Wars

An Alternative History

Tariq Rahman

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000594409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book studies the wars Pakistan has fought over the years with India as well as other non-state actors. Focusing on the first Kashmir war (1947–48), the wars of 1965 and 1971, and the 1999 Kargil war, it analyses the elite decision-making, which leads to these conflicts and tries to understand how Pakistan got involved in the first place. The author applies the 'gambling model' to provide insights into the dysfunctional world view, risk-taking behaviour, and other behavioural patterns of the decision makers, which precipitate these wars and highlight their effects on India–Pakistan relations for the future. The book also brings to the fore the experience of widows, children, common soldiers, displaced civilians, and villagers living near borders, in the form of interviews, to understand the subaltern perspective.

A nuanced and accessible military history of Pakistan, this book will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of military history, defence and strategic studies, international relations, political studies, war and conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254645-1

In a war, the normal order of public morality is reversed: normally murder and loot is not allowed in any civilised code of ethics but in a war, they are rewarded. Hence, An Intimate History of Killing—a book which argues that war is neither glorious nor does it bring out the noblest in humans—starts with the line: ‘the characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing’.¹ After 375 pages, the book ends by making sure that the reader now knows that: ‘warfare was as much about the business of sacrificing others as it was about being sacrificed. For many men and women, this was what made it “a lovely war” ’.² For some, one learns with a shudder, the loveliness lies in ‘feelings of pleasure in combat’, that is killing others.³ Others are horrified, still others go about obeying orders like zombies, and most justify their actions with reference to high ideals: duty, sacrifice, nation, regimental honour, personal honour, and manliness. And yet modern warfare is so terrible in the number of the dead, disabled, injured, mentally diseased, traumatised, etc. It leaves behind that it is a wonder why decision makers choose it at all. And yet, Pakistan, a small country, has fought many wars, most of its own choosing, against India since its creation in 1947. Most of these wars—the Kashmir war (1947–48), the 1965 war, the Kargil war (1999), and the ongoing low intensity guerrilla operations from 1989 till date—were fought for Kashmir. There was also a major civil war, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 but here too the major antagonist was India. However, Pakistan has also fought with the Taliban—radical Islamist militants—operating on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border (FATA) intermittently from 2005 onwards. There is a vast archive of material on all these wars: memoirs and biographies of participants, mostly senior military officers, diplomats, and politicians in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There are also scholarly studies of these wars. Indeed, the archive is too large to be mentioned here but it will be mentioned in the individual chapters about each of these wars and wherever it is required.

This work is not a military history in the sense that it is not an analysis of battles. Nor, indeed, is it a nationalist history in the sense that it is not a justification of Pakistan’s historical narrative. Instead, it is called an alternative history. Why? The answer to that will come later. Let us begin with the questions it seeks to answer:

1. What was the nature of the decision-making process in Pakistan in the wars under study, that is 1947–48, 1965, 1971, Siachen, Kargil, the covert war for Kashmir (1990 till date), and the military actions in FATA and other areas of Pakistan against Islamist militants (the Taliban)?
2. How did military personnel, their families, and other citizens of Pakistan experience these wars?

The first question deals with the elite decision-making leading to wars. I argue that this decision-making involves only a few individuals, a clique, of some civilians but mostly army officers, who resort to excessive risk-taking in that the conflicts they initiate may escalate into an all-out war with India, a bigger country in area, population, size of its economy and the strength of its armed forces, which can do unacceptable damage to Pakistan. This type of behaviour pattern on the part of such decision makers is metaphorically called ‘the gambling syndrome’. But these individuals act in a heterodox and deviant manner, almost like rogue elements, even when they have the legal authority to take decisions, bypassing the civilian cabinet and parliament even when they exist and even trusting the military itself on a ‘need to know’ basis. I further argue that this kind of decision-making is facilitated in a political culture of authoritarianism, lack of civilian control over the military, and a dysfunctional democracy. Moreover, the decisions being shrouded in excessive secrecy because of their plausible deniability are not analysed critically later and do not form corrective antidotes to such kind of decision-making in the future.

This aspect of this study is in the tradition of elite historiography based, for the most part, on document analysis along with some interviews of powerful members of the civil-military elite who contribute towards decision-making about wars or, at least, know about these decisions. For instance, Colonel Seyyed Ghaffar Mehdi’s (1921–2015) criticism is trenchant and polemical. He uses the words ‘betrayal’, ‘incompetence’, ‘wishful thinking’, and wrong strategy for the decision-making and the conduct of these wars.⁴ While one could look at decisions about war from the prism of competence, wrong strategy, lack of preparation, etc., this approach is based on the premise that wars of aggression, presumably for Kashmir in Pakistan’s case, are justified in principle, provided one approaches them in the way the author prefers.

While both civilians and military officers have been responsible for the kind of decisions about wars in Pakistan, it is the domination of the military which has created the kind of political culture in which such decisions are not questioned, discussed, and examined by all stake holders beforehand. Hence, in Chapter 2, I attempt to understand the world view, values and assumptions of the military institution in Pakistan and what explains its political ascendancy.

The answer to the second question brings us to the subjective experiences of the people. There is not a single study of the wars of Pakistan, which has attempted to understand and describe the personal experiences of even the fighters themselves let alone their families and civilians. The memoirs and biographies I have mentioned earlier do, however, provide insights into how the officers felt though this is done only in passing. Even less often these officers mention some experience of their families or juniors but, again, this is, as it were, an aside. The focus is always the battles they fought and the war as a whole. In any case, these narratives are by officers who write mostly in English and only rarely in Urdu. The aim of this study is not only to understand the experiences of the elite, the officers, and their families, but also those who are ignored, suppressed, and muted in accounts of wars. These voices—of widows, common soldiers, villagers near borders, etc.—are considered out of place in histories of war in which the narratorial discipline is constructed by a macho masculinity privileging heroism in battle. These voices are what Bina D’ Costa, a social scientist who has written a study of the construction of national identity through the lens of gender, calls ‘micro-narratives’. She defines these as: ‘lived experience of people, such as men, women, children and religious minorities, who were forced to re-landscape their lives due to these political events’.⁵ In this study, such lived experiences are privileged whether these result in any perceptible re-landscaping of lives or not. This aspect of the study is both methodologically and theoretically difficult as will be discussed later.

The materials for this aspect of the book are the interviews of volunteers and such sources of personal experiences of people which are available. The total number of such interviewees and informants, including people with whom I have conducted conversations, are 109: 49 military men including officers, JCOs, and ORs; 60 civilians out of whom 42 were males and 18 were females. These civilians range in socio-economic status from being federal secretaries and well-known intellectuals and public figures to obscure villagers, sweepers, porters, security guards, etc. The informants were approached initially on the basis of my acquaintanceship with them. They, in turn, introduced me to other possible interviewees. However, since my acquaintances were officers, it was only after some time that I found it possible to approach civilians affected by wars, JCOs, NCOs, sepoys, and people of corresponding ranks in the air force and the navy. I also met porters of the Siachen area, widows, and non-commissioned ranks in the armed forces. Thus, using the snowball sampling technique, I found a fairly large number of respondents. My experiences with the NCOs, JCOs, and a petty officer and his family in the villages of the Chakwal district were most valuable. Similarly, I learned a lot from displaced villagers of the Eastern borders during the wars of 1965 and 1971, the porters of Siachen, and the displaced persons of FATA. Although their responses were either excessively garrulous or succinct, they were of great value in understanding their perspective. The major problem was that they tended to tow the official line which, they assumed, was what I had come to listen to and write about. It was only in their occasional asides, slips, and silences that I could infer that the narrative they vociferously expressed was, in fact, contested in their own minds. In this context, m...