Like a broken record September 6^th comes around every year and Pakistanis are bombarded with propaganda on how the 1965 Indo-Pak war was won. This would be fine if it were the case; except it wasn’t. Pakistan’s leadership blundered into a war it didn’t expect and wasn’t prepared to fight to the bitter conclusion. Its war aims were obscure to non-existent, and the top leadership manifestly failed to lead the nation to victory over an enemy, which though larger, it had every capacity to defeat.
 

September 6^th commemorates the day when the war began in earnest, when the Indians crossed the unprotected border with the intention of capturing Lahore. That the border was undefended in the first place despite the fact that Operation Grandslam had been raging in Indian Occupied Kashmir for days is in itself a travesty. It’s perhaps one of the biggest blunders in military history, definitely in the South Asian context. The Pakistani intelligence community had known full well of the Indian plans for an attack, but were ignored by a staggeringly ignorant Ayub Khan and his merry band of fools, (which included a certain Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was one of the chief hawks in persuading Ayub Khan to launch Grandslam in the first place).

  

So on the ground Pakistan was unprepared on the international border. When the Indians thrust forward therefore there was a desperate scramble to shore up the defences around Lahore, and were it not for the timely intervention of the air force, things may have been very grim indeed. The Indian advance succeeded in diverting Pakistani attention and resources away from Kashmir where the Indian Army was facing an imminent defeat. However, even here at this point when it was poised on the brink of a stunning victory, Pakistan’s leadership did its best to help the Indians. With the vital communication hub of Akhnoor virtually undefended and its capture a forgone conclusion, the Pakistani advance was ordered to halt, and a change of command ordered. The delay allowed the Indians to shore up their position, and golden opportunity went out of the window. From speaking to a number of retired military officers, the blame for this inexplicable act lies with Ayub Khan. If Air Chief Marshal Asghar Kahn is to be believed, (and I see no reason not to), he was sent by Ayub Khan to secure the help of the Chinese, who offered any number of Shenyang F-6 Farmer interceptors (which Ayub Khan insisted couldn’t be flown to Pakistan, but dismantled and shipped via Indonesia for some reason). During his time in China however, he was quizzed by the puzzled Chinese as to why Ayub Khan was desperately sending out peace feelers when the war had only just begun. The truth is, Ayub Khan had lost his nerve, and this was something which has been well documented and was even on official record. He was found guilty of cowardice during WWII in Burma, and sent back to command a garrison in India in disgrace. His cowardice stopped the liberation of Akhnoor and the then inevitable surrender of Indian forces in Occupied Kashmir. Yet to the Pakistani people, he was on the radio portraying himself as the most vicious of tigers, and some people still buy this rubbish decades later.

 

Talk of Asghar Khan brings me to the air force. It had planned, trained, and equipped itself to destroy the numerically superior Indian Air Force on the ground in the opening stages of any conflict. It was perfectly capable of doing so, and with the capability came the opportunity, because on September 6^th the Indian Air Force was nowhere in sight when its army crossed the border. At dusk that day the PAF should have been ready to wipe out the Indians, but only one squadron (Peshawar based Number 19 Squadron) was ready, and only they, led by Squadron Leader Sajad ‘Nosey’ Haider, (having led his men to attack the Indian columns advancing on Lahore earlier in the day), was able to carry out its assigned task and attack the IAF airbase at Pathankot. All other raids were failures, mainly due to the order to strike being given too late in the day for them to be carried out effectively, and poor leadership. These raids achieved nothing. The general failure of the Sabres to hit their objectives, saw the intrepid crews of the B-57s sent out against fully operational and alert, undamaged enemy airbases, to keep the IAF on their toes throughout the night. The B-57s did a very good job under trying circumstances, but ironically the bomber crew’s contribution to the war is generally overlooked.

 

 If the PAF failed the night before, morning saw yet another failure. It was obvious that the IAF would retaliate, and retaliate in numbers, and that their target would be Sargodha, the home of the PAF. Despite this however, and despite the base being chocked full of F-86F Sabres wired to carry Aim-9B Sidewinders, there was no equivalent of Mallory’s ‘Big Wing’ to meet them. In fact throughout the day, the IAF repeatedly managed to penetrate Sargodha’s defences, (sometimes achieving complete surprise), and carry out some spectacularly inept bombing runs. You can’t really celebrate being saved from destruction by your enemy’s incompetence, but that is what the ‘Battle for Sargodha’ has become. No one actually examines what in reality happened, and never has anyone publically asked who was responsible for the glaring failures which the official history even refuses to admit exist. Why was the IAF consistently able to arrive over Sargodha without being detected by mobile observer units before hand? Were they placed in the wrong area? Or were they just inept? No attacking IAF aircraft should have returned home considering the PAF had the planes and the know how to be able to meet the attacking aircraft and blow them out of the sky. The PAF had the technological and professional edge to wipe the IAF out, and it failed. In fact only the navy can be assumed to have done very well in the war. It kept the larger, better equipped Indian Navy at bay for the duration of the war. So much so that Indian accounts of the 1965 war barely gives the IN a mention at all. With a submarine lurking off Bombay ready to pick off and aircraft carrier or a cruiser should they venture out of port however, they perhaps can’t be blamed for staying at home.

 

The individual shortcomings in the war tap into wider failures. The 1965 Indo-Pak War represented the best opportunity to liberate Kashmir from Indian occupation, but this opportunity was needlessly squandered. No one mentions that on September 6^th every year, or if they do, they definitely don’t get on the TV as much as they should. There are a small number who are quite vocal in this respect, but the common consensus is that sleeping dogs should be allowed to lie, and that the boat shouldn’t be rocked. So today will all be about Pathankot and MM Alam, rather than the failure to destroy the IAF on the ground; the Battle of Chawinda, rather than the Battle of Assal Uttar (where the 1^st Armoured Division blundered into an Indian tank trap and lost all its tanks); and the raid on Dwarka. No one can claim that the lower ranks and junior officers failed to meet the grade, because they fought like cornered tigers. However, higher ranking officers and the nation’s senior leadership failed spectacularly.

 

So we’re left with where we are today, with the Kashmiris still under the oppressive yoke of the Indians, held in a false, illegal, and unrecognised union with India and the point of an Indian bayonet. The world cares even less about the Kashmiris today however than they ever did, and no amount of bogus ‘confidence building measures’, or phoney ‘composite dialogue’ between India and Pakistan will change this. The Indians have a free hand in Kashmir mainly because countries that matter when it comes to things like this think it’s in their interests to build India up as a bulwark against China. This isn’t something that will change, and by extension, neither will the plight of the Kashmiris.

 

In retrospect therefore September 6^th every year should be a sombre day of reflection in Pakistan because lives and a golden opportunity wasted through incompetence, instead of the crass celebration of a false victory it has become.