Daily Times

Armed with nuclear weapons, the Pakistan army is one of the world’s most formidable armies. Its rated strength is 600,000 which is organised into nine corps formations. These are comprised of 29 divisions, including 19 infantry, two mechanised and two armoured divisions. These are equipped with thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and armoured personnel carriers.

It has fought three major wars and several minor wars with India. Its intelligence arm, the ISI, fought the USSR’s Red Army in Afghanistan with US and Saudi assistance, and completed it’s objectives. More recently, the army has been deployed to fight a domestic insurgency led by radical Islamist elements.

Colonel Cloughley is uniquely qualified to write a history of the army. In addition to serving in the British and Australian armies, he spent eight years in Pakistan, first as deputy head of the UN Mission in Kashmir and then as the Australian defence attaché. He visits Pakistan regularly and knows most of the flag officers on a first-name basis. He also comments regularly on Pakistan and the myriad security challenges it faces in Jane’s Sentinel.

His history is now in its fifth edition, and clocks in at 673 pages. It includes a revealing discussion of how General Raheel Sharif became the army chief, a critical assessment of General Kayani’s tenure and a comment alleging that General-President Musharraf possessed an oversized ego.

Cloughley describes the Pakistan Army’s performance in the major wars of 1947-48, 1965 and 1971 in great detail. His narration outlines the reasons why the Army failed to achieve its strategic objectives in the first two, which werefought to wrestle Kashmir from India; and why it lost outright the second

Cloughley describes the army’s performance in the major wars of 1947-48, 1965 and 1971 in great detail. His narration brings out the reasons why the army failed to achieve its strategic objectives in the first two wars which were fought to acquire Kashmir from India, and why it lost outright in the second war.

In the first war, the army was in an underdeveloped stage, as it had just been created. The tribesman made some headway and just when Srinagar seemed within their reach, they busied themselves with the ugly business of rape and pillage. A third of Kashmir came within the Pakistani orbit and that is where things stand even today.

In the second war, Pakistanis infiltrators entered Indian Kashmir but they were inadequately trained and had only the “haziest notion of what they were to undertake.” Even though they had been sent to fight a protracted guerrilla war, “they were in poor physical condition.” Unsurprisingly, some were captured and “revealed much information to their Indian captors when, as was inevitable, most of their efforts failed.” The army “tended to think in terms of brigades, not divisions, and certainly not Corps.” General Gul Hassan, the Chief of the General Staff at the time, admitted that the war was “a failure.”

Cloughley says that Pakistan thought India would not respond to its incursion into Kashmir with a response along the international border. That was a major blunder. When Lahore was attached, Pakistan launched its First Armoured Division in a counter-attack but the tanks drove into “a well-constructed trap. Indian tank-hunters inflicted heavy punishment, and the flooded area of the Rohi Nala prevented many of the heavy (M-47/48) Patton tanks from moving forward… Tank commanders … exposed their heads and shoulders above the turrets of their tanks. Many, of course, were killed.”

He says the war was lost due to poor coordination between infantry and armoured divisions and “lack of press-on spirit in commanders, poor communications, shockingly bad command at the highest levels, and indifferent logistical planning.”

What happened in 1971 was far worse and almost unimaginable. After mistakenly denying a chance to East Pakistanis to rule the country even though they had won a majority of the seats in the national assembly in the 1970 election, the army with some 45,000 troops launched an assault on ‘miscreants’ in East Pakistan which soon turned into a full-scale civil war against the 75 million people of Pakistan.

After it became clear that East Pakistan would fall to Indian forces in late November 1971, Pakistan opened another front in the border between West Pakistan and India. While no one expected General Niazi’s beleaguered garrison would survive for very long against a full-scale Indian attack in the Eastern Theatre, much better results were expected in the Western Theatre where Pakistan enjoyed near parity in its forces with India.

Unfortunately, that campaign “was a disaster for Pakistan. Poor planning; indecision about deployment; hasty and countermanded regrouping; inadequate or even non-existent coordination between formations; inability to seize the moment for exploitation; lack of cooperation between GHQ and air HQ; bungling of movement control procedures — the list of failures is long.” He notes that nothing had been “done in the years 1965-71 to hone the skills of the Pakistan Army.” But he fails to discuss the reasons why. Nor does he present an analysis of what has been done since the disaster of 1971. Is the army in any better condition today to take on India should the latter attack?

The command structure of the military was re-organised when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took over as prime minister. The position of commander-in-chief was replaced with chief of army staff who, along with the naval and air chiefs of staff, was supposed to report to a newly-created Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That is common practice in many countries to ensure coordination between the three services. While these changes were made nominally in Pakistan, the army chief remains the de facto commander-in-chief of all three forces and the man who leads the coups.

Surprisingly, there is no discussion in the book about the strength of the army, its formations and its equipment even though the author is intimately familiar with the details. He does not probe the reasons why the army is so much larger today than the army that existed during the 1971 war, even though half of the population was lost after East Pakistan seceded.

India’s population is more than six times that of Pakistan yet its military is only twice as large. Furthermore, Pakistan’s stockpile of nuclear weapons now exceeds India’s. Does that make the country safer? Does national security just reside in military ratios? The author does not comment on these issues. Why has the army interfered so many times in the affairs of state, mounting four major coups, and calling all the shots even when it is not in office? Why does the army run so many businesses?

Cloughley mentions Zia’s death but says there is no point in theorising about who killed him. That is disappointing given his obvious closeness to the army. Similarly, he refrains from commenting on how the US was able to enter deep into Pakistani territory and kill Osama bin Laden.

What will be the future of the army? Perhaps that is best summed by a quote in the book attributed to the director-general of ISPR: “The needs of the Army will be determined by the Army itself.” Despite his softness towards the army, Cloughley, generally reluctant to be critical of the army’s role in politics, says that this is “a novel approach to democracy.”

The book at its strongest when discussing the performance of the army on the battlefield and for that reason no serious student of Pakistan can afford to not read it.

The writer has authored Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan. He can be reached at ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, November 28^th 2017.