This is a good read!(book review)
Quest for security
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books1.htm
By Ahmad Faruqui
Ahmad Faruqui sheds light on Pakistan’s defence strategy and why it has proved so costly for the country.
Today, Pakistan’s military personnel intensity, MPI, (military personnel per head of population) is 3.3 times that of India’s, and Pakistan’s military expenditure intensity, MEI, (military expenditures per dollar of GDP) is 1.8 times India’s. What is more disconcerting is the trend in these intensities. About 30 years ago, Pakistan’s MPI intensity was 1.4 times India’s and the MEI was roughly one.
Major wars
The military history of Pakistan and India consists of five conventional wars, one aborted war, and three covert wars. The first war was confined to the disputed territory of Kashmir. It began within two months of independence in 1947, on October 22, and lasted till December 1948. 'Pakistan engineering a coup de main… in which Pathan “volunteers” led by ex-INA men invaded Kashmir at the “invitation” of some Muslim rebels. These operations later expanded into conventional infantry action between the armies of Pakistan and India. When this war ended, one third of Kashmir was under Pakistani control, and the rest under Indian control. This division of land essentially continues till today.
The second major war took place in September 1965, and was confined to the eastern border of West Pakistan. The war was preceded by a clash between Indian and Pakistani forces in the disputed Rann of Kutch region in April. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, then Pakistan’s president, was visiting the Soviet Union when news reached him of the hostilities in Kutch. Surprised, he said: “These fellows have started a war on their own.” Under pressure from a division-level attack by the Pakistanis, the Indian army retreated after a series of minor skirmishes.
However, the jingoistic elements in the Pakistani army, led by then Brigadier Tikka Khan (who was to play a major role in the 1971 civil war in East Pakistan and subsequent military actions in 1973-77 in Balochistan) portrayed the action as a major defeat for the Indians comparable to their mauling by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 1962. Hostilities ended with a ceasefire on June 6.
The major war began as a Pakistani-inspired guerrilla war in August that escalated into a full-scale war involving armour, air and naval forces in September. India emerged as the tactical victor in the conflict. For Pakistanis, led to believe that one Pakistani Muslim soldier was worth ten Hindu Indian soldiers, the inability to take all of Kashmir was a rude awakening. Notes British Brigadier Bidwell, “the repulse of the Pakistanis by the Indians in 1965 was the first reversal of (the unbroken trend of Muslim victories in the subcontinent going back eight centuries) and a truly historic occasion”.
At the end of the war, India controlled about 720 square miles of Pakistani territory, most of it in the Punjab, while Pakistan held around 300 square miles of Indian territory, most of it in the Rajasthan desert. Indian casualties were estimated at 4,000 to 6,000, with up to 300 tanks and around 70 aircraft destroyed. Pakistani casualties numbered around 3,000 to 5,000, with about 250 tanks and 20 aircraft destroyed.
The third war took place in 1971. Due to a variety of political and economic reasons that are discussed later in the book, East Pakistan wanted to secede from Pakistan. This precipitated a civil war with the Pakistan Army, which ultimately turned into a full-scale war with India in the East. In the later stages, hostilities spread to the entire West Pakistan border as well. This war resulted in a quick and decisive victory for India, as East Pakistan seceded and became the new nation of Bangladesh.
Pakistan ceased to be the world’s largest Muslim country. The operations of 1971 finally dispelled any vain dreams that the ‘sword-arm’ of old India could, despite its numerical inferiority, sweep aside the armies of the effete Hindus, and win another battle of Panipat outside the walls of Delhi. Military historian John Keegan noted that “Pakistan plummeted abruptly from a formidable rival to India and the fifth most populous state in the world, to a rump-state with only a tenth of India’s population and approximately proportional military and diplomatic leverage”.
The 1971 war was an unmitigated disaster for Pakistan, and a humiliating defeat for its army. It not only lost in areas where victory was not to be expected, but it failed to do even as well as it should have. On the western front, Pakistan’s initial armoured thrusts were halted almost at once. At the end of the war, India held 2,750 square miles of territory in Sindh, and Pakistan held a mere 50 square miles of Indian territory.
The fourth war began in 1984 in Kashmir, and involved India’s successful conquest of the Siachen Glacier, a forbidden region known as the ‘third pole’. It lies in the eastern corner of Baltistan, where the border between India and Pakistan lies undemarcated since the partition of British India in 1947. Pakistani attempts to retake the glacier were unsuccessful, and continue intermittently till this day.
At an altitude of 18,000 feet, this is the world’s highest battleground, and the site of one of the longest wars of the 20th century. More casualties arise from medical symptoms triggered by altitude sickness than from gunfire. Men shoot at one another across fields of ice. They fall into crevasses or get buried alive by avalanches. They endure intense cold and sometimes fatal altitude sickness. And yet the territory these Pakistani and Indian troops are contesting has little strategic value and is virtually uninhabitable.
As he toured the area by helicopter in 1987, US mountaineer and photographer Galen Rowell noted “the basic futility of this war. Men might as well fight on the moon as stand on these heights, gasping for breath, with weapons in hand”.
The fifth war took place in the spring of 1999 in Kashmir… mujahideen, backed by regulars of Pakistan’s Northern Infantry, occupied several mountain peaks in the Kargil region on the Indian side of Kashmir. The control of these peaks threatened the Indian line of communication to the Siachen Glacier. The brainchild of General Musharraf, the army chief and now President and Chief Executive of Pakistan, this campaign was tactically brilliant. It exploited gaps in the Indian intelligence apparatus, and achieved complete tactical surprise. However, it came to naught as Pakistan was forced to withdraw under US pressure. Pakistani forces sustained substantial casualties during the retreat, and came under heavy fire from the Indian Air Force. Autopsies of dead Pakistani soldiers revealed the presence of grass in their stomachs, indicating that they had run out of food supplies.
The military stalemate between India and Pakistan over the first half century of their existence has been a negative sum game. Endemic warfare between these ‘feuding brothers’ has produced over 50,000 deaths in 1948 and 1965, a million deaths in 1971, and more than 70,000 deaths in Kashmir since 1989. At the same time, war has failed to resolve their underlying differences, evoking the tragic words of the English poet Matthew Arnold:
And we are here on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The impact of defence spending
Money that could be spent by India and Pakistan on economic development has been diverted on an expensive and dangerous arms race. The two countries will spend $15 billion over the next 10 years to maintain their arsenals, enough to feed and educate more than 37.5 million neglected children. A detailed econometric analysis of the effects of defence spending in Pakistan found that:
Defence has a small positive direct impact on growth … but the indirect effects, through investment crowding out, are strongly negative. The final, steady state, impact of defence on growth is negative and very high … Pakistan can ill afford a costly subcontinental arms competition with its larger neighbour.
Excerpted with permission from: Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan: The Price of Strategic Myopia
Email: [email protected]
Website:www.mrbooks.com.pk
ISBN 0-7546-1497-2
189pp. Rs 2,995