Pakistan: American Weapons in the Service of Jihad

This is the sixth installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan.  Click here for the rest of the series.

Pakistan’s 1965 attack on India placed a modern state’s seemingly modern army in the service of jihad. Military units named after millennium-old Islamic warriors were armed with sophisticated American weaponry in an odd but enduring fusion of primitive ideas with modern arms. The men who orchestrated the war – Ayub Khan and Zulfi Bhutto – may not have been personally religious, but they carried within them deep scars of injury derived from their sense of a crushed Muslim identity. Victimhood is a parasitical affliction: it requires the actual demonization of perceived oppressors in order to validate imagined grievances. It is also quite dangerous: the victim’s anxiety about his own identity often yields a savage, self-righteous certainty in his suspicions about others.

The 1965 war was not about “liberating” Kashmiris. It was about humiliating India. It sought above all to validate Pakistan’s troubled identity with the glory of Islamic victory against the kafir. “As a general rule,” Ayub had written in a top-secret memo to General Musa days before the launch of Grand Slam, “Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place. Such opportunities should therefore be sought and exploited.”

At the battle of Badr in the 7th Century, the Prophet’s tiny band of Muslim soldiers claimed to have vanquished the Quraysh with the help of white-turbaned angels sent by Gabriel. Ayub’s propaganda machinery borrowed directly from that legend, reaffirming Pakistan’s position as the defender of Islam. Stories about Pakistan’s forces being assisted by green-robed angels who deflected Indian bombs with a wave of their hand were circulating, as were legends about Pakistani soldiers shooting down Indian aircraft with Enfield rifles.

But now that India held the upper hand, Pakistan had to affix the blame. However, the Pakistani establishment, immersed in an admixture of victimology and chauvinism, was incapable of introspection. In a gesture that defies belief, Pakistan’s foreign minister simply blamed America. In his “final analysis” of the war, Zulfi Bhutto, the delusional feudal megalomaniac who was often unfairly accused of harbouring democratic instincts, wrote that India’s victory “cannot be explained except in the light of positive United States complicity.” He found American “designs” against Pakistan “positively malicious” and claimed that Washington would stop at nothing short of “liquidating” Pakistan’s “national leadership which would then find itself in no position to offer effective resistance.” “The only language the United States and its henchmen will understand,” Zulfi concluded, “is the language of determination.” The following month, Zulfi went a step further and declared that India was “enlisting Jewish influence in USA.” Ayub himself found this analysis somewhat farfetched, but he was now more or less irrelevant. According to one American historian of Pakistan, it was Zulfi’s words which resonated with the masses now. He was determined to capitalise on the fears and suspicions that the people of Pakistan had been fed for two decades. In three years, Zulfi emerged as West Pakistan’s most popular politician.

In a manner that accurately prefigured – or perhaps positively established – the pattern of the present-day Pakistani-U.S. relationship, Pakistan diverted American military aid to fight India; allied itself with the very enemies it had been paid and equipped by the U.S. to oppose; its leaders presented themselves as moderates to Washington even as they perpetuated their hold on the country by intensifying its Islamisation; and, in the end, denounced America as the Great Satan.

It is difficult to say if a Pakistani nation ever came into existence after 1947. Rather, Pakistan had been rapidly transformed into an asset by its ruling elite. Twenty years after independence, nearly 70 percent of Pakistan’s economy was owned by 22 families. Not a single democratic institution had been build. Control of the state was determined by guns and the threat of guns. By the end of the 1960s, Pakistan had witnessed one major political assassination, two constitutions, two wars, seven prime ministers, one military coup, and two martial law administrators.