Pakistan’s Army: Building a Nation for Jihad

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

The army was Pakistan’s most organized institution, perhaps the only organization that could be called an institution. Its recruits were drawn primarily from Punjab, but the first Pakistani to command it was a Pashtun. Ayub Khan, however, did not stay in that role very long: he seized the presidency in a military coup – the country’s first – eight years later.

Ayub’s ascension offered some hope. As a military man, he was disciplined, appeared certain about his plans for Pakistan and, most crucially, possessed the power to implement them. These expectations were not entirely misplaced. Although he called his coup a “revolution”, Ayub was an advocate of free enterprise. Pakistan’s industrial base expanded under his rule, contributing 6 percent to the nation’s GDP by 1959.

But after granting all that, it is also true that Ayub was never the modernizer that his admirers made him out to be. The outward appearance – the sharply cut suits, the finely clipped moustache, the appetite for malt whiskey – that endeared him to western leaders belied the strong undercurrent of grievances that defined his worldview. “[F]rom Casablanca to Jakarta,” Ayub believed, Muslim nations were “suspect in the eyes of the major powers because most of them profess the faith of Islam.” “India,” he then declared, “has a deep pathological hatred for Muslims… [and] will never tolerate a Muslim grouping near or far from her borders.” Ayub’s Pakistan was going to embrace pan-Islamism and defend it from “Hindu India” and other aggressors.

What followed was an intensive programme of indoctrination that invented a whole new past, presenting Pakistan not as another country but the very apogee of Islam’s evolution. School textbooks were filled with myths; the study of “Islamiyat” was promoted at universities; a whole new discipline called “Pakistan Studies,” locating the country’s origins in the history of Islam, was created. India was relentlessly demonised as a “Hindu” state, producing, according to one Pakistani historian, a xenophobic outlook among both the establishment and the general population.

Pakistan started enlisting allies in the region, securing the support of China and Indonesia. Washington had by then become wary of its Islamic ally. In 1963, it had suspended a $4 million loan after Pakistan entered into an aviation agreement with China. Ayub visited Moscow in April 1965 and gained a promise of Soviet arms for Pakistan.

In May of the previous year, India’s long-serving first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had passed away. So thoroughly had he come to symbolise India that his death produced profound doubts about its ability to survive without him. But the transition was surprisingly smooth: Nehru had a built a durable democracy.

Zulfi Bhutto, Ayub’s ambitious foreign minister, was sent to New Delhi as Pakistan’s representative at Nehru’s funeral. There he met Shastri, the favourite to succeed Nehru. He was not impressed. From almost that moment on, Zulfi pushed his boss to take action in Kashmir. India, he felt, was ready for defeat.  Incidents along the Line of Control escalated rapidly. A few months later, Shastri himself made a stopover in Karachi on his way back from Ottawa to Delhi to attend an informal summit with Ayub. As the discussions carried on, the mighty dictator, dressed in a suit, considered his democratic counterpart – sandal-strapped, dhoti-clad, diminutive, frail, vegetarian – and concluded that Shastri was a weakling incapable of putting up a fight. Big mistake.

In the war that ensued, Pakistan was utterly defeated within a month. Pakistan’s claim to being the authentic home of India’s Muslims received a major blow when it emerged that the much-talked about Indian officer who had single-handedly knocked out seven Pakistani tanks – receiving, posthumously, India’s highest military honour – was a south Indian Muslim called Abdul Hamid.