3 days ago
India paid for ignoring warnings in 1965 war. It can't afford to repeat those mistakes today
'There were no concentration of troops on the Pakistani side and no battle indicators of war or even limited skirmishes,' then-XV corps commander Lieutenant-General Kishan Pal told Unified Headquarters in Srinagar on 24 May 1999. The 'situation was local and would be defeated locally.'
Even though commanders across the Kargil sector were reporting that troops were being fired on across the Line of Control, from Mashkoh and Dras to Batalik and the gates of the Siachen glacier, their Generals lined up behind the Minister.
'Forty-eight hours,' Defence Minister George Fernandes confidently proclaimed to the nation: 'The intruders will be evicted in 48 hours.' The previous night, on 14 May 1999, Captain Saurabh Kalia and five soldiers—Arjun Ram, Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram, and Naresh Singh—had disappeared on their way up the Kaksar River to Bajrang Post on the Line of Control. Their bodies were returned weeks later, bearing evidence of their torture: cigarette burns, fractures, and amputated genitalia.
Last week, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan made the courageous decision to tell a nation in denial that India had lost combat jets on the first night of the 100-hour war with Pakistan: 'Why they were down, what mistakes were made—that are [sic.] important,' he explained. Those errors, General Chauhan went on, were examined during a 48-hour pause in Indian Air Force offensive operations before it resumed long-range strikes.
Even if there has been needless coyness in matters of details, the importance of this truth-telling cannot be overstated.
The summer of war
Last week, six decades ago, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, the largest political party in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, called on citizens to join the army of Razakars, who were preparing a guerrilla campaign to seize Kashmir from India. The government of the so-called Azad Kashmir ordered all men aged between 16 and 45 years to undergo military training. Local clerics called for jihad, new camps were set up to train volunteers, and units of Pakistan's Frontier Corps began to be moved into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir from the border with Afghanistan.
Amazingly, no one in India seemed to hear the words being broadcast on loudspeakers across the ceasefire line, now known as the Line of Control. From the end of July, nine columns of irregulars and troops—each made up of several hundred men—made their way into the heart of Kashmir almost unnoticed.
Later, Indian intelligence officers would learn that the guerrillas had been ordered to join the annual congregation to mark the death of the saint Sheikh Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani at Khanyar, Srinagar, scheduled for 8 August. Then, they were to march with protestors who were to gather to protest the arrest of Kashmir's former Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. They were to take over the airfield and radio station and proclaim a revolutionary council. This would be the signal for regular Pakistani forces to cross the ceasefire line to help the Kashmiris.
There has never been an explanation, India's official war history notes, 'of how such a large number of men had managed to slip across the Indian borders, supposed to be so vigilantly guarded.'
'Even on 2 August 1965,' it notes, 'when a high-level conference was held at Srinagar to review the security arrangements on the Cease Fire Line, there was no inkling of the impending guerrilla invasion within 72 hours.'
Earlier that summer, though, the Indian Army had begun to experience an unusual degree of fire from across the ceasefire line. Then, on 16 May, an Indian outpost near Kargil came under direct attack. The Army then discovered that Pakistani forces had occupied positions on Peak 13620—so named for its altitude, in feet—as well as the adjoining Kala Pahar area.
For the first time since the 1947-1948 war, the Indian Army responded with offensive operations, seizing Peak 13620 and a series of positions along the ridge over Kargil. The positions were, however, returned to Pakistan on 30 June after an assurance from the United Nations Secretary-General, General U Thant, about the safety of the Kargil-Srinagar highway.
The Indian Army's outposts in Tithwal, Uri, Mendhar, Poonch, and Naushera, though, continued to come under attack through coming weeks—likely compelling soldiers to reduce patrolling along the passes across the ceasefire line.
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The chaos of war
For commanders of the Pakistan Army, India's blindness must have seemed like a gift from God. Then-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leading hawk in Field Marshal Ayub Khan's regime, had drawn up the plans in consultation with Foreign Secretary Aziz Ahmad and the commander of Pakistan Army forces in PoK, Major General Akhtar Husain Malik. The memoirs of the Pakistan Army's then-army chief, General Mohammad Musa, assert he was sceptical of the idea, concerned that it might lead to all-out war.
To Musa's surprise, his divisional commander continued execution of an idea he had shot down: 'The policy-makers thwarted professional assessment and advice on a matter having grave military implications because of their miscalculation of the politico-strategic situation and the over-ambitiousness of a few individuals.'
Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan has suggested that these political tensions undermined the operation from the outset. 'The Chief [General Musa] and the Chief of General Staff, General Sher Bahadur, had, from its inception, viewed Gibraltar as a bastard child, born of the liaison between the Foreign Minister [Bhutto] and General Malik,' Gul Hasan wrote in his memoirs.
Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Air Force from 1957 to 1965, has recorded that he was asked to assign a Kashmiri-speaking officer to run a radio station, which was purported to be operating from Srinagar but was actually located at the Race Course Grounds in Rawalpindi. The Air Marshal was promised a 24-hour heads-up before operations began, but the chaotic organisation of the attack meant he only learned of it after the event.
Late on the afternoon of 5 August, Gulmarg-based shepherd Mohammad Din turned up at the local police station to report that he had run into large numbers of armed Pakistanis. Troops were dispatched to surround the infiltrating column. There were further fire contacts in Teetwal, Kupwara, and Mendhar that night. The Salahuddin column, the largest of the groups, succeeded in pushing its way into four Srinagar suburbs and exchanging fire with Indian soldiers dispatched from the Badami Bagh cantonment.
The assault, though, soon began to stall because of its lack of local support and the absence of well-structured logistical backup. Major Farooq Ahmed would later recall hiding among flea-infested animal herds as he fled ahead of Indian troops. The starving personnel of the Kargil column mutinied twice, while thousands simply returned home across the ceasefire line.
Following its initial failure, the Indian Army began to push back—famously capturing key infiltration routes, like the Haji Pir Pass and, once again, Peak 13620.
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Failures of command
The unravelling of the attempt to seize Kashmir led Pakistan's leadership to dither. At the end of August, military historian Shuja Nawaz has written, Field Marshal Ayub sent a missive to Bhutto, asking him to 'take such action that will defreeze the Kashmir problem, weaken Indian resolve, and bring her to the conference table without provoking a general war.' General Gul Hasan now begged for permission to launch Grand Slam, an offensive aimed at Akhnur and then Chhamb, which would eventually cut off the highway to Srinagar.
Even though the Indian Army had repeatedly war-gamed such an attack since at least 1956, Lieutenant-General Harbaksh Singh recorded in his memoirs that the Pakistani offensive caught it completely off-guard.
'The preparations made by Pakistan for this thrust could not be concealed,' the official war history notes, 'and the United Nations observers had warned India of the impending attack. The warnings were probably not taken seriously.' To make things worse, the Indian Air Force—which had never been warned or consulted on the prospect of a war in Kashmir—ended up hitting the Army's armour and gun positions.
Flailing Indian commanders, though, were saved by General Musa's inexplicable decision to relieve General Akhtar Malik of his command mid-battle. Following the fall of Chhamb, the onward push to Jourian spluttered and lost momentum.
This gave India time to launch its counter-offensive across the border in Punjab. The XI Corps secured initial successes in its push toward Lahore, securing significant victories at the battles of Asal Uttar and Barki. There was a stalemate, however, in other key sectors, like Dera Baba Nanak and Fazilka, while a Pakistani counter-offensive succeeded in capturing Khem Karan. For its part, the I Corps push toward Sialkot soon degenerated into what the official history describes as 'a slogging match.'
Large-scale preemptive strikes on Indian airbases on 6 September by the Pakistan Air Force succeeded in destroying several aircraft on the ground in Pathankot and Kalaikunda. These losses forced the Indian Air Force to commit a large part of its resources to combat air patrols to protect its bases, thus degrading its ability to support the Army's push toward Lahore.
Two days before India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire, Ayub and Bhutto made a secret visit to Beijing to seek support from then-Premier Chou En-lai. The message from Chou was less than reassuring: 'You must keep fighting even if you have to withdraw to the hills.' A tired and worried Ayub took counsel from Musa and Nur Khan and decided not to prolong the fighting.
The failures of 1965 helped India triumph in the Bangladesh war just seven years later—but the absence of an institutional culture of relentless and open questioning meant some mistakes were soon to resurface. In 1988, India proved unable to prevent large-scale infiltration across the Line of Control, opening the way to the long jihad in Kashmir. Failures of Generalship claimed a bitter toll on Indian soldiers' lives in Kargil, just as it had in 1965. And weaknesses in Indian air power exposed in 2019 were hushed up, leading to the reverses General Chauhan has now underlined.
Lessons can be learned through close examination of one's own errors or be taught by the successes of enemies.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
