| #195 |  | 895 |  |
June 01, 2009 |  | By Col Anil Bhat (Retd) | ||
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If reports of Pakistan Army’s operations in Swat valley over the past couple of weeks are to be believed, then the head count of Taliban killed should add up to a thousand or so. But with the kind of media access, or lack of it, there does not seem any way of ascertaining the exact figure of Taliban killed or caught. One indicator is fresh graves, of which there are no reports. What is clear though is the many tens of thousands hapless civilians displaced, facing the Pakistan Army’s uninhibited use of artillery, attack helicopters and even aerial bombardment, and on the other hand the firepower of the Taliban.
While it is too good to believe that PA at long last has trained its guns on the Taliban – in many ways its own creation – in Buner and Dir, albeit much after the Taliban took over Swat. That this has been done, along with ‘removing’ 6000 troops from the substantial part of forces deployed against India, and in all probability after considerable arm-twisting by the US, the action against the Taliban is no great consolation. Had there been no US pressure, the Pakistan Army would have continued its post-9/11 charade of ‘dismantling’, but actually protecting tanzeems like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LET), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and some others by letting them change their locations in Pakistan itself, and quite often packing some of them off to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and India’s North East. The Army, in probability would have also gone on buying peace with the Taliban and motley fundamentalist groups, as it has repeatedly done, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), in the past three years or so, at least.
To gauge the sincerity, determination and sustainability of the Pakistan Army’s war against terror on the very same terrorist organisations which are its creation, it may be relevant to take stock of the Army’s six-decade-long history and get an idea of its will, capability and freedom to fight, which strike at the roots of its professionalism or rather, lack of it.
For any army, it is the fighting spirit which stems from high morale, sound and sustained training, and good leadership that wins the day on the battlefield. Let us begin from 1947, when the Pakistan Army was carved out of the undivided Indian Army, till then acknowledged by Allied and Axis countries of World Wars (WW) I and II as a formidable professional fighting force. The Pakistan Army’s fall from professionalism began when the Islamic influence became overt during the Zia era. The Pakistan Army’s current expertise of creating terrorist organisations has its genesis in its strategy of force multiplication through terror, in many ways the first attack being on Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in 1947, when it sent thousands of Kabailis (tribals) to plunder, rape and kill Kashmiris.
Indian Army veterans of 1947, 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars have observed some major post-1947 changes in Pakistan’s armed forces: (a) The vastly increased distance between the officer and his soldiers during war. Many Pakistani personnel below officer rank have expressed this and added “if we were being led by your (Indian) officers, the result of this war would have been very different”. (b) Avoiding proximity to flames or ensuring not to suffer burns, based on the twisted religious belief that death by burning will lead to ‘Jahannum’ (Hell)! This meant that Pakistani tank crews abandoned their mounts after the first hit itself, even when the main gun and machine-guns were still functional. (c) Despite the Pakistan Army having more modern American Patton tanks than the Indian Army’s British WW II vintage Centurions, standard of gunnery training was far below the mark. Hence, there were disproportionately large losses of Pakistan Army tanks in both the 1965 and 1971 armour-intensive wars.
Brigadier (retd) Z A Khan, a Pakistani armoured corps officer, in his book The Way it Was: Inside the Pakistan Army-Indo-Pak Wars 1965 & 1971 (Natraj Publishers, Dehra Dun, 2007), brings out a further flaws in the Pakistan Army which led to its defeat in these two wars. Besides elaborating on outdated methods of instruction in training and faulty planning of operations in war, compounded by lack of coordination and cooperation between the three services, Brig Khan writes, “The 1965 war with India was started by us to force a favourable settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Operation Gibraltar was badly planned and badly executed, it ended with the loss of over 5000 Azad Kashmiris forcibly recruited and sent as infiltrators……. ‘Man managed’, spoon fed and over supervised in peace, in the loose atmosphere of the battlefield, the soldier, the NCO and the JCO missed the absence of the officer…..The army must learn to shoot, not for the annual classification and the Pakistan Army Rifle Association, but field firing under simulated battle conditions….”.
In barely two weeks of war in 1971, 93,000 Pakistan armed forces personnel surrendered to India Army. Thereafter Pakistan’s third dictator Zia-ul-Haq made a long term plan of “bleeding India by thousand cuts” by Islamising the Pakistan Army and forming terrorist groups to wage a proxy war. For its 1998-99 Kargil misadventure, the Pakistan Army raised twelve battalions of the Northern Light Infantry comprising 49 per cent Shias, 23 per cent Ismailis and 10 per cent Noor Bakshis – 55 per cent from Gilgit and 35 per cent from Baltistan – as convenient cannon fodder.
In the ongoing operations in Swat, Pakistan ’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen Athar Abbas, says that helicopters ‘inserted’ commandos into the main town in Buner on 29 April 2009, against an estimated 450-500 militants after warplanes and attack helicopters engaged ‘miscreants’ and killed more than 50. Rather than fleeing, ‘militants’ seized three police stations in the north of Buner on April 28 and kidnapped 70 police and para-military, while eighteen were “recovered”. The spokesman gave few other details. Security forces prevented reporters from entering the area and telephone services were interrupted, making it hard to verify the army’s account of the fighting.
Last but certainly not least, how ‘free’ is the Pakistan Army in fighting the Taliban and other groups created, nurtured and directed by it? Why does it still need to raise new ‘elite’ forces, as in April 2009, when 600 policemen refused to go to Swat? Steeped in organising and outsourcing terrorists, it never prepared itself to effectively fight them even to save Pakistan.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views either of the Editorial Committee or the Centre for Land Warfare Studies). | ||||||||
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Col Anil Bhat (Retd) |
