In Dhaka, on December 16, 1971, under clear skies, and in front of a restless crowd of nearly a million Bengalis, Lt.-Gen. A. A. K. Niazi surrendered first his pistol, then his sword, and then half his country to Lt.-Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora of the Indian Army.
Niazi was one of the most highly decorated officers of the army. Just a few days prior to the surrender, he had avowed that Dacca would only fall over his dead body. He had puffed up his chest and boasted that Indians would have to drive a tank over it in order to win the war.
The war began when Pakistan launched bombing raids on Indian air fields in the west on the 3rd of December, consistent with Ayub’s dictum that the “defense of the east lies in the west.” The Indian Air Force emerged unscathed from the attacks.
But the air raids gave India the justification to launch a full-scale invasion of East Pakistan. The pros and cons of the invasion had been assessed in New Delhi. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had asked General Manekshaw, the supreme Indian commander, whether an invasion of East Pakistan might trigger a nuclear attack by the US on New Delhi, given President Nixon’s “tilt” toward Pakistan. Manekshaw replied, “In that case, we will have nothing to worry about.”
Niazi’s forces, outnumbered and out gunned, with no air cover, and drained by months of fighting an insurgency, had no chance of winning. The noted historian John Keegan wrote, “Although the outcome of the campaign was a foregone conclusion after the first week, General Niazi’s largely undamaged force could have held on in Dacca and other strong defensive positions for weeks, perhaps months.” But their will to fight had vanished.
Paratroopers began to descend on Dhaka as the end neared. Niazi asked Captain Salim Salik if they were “blue” from the south or “red” from the north. Those were code words for the Americans who had anchored the USS Enterprise in the Bay of Bengal and the Chinese who had threatened to intervene in the conflict. Captain Salik said they were brown.
Niazi knew the game was over. After the surrender, the military president, Gen. Yahya Khan, came on the radio and reassured the nation that the war would go on. However, the army deposed him a couple of days later.
How did this unthinkable event come to pass? First, Yahya’s sheer arrogance led him to annual the results of the national elections. He could not countenance the thought of handing over power to the Awami League in the East. Second, his decision to launch an offensive against the Awami League which turned the entire province against the military. Refugees in the millions fled to India forcing India to think of retaliating. Third, instead of negotiating either with its civilian population or with India, he attacked India in the West.
Henry Kissinger said he could not figure out why Pakistan’s high command, located entirely in the West, thought that a beleaguered force of 45,000 men, fighting without the full complement of armor and artillery in the East, and consisting mostly of soldiers who had been hastily flown in from the west, and thus had little knowledge of either the terrain or the local culture of East Pakistan, could have first taken on a population of 75 million that rose in arms against the military regime and then fight an Indian force that was five-times larger Indian force which had not been worn down by an insurgency.
And it was the ultimate folly to appoint Niazi, a recently promoted three-star general with no knowledge of the East, as the theater commander in the East. He lacked the strategic leadership qualities. In his memoirs, Niazi does not accept any blame for what happened. He says he challenged the Pakistan Army to court-martial him, but they refused.
True, the blame does not just fall on Niazi’s shoulders. It was Yahya and the high command who annulled the results of the general election. It was Yahya who told the army to attack “miscreants” in the East thereby turning the entire population against the army. He had once been posted to the command of the 14th Division which was the sole division in the East. When war seemed imminent, he boasted that he knew East Pakistan like the back of his hand. What good was his knowledge when he refused to visit the East once the military operation was launched in March?
When the war began, he retreated to his office and kept mumbling that all he could do about East Pakistan was to pray. His deputy, General Hamid, visited the troops in the East just twice. Lt.-Gen. Gul Hassan, Chief of the General Staff, would not answer Niazi’s phone calls. The top brass of the Pakistan army had abandoned their “most decorated officer” to his own devices.
Since India had deployed a very large force in the East, for the first time in history there was near parity of forces in the West. But Pakistan did not prevail on the western front. There was poor coordination among the three services. The naval chief heard on the radio that war had broken out. Yahya and the air chief had chemistry problems.
When the war ended, Yahya said that he had always maintained that wars solve no problems. The victors in Dacca knew otherwise. Later he blamed the loss on the “treachery of the Indians.” Blaming the enemy for his defeat qualifies him for a special place in military history.
Professor Michael Howard has averred, “The vanquished are likely to learn more from their defeat than the victors from their victory. Their histories, also, are often fuller and more reliable…the catastrophe is there plain for all to see.”
But that is not the case in Pakistan where the army reigns supreme. Any attempt to analyze defeat and derive lessons is regarded as an act of treason. But coups which are a clear act of treason are justified by the law of necessity. When he was the military ruler in the 2000’s, Gen. Musharraf was asked about the loss of East Pakistan. He dismissed the questioner, saying why we should concern ourselves with something that happened a long time ago.
The Hamoodur Rehman Commission’s report on the debacle was never published in Pakistan. It appeared in India almost two decades later. It put the blame squarely on the army. It had failed to anticipate the enemy’s reactions, under-estimated the enemy’s skills, and failed to learn from prior wars.