Listener (UK)

War, as somebody once said, is far too important a matter to be left to soldiers. It’s a paradox whose point has been all too amply proved by recent events in Pakistan. The commission of inquiry ordered by President Bhutto into the conduct of the third Indo-Pakistan war by his predecessor, Yahya Khan, and the coterie of fellow generals who helped him run (if that’s not too strong a word) the country, may look like a predictable enough politician’s ploy to find convenient scapegoats. Nonetheless, Yahya’s handling first of the separatist crisis in the East, and then of the war itself, has been so outstandingly incompetent that this may well be a case where the scapegoat really did have it coming to him. Yahya’s misreading and mishandling of the situation caused by Sheikh Mujib’s election avalanche in the East is well enough known now to need no retelling. In his brutal and clumsy attempt to put down East Bengali separatism, he couldn’t have fashioned a better weapon to place in the hands of Pakistan’s hawkish enemies in New Delhi. As a retired commander of the Pakistan Air Force put it later, Yahya devised a perfect staff college solution for the destruction of Pakistan.

Having mismanaged the political end of the crisis so disastrously, he and his fellow generals handled the actual fighting with equal incompetence. Cut off though they were from their supply bases in the West, Pakistan’s 90,000 soldiers and auxiliaries in the East should have been able to hold out longer than they did. Strategic and tactical errors of all kinds made it possible for the Indians to reduce the East in three weeks, although the Pakistani forces were not outnumbered by anything like the three-to-one advantage traditionally required of an attacking force, and they were not short of arms or ammunition. Let one example suffice. For the last two weeks of the fighting in the Eastern Wing, the Pakistani Army there was totally without air cover. The two squadrons of F86 fighter-bombers based in the East were unable to fly because the one airstrip available to them, at Dacca Airport, was knocked out by the Indian Air Force. In all the months of crisis leading up to open hostilities between the two countries, the Pakistanis had not bothered to lay down a single alternative strip in the East.

In the West, the failure was even more remarkable. Pakistani strategy has always predicated that an attack on the East Wing could only be effectively countered by an all-out assault in the West. Yet Yahya Khan, as Commander-in-Chief as well as President, never committed his army to battle in the West. From the Pakistani side, the engagements that took place along much of the 1,800-mile border between India and West Pakistan, from the Rann of Kutch in the south to the snowy mountains of Kashmir in the north, were little more than probes or skirmishes. Where they did take some ground, as in the Chamb district of Kashmir and across the Sutlej River, south of Lahore, it was against a fairly relaxed Indian resistance which fell back initially to well-prepared positions which they subsequently held without difficulty. The fact is that many major Pakistani strike units, equipped for a fast-moving armoured conflict in the West, never fired a shot in anger.

There was also an astonishing lack of liaison and co-ordination between the Army and the Air Force. Day after day, Pakistani attack planes took off in strength to fly close support missions for an army which failed to turn up on the battlefield. Finally they gave up the effort in disgust. All in all, the PAF’ record in the West was good. The somewhat euphoric kill ratios they were claiming while the fighting was going on have since been revised downwards, but the true figure still reflects credit on a service that was outnumbered three to one : 104 Indian planes destroyed, plus 14 damaged, for the loss of 29 Pakistani planes, and four damaged. Unlike the Army, the Air Force has kept strictly out of politics, and there was virtually no contact between the generals and senior Air Force officers. It may be of some significance that since President Bhutto dismissed the ‘fat and flabby generals’, as he called them, the highest-ranking service officer in Pakistan is Air Marshal Rahim Khan, the Air Force Commander.

No doubt the forthcoming commission of inquiry will produce a thick crop of recriminations on which the bitter and humiliated Pakistani public can feed for months and years to come. Meanwhile, what are President Bhutto’s chances of giving effective leadership to a country that has been adrift for so long without anything that could recognisably be described as a government? Popular support he overwhelmingly enjoys in what is left of Pakistan, not just among the workers and peasants who respond so fervently to the brand of Islamic socialism propagated by his Pakistan People’s Party, but also among the professional and mercantile classes, disgusted by the failure of the generals and frustrated by years of political impotence.

They, perhaps, see a different figure from the cult hero of the masses - the well-dressed son of a wealthy land-owning family whose instincts are likely to be basically conservative rather than the pro-Peking radical adored by the mob. President Bhutto’s action in impounding the passports of the 22 families who are said to control Pakistan’s economy, and in demanding the return of private money from abroad, may be no more than window- dressing. There also seems to be some ambivalence about the nationalisation measures he has just announced. On the other hand, they may all represent the start of a genuine attempt to level out the glaring inequities in Pakistani society. Will the real Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto please stand up? Whoever the real Bhutto is, it’s certain that despite his difficulties with Urdu, which does not fall trippingly from his American and British trained tongue, he is a sublimely gifted orator. Some of his conservative Muslim opponents recently mounted a whispering campaign against him. `They say I drink whisky,’ he told a huge crowd in a provincial city. The crowd sighed in horror. ‘It’s true,’ Bhutto confessed. I do drink whisky.’ The crowd gasped in dismay. ‘But they,’ said Bhutto with a rhetorical gesture towards his enemies in Karachi, ‘they drink your blood.’

I have another memory of his effectiveness qs a mob orator. It happened on the day general war broke out between India and Pakistan, although neither he, his audience of 100,000, nor we of the worlds news media, knew as yet that it had started. For 40 minutes, he had been addressing the crowd in Liaquat Garden, Rawalpindi in Urdu. Then, turning to my cameraman, he began a three-minute bribe in English against British policy in the dispute. It was a brilliant, if mostly hysterical view of the sins, real and imagined, of both the British Government and the Opposition, in which he summoned up the ghosts of Palmerston and Disraeli to demonstrate how low Britain had fallen since the days of the Raj. He ended up a jabbing a finger straight into my cameraman’s lens and claiming that British one-sidedness had actually inspired and encouraged the Indians to attack peace-loving Pakistan. Those were his last words before rushing precipitately for his car and driving off, leaving us to get through a wildly excited crowd of 100,000 people who understood enough English to get his drift. It wasn’t an experience I’d care to repeat.

There is no doubt that British stock stands extremely low in Pakistan nowadays, and has done since the start of the East Pakistan crisis, British policy has been such, or has been construed as such, that we rank second only to the Russians - who openly armed, aided and abetted the enemy - in public contumely. Britain’s abstention on the General Assembly resolution calling for a cease-fire and troop withdrawal was particularly ill received.

Pakistanis asked: ‘Why do you British hate us so much?’ Time after time Pakistanis, schooled and moulded under the Raj, told me more in anger than in sorrow how disgusted they were that traditional British standards of fair play had been so far eroded that for the sake of our commercial interests in India we were willing to play old friends so false. Much of this anti-British hysteria was focused directly on the BBC, whose external news and current affairs broadcasts were, the only impartial source of news available to a people whose own news media are so rigorously and remorselessly fettered.

What the BBC was telling them about the progress first of the crisis, then of the war, was of course quite different from what their own press, radio, and television were telling them. So, of course, the BBC was to be lying. Leading English-language newspapers were labelling the BBC the ‘Bharat Broadcasting Corporation’, or the 'London Office of All India Radio’, and even highly sophisticated Pakistanis seemed convinced that the Corporation was part of an international conspiracy to dismember Pakistan. ‘You have outdone Dr. Goebbels,’ one acquaintance told me. It’s a familiar enough experience for a roving correspondent, anywhere from Biafra to the Middle East, via Belfast and Londonderry, to hear this kind of complaint from people who are convinced that the BBC has it in for their particular side. Days after Jessore had fallen to the Indian Army without a shot being fired, the Pakistani military spokesman was insisting that the town still held out. I taxed him with the eye-witness report of my colleague, David Sells, that he’d seen the Indian troops march in to the populace. ‘That report is mistaken,’ the spokesman insisted, while from the rows of Pakistani journalists attending the press briefing came hostile murmurs about ‘more bloody BBC propaganda’. A week or so later, when the spokesman finally had to admit that the jig was up in the East, one local newsman conceded to me that perhaps the BBC hadn’t been lying after all. But grudgingly. Bearers of ill tidings are never popular.