1965 War: How Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's plan led to the fiasco in Pakistan

The much vaunted Operation Gibraltar and the fallback Operation Grand Slam had collapsed much before the actual 1965 war began on September 6, 1965. Operation Gibraltar, according to Lawrence Ziring’s Pakistan in the Twentieth Century A Political History (Oxford University Press, 1997), was launched on July 28, 1965, and it came to grief when the ill-equipped and ill-trained infiltrators were captured by the Indian army, and they let out the secret of Pakistan’s big plan to liberate Kashmir. Operation Grand Slam, which was launched on August 30, collapsed in three days as the Indian army moved swiftly towards Muzaffarabad, days before it moved towards Lahore. 

The men behind the fiasco were foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, army chief, General Mohammed Musa and foreign secretary Aziz Mirza. Ayub Khan,  who had won the presidential election against Fatima Bhutto in January 1965, was quite unaware of the reckless military plans and their failure. Ziring says that Ayub wanted the operations to be called off after Musa confessed to the debacle and asked General Mohammed Yahya Khan to end the campaign. It was at this moment, Ziring says, that India opened the new West Pakistan front on September 6. Pakistan reached the end of its tether by September 15. Ziring notes: “Moreover by 15 September, Ayub’s generals were reporting the almost total exhaustion of military supplies, and the virtual emptying of petroleum reserves. The troops would soon be left without ammunition, the aircraft without spare parts and fuel, and the armour without the necessities of battle.”

Ayub and Bhutto travelled to Beijing on September 20. The Chinese advice seems to have been to allow the Indian army enter Pakistan as that would build popular resistance and lead to people’s guerrilla war. Ayub did not buy the Chinese advice and instead accepted the UN Security Council’s call for a ceasefire on September 22 and Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin’s invitation for a peace conference at Tashkent. After Tashkent, Ayub was a broken man and it also marked the end of his political career. 

Bhutto distanced himself from Ayub post-Tashkent. He had even the temerity to point an accusing finger at Ayub for the war that had gone awry. He turned into the fiery populist leader of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which culminated in the secession of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh after the 1971 election. Here too, Bhutto played the unscrupulous opportunist by pushing the blame of the 1971 India-Pakistan war on General Yahya Khan, who tried his best to handle the intractable internal political situation in Pakistan and keep the country united.

The 1965 India-Pakistan war came after the 1962 India-China war. While India was battered in 1962, it had gained international support from the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the Cold War ideology of defending democratic India against communist China. The Soviet Union-China fallout had ensured that Moscow too was sympathetic to India. Bhutto wanted to swim against the tide. He was hitting out at the US and the rest of the world for ignoring the Kashmir issue and it did not win him friends. It was at this juncture that he moved towards China. But the Chinese, despite their hostile stance towards India, were not willing to be drawn into the war.

It also becomes evident that Bhutto held on to a maximalist position between 1963 and 1964. Former diplomat KP Fabian in Diplomacy Indian Style (HarAnand; 2012) shows that the United States and the United Kingdom became very active on the Kashmir question after the 1962 war. Fabian delineates the diplomatic indiscretions of YD Gundevia in wanting to settle the Kashmir issue, partly to win the confidence of the West. There was of course explicit pressure from the Americans and the British after the Chinese ceasefire in November 1962 on India that it should reach a settlement with Pakistan on the Kashmir question. 

A communiqué was then issued by Nehru and Ayub in New Delhi and Rawalpindi to start ministerial talks followed by a summit. There were six meetings between India’s Minister for External Affairs Sardar Swaran Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Bhutto, at Rawalpindi on December 26, 1962, in Delhi on January 16, 1963 (Fabian observes that “He (Bhutto) and his delegation were put up in the Rashtrapati Bhawan.”) and in Karachi in February, and in Calcutta in March, in Karachi in April. Fabian provides fascinating details of the Indian and Pakistan proposals for settling the Kashmir issue, with Bhutto and Pakistan making maximal claims in the Valley.

It was after the failure of these talks that Bhutto seemed to have become obsessed with the notion that the Kashmir issue is to be settled through the force of arms. He thought that 1965 was the best moment to achieve the end of liberating Kashmir as well as making himself the leader of a rejuvenated Pakistan. But Bhutto’s 1965 calculation turned out to be wrong for him as well as for Pakistan.

Pakistan’s  claim that it was not an aggressor in the 1965 war because it confined its military operations to Kashmir, which it considers disputed territory, is unconvincing. The argument does not wash. Operation Grand Slam involved moving into territory that was outside of Kashmir. If Pakistan had accepted the military fiasco of Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam and cut its losses by calling off the operations, then it would have meant that it could get away with impunity and with no costs paid. 

It can be said that India did not gain much by opening the Lahore-Sialkot front because it was not India’s intention to hold the territorial gains, and that it would have been much better if India had held on to the gains made in Kashmir by capturing Haji Pir Pass, Tithwal and Kargil. It might appear that it was an Indian overreach to have expanded the theatre of war. It is an issue that Indian military and diplomatic historians must discuss in all candour, if only for academic reasons.

The consequences of the 1965 war were disastrous for Pakistan. The country moved from the fiasco of external war to the fiasco of civil war in 1971. History does not unfold on the basis of the calculated decisions of Prime Ministers, foreign ministers, generals, diplomats and the sentiments of people. The outcomes of conflicts depend on real and not presumed military and economic power. Pakistan did not have the military and economic power to  have waged a war in 1965.