Dear Sir

General Jahangir wrote a fine article.

Unfortunately many of our soldiers and eminent civilians become idealistic after retirement. I find it very strange why our generals accept US sponsorships to advocate foreign agendas after retirement. In service they are different and in retirement they become great liberals.

I don’t think that anyone who spends more than 20 years in service remains dynamic. The system ensures that dynamism and boldness are destroyed. We need stauffenbergs or nassers or qaddafis not old windbags.

This is a strange phenomenon and is well proven by various books written by many so-called eminent ex big bosses!

I remember a talk which General Jahangir delivered in Staff College Quetta in which he criticised the Indian Army Officers right to go to Civil Courts. Since that day my opinion about General Karamat as a just man was totally reversed.

The readers may note that the Pakistan Army Officer since Liaquat Ali Khan’s time in 1950 was reduced to a man who could be fired without any reason by the army high command like a third class clerk and could not go to court! In India the army officer has the basic rights to go to court.

If any future civilian government can democratise the army it will be a great service to democracy. Pakistan may have enjoyed some democracy but the army officers and I mean the junior lot were reduced to a spinelessness since their commission is not secure. Any officer of the Pakistan Army can be retired and cannot go to court while in service. This stone age law must be amended. This basic right was arbitratrily taken away by Liaquat the first Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1951.

The present mess in Pakistan was created since the army clique led by Ayub derailed democracy in 1958. They delibeartely intrigued with bureaucrats to destroy political leadership.

The same exercise was repeated in 1977-88.

Nawaz Sharif now the much criticised man as far as the army was concerned was selected and groomed by the army.

Kind Regards

Agha Humayun Amin

Safely ensconced in the US or UK, it is all very well for many of us ex-patriots to spew negative comments against Islam and bore the reader with endless diatribe extolling the virtues of Secularism.  However, it is amazing that such commentators completely ignore the fact that Islam was never truly established in Pakistan since the day of its inception. Our leaders have never shown themselves as exemplary Muslims,  and for those doubting Thomas' any one ordinary experience - whether related to government or a private task - in Karachi or Lahore will prove beyond a shadow of doubt that we are a nation of hypocrites and Islam is only on our lips reduced by us to a meaningless set of rituals without any value or substance whatsoever. Islam is not the foe here, our greatest enemy is within us gentlemen and that enemy is us - we are our own worst enemies.  Had we followed Islam and introduced the Sharia from the very beginning and had our leaders truly followed Islam in practice we would never have been in the current disastrous social and economic state. It may come as a surprise to most Pakistani Muslims, but Islam is not a box of Turkish Delight chocolates, that you can pick and chose the flavours you like and discard the rest.  Islam is an all or nothing law and as long as we keep our policies and national agendas hostage to the whims and desires of the US, NATO, UN and Russia we will never ever see an end to the misery and the mess we have made of our country.  If the dead could speak, I would like to ask one question of the bloody bodies which filled the train carriages arriving from India at partition,'were they arriving to Pakistan leaving behind everything they held dear, with the thought that they were coming to a Secularist Pakistan or a Islamic Pakistan where they imagined that their progeny would never face the carnage they did at the hands of the Hindus and Sikhs?

December 18, 2000

Letter to the Editor
Re: Nuclear Proliferation on the Indian Subcontinent, by Kenneth R. Totty, JFQ Forum

Dear Editor,

Commander Totty argues effectively that domestic policies and a relentless drive for regional hegemony have driven India to acquire nuclear weapons, and that Pakistan is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons as long as India has them. However, I disagree with his statement that Indian foreign policy is non-aligned, and that much of the conflict between India and Pakistan is because Islamabad is obsessed with its powerful neighbour. He also states that the average Pakistani thinks India wants to destroy Pakistan and absorb it as a province, even though adding millions of Muslims would be against India’s security interests.

Is Pakistan’s sense of insecurity rational? A look at its 53-year history with India reveals otherwise. At partition in 1947, a large fraction of the British Indian Army opted to join Pakistan, and the British asked India to provide Pakistan with its fair share of the arms and ammunition. However, Indian leaders blocked the shipment of most of this equipment, and some openly spoke of the need to annul the partition of British India. This created a grave sense of insecurity and driving the Pakistanis to join security alliances with the United States. In later years, India sent its army into the large princely state of Hyderabad whose ruler did not want to join the federation, and annexed this state. This was contrary to the principles that India had used to justify the accession of Kashmir to India, whose Hindu ruler wanted to join the federation, but whose Muslim population was not given the right to self-determination.

In the aftermath of its border war with China in 1962, the US and Britain rushed large quantities of sophisticated arms and ammunition to India. The US asked Pakistan not to use this opportunity to initiate military action in Kashmir, and Pakistan complied with this request. The new equipment was used by India to raise six mountain divisions to defend it from a Chinese invasion that Pakistan had argued was infeasible to carry out across the Himalayas, and inconsistent with Chinese foreign policy objectives. Several of these mountain divisions saw action against Pakistan in later years, and are now deployed in Kashmir to fight the insurgency. In the most visible act of hostility, India exploited Pakistan’s difficulties in its eastern province in 1971 to dismember the country. Many within the high command of the Indian military wanted to destroy the Pakistani military on the western borders, but were prevented from so doing by strong American political pressure.

India’s strong military ties with the former Soviet Union turned its non-alignment policy into a slogan. It signed a 30-year treaty in 1971 with the USSR, and has just renewed it with Russia for another 30 years. It has recently entered into a $3 billion military agreement with the Russians for the joint production and marketing of sophisticated military hardware including T-90 main-battle tanks and SU-30 MKI long-range fighters.1 Its airforce already contains hundreds of MiG-21 and MiG-27 fighters produce under Soviet licence. Russia is also providing the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov free of charge to India, since it is buying the MiG-29 fighters that will go with it and paying for the carriers’ refurbishment. India is also considering the acquisition and potential production of nuclear submarines from Russia.

Pakistan is painfully aware that the Indian Strike Corps, heavily armed with Russian weapons, remains poised to cut the narrow Pakistani landmass into two. Prithvi surface-to-surface missiles, deployed with Indian army units along the Punjab border, can cause havoc among Pakistani forces further north. Neither can Pakistan ignore the political signal contained in the location of India’s nuclear weapons testing site at Pokhran, less than 100 miles from the border. Thus, it is not surprising that Pakistanis live in fear of India.

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons have not improved the security of either Pakistan or India, since both countries now live in mortal dread of each other. As noted by Stephen Van Evera, the greatest threat to many countries comes from their exaggerated perceptions of insecurity that often cause them to respond with counterproductive belligerence.2

Both countries would be better off by reducing their military expenditures, and diverting their resources to human development. Spending a billion dollars on an Agosta-class submarine or $40 million on a SU-30 fighter makes it that much more difficult to reduce poverty and illiteracy, much bigger threats to the long-term security of a subcontinent that is prone to ethnic, sectarian, religious and ideological violence.3

Ahmad Faruqui
Economist
29 Tyson Court
Danville, CA 94526

December 26, 2000

Letter to Editor

Dear Editor,

This is in regard to various articles by Air Marshal (Retd) Ayaz Khan portrayal of IAF as a force that has an aging fleet and her pilots are less experienced and ill trained. Sir, lets not keep on basking in the glory of 1965 war, when literally ‘we got lucky’. In 1965 we had much superior aircraft’s and much experienced and well trained pilots, and above all fearless and aggressive leaders in the PAF. Simply, the PAF’s performance in the war was par excellence.

Fact 1, is that after ‘65 it has been down hill all the way for the PAF in terms of equipment and pilots. We the Pakistani’s tend to be jubilant at the one odd crashes of MiG-21 bis of IAF and while our ‘experts’ quote the lower morale and training standards of IAF giving a notion that PAF can out do the Indians at any day and time. Well, lets look at our flight safety record, our F-7’s, F-6’s, Mirages and now the practically grounded fleet of 30 odd F-16’s is not outstanding. People like Air Marshal Ayaz who are aware of the working of the PAF know that we routinely fudge our records to portray a rosy picture in the QA and Flight safety reviews. I will not use this forum to open a Pandora’s box by elaborating the inner and dodgy workings of our monthly Air Staff Presentations.

Fact II, Pakistan will not have more than 10 fly worthy aircraft’s after 2007 if the Super-7 project doesn’t deliver on time. The PAF waited for nine years and with three weak Air Chiefs who preferred to be cautious and wait out the military embargo, rather than deciding on a future course for the PAF in terms of new aircraft induction’s. Incidentally, this ‘Guidance and Vision’ was the reason for which those four stars were pinned on their shoulders.

Fact III, the recent exing of the five senior most officer’s of PAF was in part due to the safe posture/stand taken by the PAF’s leadership during the Kargil conflict. I guess our falcon’s forgot that ‘Fortune favours the brave’. The Air Marshals bet on the wrong horse (Nawaz Sharif) and lost. I am not making a political statement but men in uniform are pampered and looked after for years, just to ensure that they deliver when the crunch comes. Sir, the PAF didn’t deliver in Kargil, we lost soldier’s on ground during the retreat because the PAF chose to ignore its fellow brethren in the Khaki. Well maybe we needed better MEN to lead at the helm of affairs in PAF. I have no sympathy for the axed Air Marshals, I think they got away with less than what they deserved. I hope the have some idea of how our boys were butchered by napalms in the valleys of Drass and Batalik sectors. But also, they will be more concerned about getting a job at CAA or some FPSC post right now.

Fact IV, coming back to the IAF. The Indians out number us by 3: 1, they have far superior aircraft’s and their early warning capability and ground attack capability can take care of our flying club in matter of days. The only thing stopping them from doing this is the nuclear deterrence and a maybe a few pilots who like our boys in Kargil are willing to risk it all for this nation. The Air Marshal can do a great service to the country if he starts narrating the current state of PAF, its passive/weak leadership and its antiquated equipment. Maybe, this will gives us a wake up call which is highly unlikely and we salvage what is left of a great fighting arm called ‘PAF’.

Arif Malik

Pennasauken, New Jersey