Somewhere in Pakistan....

In recent months, an unprecedented review of Pakistan’s history in relation to India is taking place. In early June, Air Marshal (rtd) Asghar Khan, the first Pak Air Chief (1957–65) delivered a public lecture in Islamabad on “Pakistan’s Security”. The 90-year-old veteran, who is president of the Tehrik-i-Istaqlal party, made a startling revelation when he asserted: “None of the four wars we fought with India were started by India. From first incursion after Independence in Kashmir till Kargil, we started the hostilities.” Air Marshal Khan added that an objective history of the subcontinent indicates that no incursion started from southeast and it was always from northwest. Apropos the 1971 war that led to the birth of Bangladesh, he stated that many other Pakistani politicians also disliked the military action by General Yahya Khan but did not speak out. Asghar Khan recalled that he openly opposed the operation against Mujaeeb-ur-Rahman and was accused of being a traitor. He reiterated: “We (Pakistan) had started Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir before the 1965 war and Kargil (1999) was also our misadventure.” The gist of the Asghar Khan thesis was familiar and privately supported by many liberals in Pakistan – that the Pak military had hijacked the state in the early decades and had created a false narrative about the threat from India and the contours of Pakistan’s security, even while underlining democracy and the civilian political system, to ensure their own institutional primacy. Regrettably the Pak military was supported in this endeavor by the US and the false narrative kept alive by the Anglo-American media/academic combine of the time. Predictably the response from the Pak establishment to this historical corrective was that the veteran and highly-respected Asghar Khan had become senile. But more objective and rational voices in Pakistan supported the candor of the former Air Chief and Najam Sethi, Pakistan's best known editor has confirmed this version. In a recent article (August 12) Sethi opined: “We miscalculated when we sent Pashtun lashkars to liberate Kashmir in 1948, because that provoked the partition of Kashmir…and the compulsion to demonize India as the biggest and continuing threat to Pakistan, thereby creating the budgetary rationale for an authoritarian national security state…”. Sethi adds further: “The second, third and fourth wars with India were all provoked by Pakistan and lost by it, whereas the national security paradigm was constantly strengthened by the propagation of an exactly opposite narrative in which we were portrayed as the heroic victims against a venomous and aggressive India.”