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New Delhi, December 16: Under President Ayub Khan, the military decided that “the defense of the East lies with the West” on the basis that if the army was divided into two wings, neither of them could stand against the Indian Army. Therefore, the majority of the Pakistani army is deployed in West Pakistan, while a small portion of the army remains in East Pakistan to defend the border.
Sahibzada Yakub Khan, who was appointed commander of Eastern Command in 1969, conceived a security plan called “Op Blitz” to deal with any unrest in East Pakistan. This was drawn up before the 1970 elections and on 11 December 1970, a few days after Pakistan’s general election, the plan was implemented. It empowers the Commander Eastern Command to take control of the entire civil administration and to have complete freedom to restore law and order in the exercise of its powers. MALAYSIA: Landslide hits Kuala Lumpur; two killed, 51 missing.
The Hamoodur Rehman Committee (HRC), formed to investigate Dhaka’s surrender, confirmed in its report that “the decision not to hand over power, and the use of a military crackdown code-named ‘Blitz’ was already in place”; The negotiations were nothing more than a disguise, and General Yahya Khan and his military advisers had been planning to deter the Awami League with harsh measures.’
The atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan have been well documented. According to Lieutenant General AAK Niazi, commander of the Eastern Command and chief administrator of martial law, the policy of his predecessor Lieutenant General Tikka Khan was brutal — massacring civilians and scorching the land. His order to the troops was: “I want the land not the people.” Major General Farman Ali and Brig. (later Lieutenant General) Jahanzeb Arbab faithfully carried out these orders. Farman wrote in his dinner table diary, “The green fields of East Pakistan will be painted red.” Niazi continued: “The military action is a display of naked brutality, worse than the massacres of Changez Khan and Halaku Khan in Bukhara and Baghdad. , or the massacre of British General Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh was even more brutal.”
During a postwar interrogation in India, General Nyazi said Pakistan’s strategy presupposed that India had “planned only limited operations” to establish a Bangladeshi government in East Pakistan. Based on this assessment, Pakistan deployed her forces along a border that stretches more than 2,500 miles and ordered them to hold on to it at all costs. As a result, the Pakistani army was kept on the periphery. This enabled the Mukti Bahini to expand their influence within East Pakistan. In fact, India’s goal is not to capture a large piece of territory, but when this is achieved, it will be too late for Pakistan to correct its strategic mistakes.
On July 9, 1971, Henry Kissinger arrived in Islamabad en route to a secret visit to Beijing. During a discussion with Yahya, he realized that “Yahia … was fundamentally unaware of his danger and unprepared to face reality.” Upon his return to the United States, Kissinger briefed the National Security Council saying , India is determined to go to war with Pakistan, and Yahya “lacks the imagination to solve political problems in time to prevent India from attacking.” He therefore suggested that the United States should prepare for “the evolution that would eventually lead to the independence of East Pakistan”. Snakes in the backyard: EAM S Jaishankar hits back at Hina Rabbani Khar, recalling Hillary Clinton’s remarks that the world sees Pakistan as a center of terrorism (watch video).
On December 3, 1971, the Pakistani attack revolved around pre-emptive airstrikes on Indian airports. A total of 32 aircraft out of a total of 278 fighters participated in the initial strike, which began between 5:09 pm and 5:23 pm, but was unsuccessful. Pakistan’s limited attacks even surprised the United States.As Henry Kissinger said, “That is [a] Great way to start a war.
The fact that not even the defense minister nor the head of ISPR, the regime’s official mouthpiece, was aware of the December 3 war reveals the disarray of high-level decision-making in Pakistan. The Defense Minister heard from Pakistan Radio that India had invaded West Pakistan. The chief of the navy and Pakistani naval ships also got the news on the Pakistani radio. On the Eastern Front, Lieutenant General Nyazi learned of the air raid while listening to the BBC World Service.
For all Niazi’s eloquent boast of strength and indomitability, the opposite is true. One of his colleagues, General Rao Farman Ali, told the Hamoodur Rehman committee that morale in Niazi had collapsed as early as December 7, when he collapsed during a meeting with Governor Abdul Motaleb Malik.
Dhaka fell without a fight, despite Niazi defiantly telling the BBC just twenty-four hours earlier that the army would fight to the last man. However, on December 16, Niazi surrendered to Indian troops and signed the instrument of surrender meekly in a formal public ceremony, rather than any act of heroism. As he details in his book, the gist of Niazi’s justification for his actions is that he was forced to surrender by the Pakistani high command in West Pakistan. The war on the western front was not going well, and Yahya Khan did not want to risk losing the western front to save the eastern front. Pakistan’s strategy of placing the defense of the east in the west has fallen through the cracks.
Just as Ayub Khan said at a cabinet meeting after the 1965 war that Pakistan would never again “risk 100 million Pakistanis for 5 million Kashmiris,” Yahya Khan declared he would not “and endanger West Pakistan. On December 16, the people of Pakistan got the news of the surrender through the Indian Prime Minister’s broadcast on All India Radio. Radio Pakistan tempered the surrender announcement with these memorable words in its 5pm news briefing: “As per arrangements between Indian and Pakistani commanders, fighting in the eastern theater has ceased and Indian troops have entered Dhaka. “
The surrender of East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh was a devastating event for West Pakistan, the aftershocks of which continue to this day. As Dhaka fell physically, so did Pakistan psychologically. The two-state theory that the Muslims of the subcontinent formed a single state was overturned. Pakistan is still looking for reasons for the dismemberment.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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