Songs of Blood and Sword Read online

  It was said that the foreign policy of Pakistan was bankrupt; that we must walk out of the alliances of CENTO and SEATO, but the next day on getting into office, there were dazzling somersaults and it was solemnly said that without CENTO and SEATO Pakistan would not survive. These are some of the people who have played havoc not only with our internal life, but have made us feel ashamed in the world outside in our external dealings.27

  Such dissent was not welcomed by the government, especially not by General Ayub, who may have been charmed by Zulfikar when he was Minister of Fuel but rarely saw eye to eye with him as Foreign Minister.

  Zulfikar felt that under Ayub’s governance, Pakistan was ‘in danger of becoming a mere satellite, without any policy of its own’.28 Pakistan’s continual political and diplomatic immaturity would have distressed Zulfikar, had he lived to see his country’s current place in the world. Foreign policy was an extraordinarily weak point of Ayub’s, who couldn’t have cared less about diplomacy so long as American money kept flooding in through military pipelines, but for Zulfikar it was paramount. A year into his post as Foreign Minister he wrote that ‘the foreign policy of a nation is a manifestation of its sovereignty.If a people enjoy all power, except the right to conduct foreign relations, it cannot be regarded as independent.’29

  Pakistan was increasingly putting all its energy into relations with powers like the United States and the Soviet Union and wilfully neglecting Asian and non-aligned states. Zulfikar saw the danger of Pakistan placing all its eggs in the Cold War basket and as Foreign Minister declared, much to General Ayub’s displeasure, that:

  we are in the vortex of grave historic events, in which the difference between a right and a false move might well mean the difference between survival and disaster . . . Instead of generating hope and providing for an easing of international tensions, the Titans, through their animosity, are leading the world to the brink of total annihilation.30

  Zulfikar refused to jump either way, in the words of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and it was this characteristic that most grievously annoyed General Ayub.

  While bilateral relations were the centrepiece of Zulfikar’s foreign policy, there was no easy way to avoid the fact that relations between Pakistan and China had seriously deteriorated under General Ayub. The General was constantly pushing China out in order to make room for the United States, blind to the glaring fact that Pakistan was no longer America’s favourite client. Relations with China, and conversely with the United States, took a sharp turn in 1963 when Zulfikar, seen as the architect of Pakistan’s bilateral foreign policy, took up the position of Foreign Minister. In anticipation of Pakistan’s possible rapprochement with China in December 1962 and the young Foreign Minister’s socialist leanings, the United States transferred 300 million rupees in counterpart funds, meant to initiate credit expansion, from the State Bank of Pakistan to US commercial banks operating within Pakistan.31 It was a clear warning to Pakistan.

  But Zulfikar did not respond well to threats. An emissary of the United States – rumours point to Henry Kissinger – told Zulfikar once that if he were one of their senators, they would have dealt with him before he got out of hand. I wouldn’t be a senator, Zulfikar cockily replied, I’d be your president.

  Three months later Pakistan and China signed a historic border agreement. Engineered by the Foreign Minister and his Chinese counterpart, Chen Yi, the agreement formally demarcated the boundary between China’s Sinkiang region and the contiguous areas whose defence fell under Pakistani control. It was heralded as a great achievement, one that would ‘not only give full expression to the desire of the peoples of China and Pakistan for the development of good-neighbourly and friendly relations, but also help safeguard Asian and world peace.’32 The United States was considerably miffed. It pronounced that the border agreement was ‘an unfortunate break in free world solidarity’ and promptly withdrew an offer of funds it had promised towards the construction of an airport in Dhaka.33

  Undeterred, Zulfikar only continued to improve Pakistan’s relations with China. The two countries resumed official trade relations, with Pakistan exporting its jute, cotton and textiles among other goods, while importing Chinese chemical dyes, machinery and paraffin wax.34 In 1964 China gave Pakistan an interest-free loan of $60 million to replace the American money that had dried up since Zulfikar took over as Foreign Minister. The bond between the two countries strengthened and Foreign Minister Bhutto spoke of the upswing in diplomatic relations, ominously foreshadowing the coming war with India, when he warned that ‘an attack by India on Pakistan would also involve the security and territorial integrity of the largest state in Asia now’.35 While Ayub may not have been comfortable with China as a new ally, the people of Pakistan responded warmly to the change in best friends. Pak-Chini bhai bhai or Pakistanis and Chinese, brothers, became the slogan of the day; we were no longer feeling like pariahs. Pakistan had opened up new frontiers and the removal of the previous insecurity of only having one bossy international ally was met with great enthu-siasm; when Chen Yi visited Pakistan in 1965, he was welcomed by scores of Pakistanis, to the point where even the rigid establishment English newspaper Dawn had to admit that Yi received a reception ‘never before accorded to the Foreign Minister of any country’.36

  Withholding economic aid to Pakistan was not enough, so under President Kennedy the United States increased its allocated amount of funds to India. In 1964 Senator Hubert Humphrey called for an Indian-led coalition to counterbalance China’s communist threat. The sibling countries were once again pitted against each other by imperial powers, playing ping-pong with the countries’ security and edgy foreign relations.

  In 1965 General Ayub was uninvited to Washington after Zulfikar refused to support US policy in Vietnam. Zulfikar’s time as Foreign Minister was electrifying, possibly his finest time in government. He was a giant among men and his dissent regarding the war in Vietnam makes my heart pound with pride every time I consider the Uncle Tom obsequiousness of Pakistan’s politicians since Zulfikar.

  I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on Zulfikar’s bilateral foreign policy. I had grown up on my father’s stories of the time and saw the period as the greatest accomplishment of my grandfather’s political career. One of my thesis advisors, understandably from an academic point of view, warned me that I was verging on the hagiographic when writing about Zulfikar’s time as Foreign Minister. It was too emotional for me to explain to my advisor how I felt sitting in New York in the midst of the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries my ancestry ties me to – Nusrat had Kurdish blood in her family – and watching my country shamelessly collaborating in the unjust wars. I tried to step back, to take enough space to remove the emotional, but I couldn’t. Zulfikar deserves the hagiography there. As a young Pakistani who came of age in the era of dictatorships, civilian and military, I had never felt proud of my country. It was an alien feeling; I knew it existed but I had never felt it until I studied my grandfather’s foreign policy.

  The breaking point between Zulfikar and General Ayub came as a result of the 1965 war with India. The catalyst for the war was the passing of the Integration Bill by the Indian parliament, which converted the state of Jammu and Kashmir into a province of the Indian Union. Kashmiris, those Muslims who identified themselves with Pakistan and not India, crossed the ceasefire line into the Indianruled area of Kashmir and began to engage in acts of sabotage. There are no just wars, no wars where one side is vindicated by their violence; between Pakistan and India, fresh from the scars of Partition, no war could be seen as any one side’s fault. But this is the story of the 1965 war as seen from Pakistan, an infant nation, still mourning the loss of Kashmir, the valley promised to them by their ancestors, while at the same time trying to build a home of their own.

  The Indian army began to send troops into Kargil and occupied strategic posts in Pakistani-held Kashmir, ensuring that an all-out war was on the horizon. Both countries saw the
war as inevitable, both countries saw the war as their neighbour’s fault. Nehru believed that Pakistan was ruining the Kashmiri landscape with its continued aggression, while India was motivated only by thoughts of peace. The major difference between the two countries’ policies, he said, stemmed from Pakistan’s ‘deliberate propaganda of hatred and disunity’.37 Zulfikar, on the other hand, saw India’s occupation of Kashmir as typical of a country with colonial designs. ‘There is no difference whatsoever between India’s hold over Kashmir and Portugal’s hold over Mozambique and Angola,’38 he wrote.

  So for two months in the autumn of 1965, Pakistan and India engaged in an undeclared war. Pakistan was in an incredibly precarious position; while India produced approximately 80 per cent of its military requirements at home,39 Pakistan embarrassingly had zero selfsufficiency, having been brought up to rely on the handouts of the often moody United States. The United States was Pakistan’s only donor of military aid. India, however, played the non-aligned card and received military assistance not only from the United States but also from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

  India’s twenty-two military divisions, equipped with American weaponry, greatly outnumbered Pakistan’s six and a half. It was obvious that, without the help of its allies, Pakistan would be easily crushed by India’s superior military strength. To make a bleak scenario even bleaker, the United States failed to come out in support of Pakistan. It was a tremendous betrayal for the United States’ principal ally in the region, counterbalanced only by China’s loyalty to Pakistan in its time of need.

  At the outbreak of the war, the United States’ first action was to cut off military aid to both sides, demoralizing Pakistan, which was under the impression that their ‘special relationship’ and having joined SEATO and CENTO, against its regional interests, meant that the United States was committed to keeping Pakistan safe from harm. General Ayub, already persona non grata with his patrons, called on President Johnson to intervene on Pakistan’s behalf. The Johnson administration responded by saying that it would withdraw its support from any country seen as being friendly towards China. President Johnson also made it abundantly clear that economic aid was not to be restored.

  While India enjoyed the support of the Soviet Union during the 1965 war, Pakistan had been dumped by its own Cold War giant. By the end of 1965, the break-up was fiscally clear. The United States had given India $246.6 million in loans and grants and another $38.2 million in import/export bank loans, while Pakistan received considerably less – $182.3 million in loans and grants and nothing in import/export bank loans.40 The Daily Telegraph had even gone so far as to suggest that the United States had encouraged India to attack Pakistan to unseat the politically unstable General Ayub, writing that a ‘coup d’état to dethrone him was imminent’ and that the ‘Indian decision to reoccupy posts across the ceasefire line in Kashmir was “cleared” with the United States Embassy in New Delhi’.41

  China’s reaction, however, was swift and sharp in support of Pakistan. As Indian forces crossed the international frontier to attack Lahore, China came out and branded the Indians as aggressors, rejecting India’s claims that it was acting defensively. China also accused the United States of showing partiality towards India. The Prime Minister, Chou En-lai, insisted that India ‘could not have engaged in such serious military adventure without the consent and support of the United States’.42 Chou En-lai did not stop at a condemnation of the United States, but also blamed the Soviet Union for playing ‘a most unseemly role’.43

  As the danger of an Indian attack on East Pakistan was mounting, China took its support for Pakistan a tactical step further. On 16 September 1965, China issued an ultimatum to India, calling on it to dismantle all its military installations on or over the China–Sikkim border within three days or face ‘grave consequences’.44 Faced with the mortifying threat of war with China, India backed off and eased the pressure on their Western Pakistani front.

  Pakistan’s Foreign Minister spoke out in China’s favour in the National Assembly, repeating what he had foreshadowed in an early speech, by saying that ‘there were three considerations which prevented India from attacking East Pakistan – God, monsoon and the ultimatum from China.’45 He was being generous; China was the only reason India did not attack East Pakistan.

  The ill-fated war ended only when both countries accepted the United Nations Security Council resolution to cease all hostilities, but by then the damage had already been done. There was land to be redistributed, again, and prisoners of war to be repatriated, so at the Soviet Union’s invitation General Ayub was called to Tashkent to meet Indian leaders. As Foreign Minister, Zulfikar was adamant that Ayub should not kowtow to the Soviets, whom he felt had played a dirty role during the war. It was China, not the Soviets, who had defended Pakistan and once again China was being edged out. General Ayub disregarded his Foreign Minister’s advice not to go to Tashkent, and ignored the protests from the Pakistani people, who believed they had been double-crossed by the Soviets. Dictators tend to do as they please – it is one of their less endearing traits – so General Ayub flew to Tashkent in January 1966.

  Signed by General Ayub and his Indian counterpart, Lal Bahadur Shashtri, the Tashkent Declaration detailed the withdrawal of troops from Kashmir, the restoration of the ceasefire line, the repatriation of POWs, and the promise to adhere to good relations based on a principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. General Ayub had no sense of irony when he arrived at Tashkent and thanked his hosts by saying that India and Pakistan had both ‘suffered under long and dark periods of foreign domination’ and that it was now that both countries had finally regained their freedom, oblivious to the fact that he had once again placed Pakistan’s fate in the hands of two great world powers.46

  The official line was that the war had ended in a stalemate; Pakistan had not liberated Kashmir, but had also resisted subjugation by the Indian army. A movement of opposition swiftly grew within the country among those who felt that Pakistan had won the war, but failed in the critical objective of freeing Kashmir. Zulfikar felt betrayed by General Ayub’s willingness to sign away Pakistan’s fate at Tashkent. For him, withdrawing the troops without an outline for a solution to the Kashmir issue was a glaring sign of the General’s weak governance. He had advised Ayub against making such a monumental mistake, but to no avail.

  Kashmir holds an almost mythic importance for Pakistanis and Zulfikar felt that General Ayub’s handling of the situation was a total collapse of power and judgement. Zulfikar himself felt that ‘Kashmir must be liberated if Pakistan is to have its full meaning’47 and could not abide by the dictator’s wavering any longer. The United States, meanwhile, was pleased that Pakistan had forgone China at Tashkent and announced its decision to resume military and economic aid to both Pakistan and India. Two days after the announcement, Zulfikar Bhutto resigned as Foreign Minister and left General Ayub Khan’s government.

  ‘It was a special period in history,’48 Miraj Mohammad Khan, now eighty years old and fighting heart disease tells me. ‘You had Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the Vietnam War was energizing the youth the world over. Politics was so radical and so romanticized. I had gone to speak to Mr Bhutto during Ayub’s time but the Intelligence wouldn’t allow anyone, especially not us students, anywhere near 70 Clifton. They used fear and intimidation to keep us away from Mr Bhutto, but us lot, we weren’t afraid.’ Miraj was president of the National Student Federation, the most radical element in political activism at the time. He was and still is, even in old age, a political firebrand.

  ‘They were restricting Mr Bhutto so much in those days, they knew he was going to leave the government and they wanted to isolate him as much as possible. The newspapers wouldn’t even print so much as a square inch of his news. We at the NSF had daggers drawn against the regime. We belonged to completely different backgrounds, but that’s why he respected us, respected me.�
�� Miraj speaks to me in Urdu, stopping only to cough into a roll of toilet paper he keeps at his side. He pauses every once in a while to make sure I’m keeping up with him as I’m taking notes in English. ‘In 1946 during a sailors’ revolt against the British, I threw a big pot on a British truck from the fourth floor of a building during a curfew. They beat me badly after that so I don’t like to talk in English. I have an allergy against it even today,’ he explains.

  Miraj is an old Marxist, a radical student leader who spent much of his life fighting against imperialism and elite domination of the poor of Pakistan. ‘When we heard of Mr Bhutto resigning from Ayub’s government, we collected NSF students and went to meet him at Cantt Station when he returned from Rawalpindi to Karachi. We were there in our thousands to receive him, we took him back to 70 Clifton in a huge jalsa. Before we left him, we gave him a paper on our foreign policy ideas. He told me to come back in the evening to speak to him. He had read the paper by then, very quickly, and had appreciated it.

  ‘We spoke quite often in those early days, we used to talk about the haris, the peasants, about the middle class, about the labour unions. He used to say, “I’m with the poor, with the barefooted, with the rootless.” People loved him for this.’ Zulfikar had not left General Ayub’s government to sulk; he had left in protest and people were waiting eagerly to see what he would do next. Miraj, a young activist, was perhaps an unlikely ally to the feudal family of the Bhuttos, but he joined Zulfikar because he saw something different in him, something that most zamindar didn’t possess. ‘Let me tell you, I loved him very much,’ Miraj says, speaking to me decades later and generously ignoring their bitter falling out, a consequence of Zulfikar’s governance when in power. ‘Yes, he was my leader, but I would argue with him at any time and he would tolerate it. I wanted to save him because I believed very firmly that he had to abolish feudalism. I used to tell him that. Please, Mr Bhutto, abolish feudalism. We are not free people, he used to tell me. Freedom is what we have to fight for after years of economic exploitation and rule by dictators. Freedom is our goal and that has to be clear.’