MAJOR GENERAL® SYED ALI HAMID
It is commonly understood that the performance of an Army in combat is directly linked to its moral which in turn is directly proportional to the support from the nation and the public at large. More the public support the better the Army fights. In this the Pakistan Army is no different but in other ways it is unique. It fights good and hard whether the cause for which it is fighting has popular appeal or not. Whether the nation claps and cheers or not, it does what it is supposed to do: it fights.
The Pakistan Army’s mission is to fight when ordered to the best of its capability. It is a mission that the Army has never declined. It fought in 1948; it fought in 1965; it fought in 1971 and it fought in Kargil. The politics of it aside when ordered, it fought the insurgency in Baluchistan and is fighting the insurgency in FATA. For 60 years it has sat on the Line of Control and fought whenever the situation escalated. It fought in Siachen and it fought in Kargil. This is the spirit of the Pakistan Army, its culture, its ethos.
Our adversaries know that this Army has never and will never refuse a fight. It is one of the fundamental pillars of our deterrence strategy; as important if not more than our nuclear capability because it is related to the “will”. Kissinger defined deterrence as a combination of possessing a capability and displaying the “will” to use it. Capability is material, will is mental. Capabilities can be acquired; the will to fight has much deeper roots that take decades if not centuries to grow. It is to do with our military culture, our traditions, spirit-de-corps, motivation and above all leadership.
So often we have heard in the context of the combat history of the Pakistan Army the phrase that ‘the young officers and men fought well but the senior officers let them down’. Does leadership stop at the level of the company commander? Who motivates the young officers? Who instills in them the values of military culture, tradition and spirit-de-corps? Who instills in them the will to fight? It is the senior officers. I was in Chhamb in 1971 as a raw captain. I saw some young officers and soldiers failing the test of combat. It also happened amongst a few of the colonels and brigadiers. But I also witnessed remarkable feats both at the junior and senior level.
In retrospect however what was more remarkable was the will to fight against an opponent three times larger in number and with the best of equipment that the Soviets could provide. In its history, the Pakistan Army has in a general war scenario always confronted adversaries much larger in size whether on its eastern borders with India or facing the might of the Soviet Army occupying Afghanistan.
If the Pakistan Army “lost” in East Pakistan, remember this is not the first time that it happened to a first-rate fighting force, nor the last. In recent military history, 90,000 men, remnants of the encircled German 6th Army, surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad. A hundred thousand of the British Army surrendered to the Japanese at Singapore. The Americans may have met a similar fate in Vietnam had they did not possessed fleets of aircrafts, helicopters and ships to evacuate their troops and the South Vietnamese Army had not fought a rearguard supporting action. We still have to see how the situation unfolds in Iraq and Afghanistan. But these nations don’t clap when their army is criticized for its failures.
For those who clap next time someone criticizes the Pakistan Army, remember that the officer or soldier of the Pakistan Amy does not expect you to clap when he manning a post at 21,000 ft in Siachen where day temperatures are -20 Centigrade; he is doing his duty. He doesn’t expect you to clap when he is sitting in a tank in the Cholistan Desert during summer training when the temperature in the shade exceeds 55 degrees Celcius; he is doing his duty. He doesn’t expect you to clap when a Taliban sniper drills a AK-47 round through his leg or worse; it happened in the line of duty. But he also doesn’t expect you to clap when the Army is criticized in public. The Army is his pride, his existence, his strength and being part of the Pakistan Army is from where he gets his “will to fight”. Do not destroy this will or else one day when the nation is faced with a dangerous threat, the Army will (God forbid) throw down its arms and walk back to the barracks.
