Pakistan’s former president and military ruler Ayub Khan had “no intention” of going to war with India in 1965, and was taken aback when India “launched an attack”, said his son Gohar Ayub Khan, a retired Pakistani military officer and a veteran politician.
An aide-de-camp to his father Ayub Khan, Gohar Ayub Khan said that Pakistan Army was taken by surprise by the “Indian Army’s attack on the international border” on September 6, 1965.
“The president, who was also the supreme commander of the military, had no intention of going to war with India in 1965. But we certainly won the war,” Khan told an Indian news agency in an interview over the phone from Islamabad.
A Sandhurst-trained military officer, who retired from the army in 1962 to be a part of politics and rejoined the army in 1971, Khan blamed India for the events leading up to the 1965 war.
He said that though exchange of fire between India and Pakistan across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir had become a regular feature, neither side wanted any more wars, adding that both sides should work on an agreement to maintain peace on the border.
“I think we should have peace. We have had enough wars,” he said.
He said that due to tensions in Jammu and Kashmir and the operation against militants, “the situation escalated” in 1965 which culminated in “India mounting an attack” on Pakistan.
“The forward positions of the Pakistan Army were held by the paramilitary forces which the Indian Army was able to push back. But nowhere else, not in Lahore or Sialkot, could the Indian Army penetrate or cross the main defence of the Pakistan Army,” said Gohar Ayub Khan.
He said the morale of the Pakistan Army “during the 1965 war and even before that was so high that if you asked the ambition of anybody in the Pakistan Army, they would say it was to hoist the Pakistan flag at the Red Fort in Delhi”.
He dismissed claims that India won the war.
“On the Indian side, 2,763 soldiers lost their lives and 8,444 were wounded. A total of 200 tanks and 36 aircraft were destroyed, and 1,607 personnel went missing. On the Pakistani side, 1,200 soldiers were killed and around 2,000 wounded, 132 tanks and 19 aircraft were destroyed,” he said. “I am amazed how India can say they won the war.”
Khan, who has been Pakistan’s foreign minister and speaker of the National Assembly, dismissed key Indian wins during the war, namely the Battle of Asal Utar. “Did the Indian Army take an offensive in that area? No, they didn’t.”
He said international pressure on both countries was responsible for signing of the Tashkent agreement by the then Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan.
But Khan maintained: “Had India not attacked on September 6, there would have been no war.”
