Marching Blind: Why Pakistan’s Generals Keep Misreading India

Every time Pakistan’s military elite tries to bleed India, it ends up slashing its own wrist.

In his classic treatise On War (1832), the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously warned: “No one starts a war - or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so - without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

That injunction might as well have been scribbled in the margins of an ISI war diary or a Rawalpindi whiteboard. But it is unlikely that Pakistan’s military brass ever read Clausewitz, for this is a dictum that Pakistani generals have defied with tragic consistency - from Ayub Khan’s farcical misadventure in 1965 to Pervez Musharraf’s Himalayan gamble in 1999, and now the blood-stained provocation in Pahalgam on April 22 where more than 25 persons, mostly tourists who were targeted for their faith, were slaughtered in cold blood.

The Pahalgam barbarity reminded the world yet again of the schizophrenic psyche of Pakistan’s generals, where violence is always just another form of statecraft. The massacre bore the hallmarks of a deep-state operation, allegedly orchestrated by Pakistan’s all-powerful Army Chief of Staff, General Asim Munir, a man seemingly more interested in fuelling jihadist adventurism across the Line of Control (LoC) than confronting the economic and political implosion at home.

What did he seek to achieve by this? Pakistan’s generals have a unique gift for launching bold actions with no plausible exit plan, premised on dated myths about Indian weakness, ‘Hindu cowardice’ and Kashmiri sentiment. The outcomes, unsurprisingly, have been disastrous and not only for India-Pakistan relations but for Pakistan’s internal cohesion as well.

To understand the Pahalgam strike in context, one must go back in time. In 1965, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, the first of Pakistan’s military strongmen, who was described by political scientist Samuel Huntington as ‘the Asian de Gaulle’ (!).

Ayub imagined that internal unrest in Kashmir triggered by the theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal shrine had rendered the state ripe for rebellion. Then came India’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962.

Later, Ayub was buoyed by exaggerated accounts of Pakistan’s ‘victory’ over Indian forces in the Rann of Kutch in April 1965. A.R. Siddiqi, in his ‘The Military in Pakistan: Image and Reality’ (1996), observes pithily that “In the popular Pakistani mind, the Kutch operation had quite irresistibly revived and conjured up the images of the historic desert campaign of Mohd bin Qasim in the 8th century.” Ayub, convinced that “the Hindu has no stomach for a fight,” greenlit ‘Operation Gibraltar’ which involved sending thousands of soldiers disguised as mujahideen into Indian-administered Kashmir. Both Ayub and his wily Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the key architect of Gibraltar, claimed India would crumble under pressure and would not retaliate beyond the LoC.

Not only was the Pakistani intelligence way off the mark, but the rationale for launching this venture was breathtakingly flawed. The Kashmiri population did not rise up. India retaliated across the international border after captured Pakistani soldiers spilled the beans of the operation.

Well, Pakistan’s first military dictator soon found he had to deal with Indian tanks within sight of Lahore - so complete was the surprise and so great the delusion of Pakistan’s top brass.

In 1971, the debauched Yahya Khan, drunk on flawed intelligence and whisky in equal measure, presided over Pakistan’s dismemberment. Ignoring reports of Bengali alienation, dismissing Indian resolve, and relying on the bluster of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Yahya responded to East Pakistan’s demand for autonomy with machine guns and mass slaughter of a genocidal intent. The Indian intervention, which followed the influx of ten million refugees, was swift and overwhelming. Dhaka fell within two weeks. Pakistan was halved. Yahya was out.

First mooted during the tenures of Zia-ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto it rejected by both on grounds of military unpreparedness and political idiocy.

That the lessons of 1965 and 1971 were not absorbed was evident in the summer of 1999 when the Kargil plan was revived by General Musharraf, the then army chief, who authorized an infiltration of Pakistani soldiers into Indian positions in the heights of Kargil, disguised again as militants.

The stated goal: to cut India’s key supply route to Siachen. Musharraf plotted this venture with the aid of a tightly knit clique of like-minded officers: Lt Gen. Aziz Khan, Lt Gen. Mahmood Ahmad, and Maj Gen. Javed Hassan. Was he inspired by Tom Clancy novels?

His military confrere Hassan, a romantic strategist, had long harboured the idea that India, riven by ethnic and religious fault lines, could be pushed into collapse by bold military action. Hassan had authored a study titled ‘India: A Study in Profile’ wherein he opined that the Hindu had no stomach for prolonged conflict while casting India as a weak, brittle state that needed just a nudge to break apart. It was a belief as bigoted as it was foolish.

As Tilak Devasher notes in his splendid ‘Pakistan at the Helm’ (2018), a “naturally reckless” Musharraf believed India would not or could not respond in enough strength to dislodge the Pakistanis. As with the 1965 infiltrations, both the assumptions would be proved wrong due to the ferocity of the Indian response.

Kargil, like Gibraltar, was carried out behind the back of most of Pakistan’s civilian leadership. There is controversy on whether Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister, reportedly found out only after the operation was underway. Some, like Gohar Ayub Khan, have claimed Sharif was in the know right from the beginning.

Whatever the truth, as analyst and former CIA official Bruce Riedel later noted, the fallout from Kargil did more than sour Indo-Pak relations; it realigned the Indo-US axis, with America refusing to reward Pakistan’s aggression.

Not only did the Indian Army push the intruders back, but the world also finally saw through Pakistan’s perennial charade of non-involvement.

So why does Pakistan keep doing this? Why does a nation that has lost half its territory, three wars and untold economic potential still believe it can wrest Kashmir by force or subterfuge? The answer lies partly in institutional arrogance and partly in the peculiar ideological ecosystem of the Punjabi-dominated military establishment.

Since the 1950s, Pakistan’s military has fashioned itself not merely as a defender of borders but as the guardian of the national ideology.

That ideology, rooted in an anti-Indian identity, treats Kashmir not as a geopolitical dispute but as a civilisational wound to be avenged. As Stephen P. Cohen once observed that India is the mirror in which Pakistan sees itself. To admit failure in Kashmir is to admit failure in statecraft itself. This explains why the army routinely manufactures crises with India whenever it finds itself beleaguered at home.

The ISI, supposedly the nerve centre of Pakistan’s strategic brain, has instead become its echo chamber. It has failed spectacularly in the real sense: whether in predicting India’s response, managing asymmetric warfare or even safeguarding Pakistan’s global standing. General Munir’s alleged role in enabling the Pahalgam strike follows this lineage. What exactly did he hope to achieve?

That a communally divided India would be cowed into silence? That Kashmiris would again erupt in protest? That the world would intervene on Pakistan’s behalf? None of these outcomes have materialized. Instead, the Aprill 22 backlash has only strengthened Indian resolve while utterly isolating Pakistan diplomatically.

Clausewitz warned of the perils of wars without objectives. Pakistan, it seems, specializes in them. Each foray, every attempt to “bleed India by a thousand cuts” has led to Pakistan bleeding internally - from Balochistan to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, from economic implosion to creeping Talibanization. So long as Rawalpindi remains in thrall to its delusions, it will keep writing cheques its army cannot cash. History may not repeat itself, but in Pakistan, it rhymes with eerie precision. And it rhymes in Punjabi.

(Tomorrow: How Pakistan’s obsession with Kashmir has boomeranged into ethnic uprisings and secessionist sentiment in Balochistan, Sindh and PoK)