The Longest August (22 page)

After the signing of the US-Pakistan military pact, hundreds of Pakistani officers were sent to the Pentagon's military academies for advanced training. The US Military Assistance Advisory Group set up its office at Pakistan's Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi.

With US military aid of $266 million in 1955 rocketing to $1.086 billion the following year,
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the budget and the popular standing of Pakistan's armed forces rose sharply. By contrast, the prestige of politicians sank ever lower.

In the March 1951 elections in Punjab during Ali Khan's premiership, the Muslim League fared well. But it failed to repeat the performance in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) election in December. Its achievement in the legislative election in Sindh in May 1953 was lackluster. And in the populous East Pakistan in March 1954 it suffered a humiliating defeat by the United Front of Bengali nationalists.

Reflecting this dramatic development, Governor-General Ghulam Muhammad dissolved the Constituent Assembly on October 24, 1954, saying it had become unrepresentative. This in turn led Bogra to form a new cabinet. He appointed Major-General Iskander (also spelled Sikander) Ali Mirza to be his interior minister and the chief of army staff, Major-General Muhammad Ayub Khan, as his defense minister, a post held until then by civilian premiers. When the ailing Muhammad spent two months in Britain for medical treatment, Mirza served as the acting governor-general.

A month later Bogra announced a plan to merge the western wing's four provinces, former princely states and tribal agencies into one unit, to be called West Pakistan. It came into being in October 1955. A new Constituent Assembly of 80, with its members divided equally between West and East Pakistan, was elected by the members of their respective legislatures in April.

When the terminally ill Muhammad resigned as governor-general in August 1955, Major-General Mirza succeeded him, a sign of the ascending power of the military in administering Pakistan. As an ethnic Bengali, he considered it politically unwise to have another Bengali, Bogra, continue as the prime minister. So he dispatched him back to Washington as Pakistan's ambassador.

Pakistan Loses Its Constitution and Gains a Military Ruler

Mirza called on Chaudhri (also spelled Chaudhry) Muhammad Ali, a Punjabi bureaucrat turned Muslim League leader, to form the next government. Thanks to his determined push, the new Constituent Assembly adopted a republican constitution with a provision for universal suffrage on February 29, 1956. It prescribed a parliamentary form of government, with Islam as the state religion and Urdu, English, and Bengali as the state languages. However, objecting to the absence of regional autonomy, the sixteen members of the East Pakistan-based Awami League, led by Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, walked out. The constitution came into force on March 23, 1956—the sixteenth anniversary of the Lahore Resolution of the All India Muslim League—with Major-General Mirza unanimously elected as the first president of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan by its National Assembly.

With its republican constitution, Pakistan caught up with India. But by having a retired major-general as its president, Pakistan set itself apart from its bigger neighbor, where all power rested with elected civilians. Moreover, the constitutional article in Pakistan that “the ministers shall serve at the pleasure of the president” accorded the president a most powerful lever. Mirza used this authority freely to dismiss ministries at the center and in the provinces. He constantly misused his clout to promote political intrigue and horse-trading.

When the Muslim League group in the National Assembly split and the defectors joined other politicians to form the Republican Party, Muhammad Ali resigned in September 1956. He was followed by Suhrawardy, who led a coalition of his Awami League and the Republican Party. He was married to Vera Tiscenko, a Moscow-born Russian actress who had found refuge for herself and her infant son from the impending war in Europe by moving from Rome to Calcutta in the late 1930s. As a result Suhrawardy had become keenly interested in international affairs.

Within weeks of becoming the premier and defense minister, Suhrawardy, accompanied by his foreign minister, Firoz Khan Noon, visited Beijing. They told Prime Minister Zhou Enlai (Chou Enlai) that Pakistan had made its choice to stand with the United States, and hoped Communist China would move toward more friendly relations with Pakistan as well as America.
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Zhou lent them a sympathetic ear. He paid a
return visit to Karachi in December. By happenstance, during that month Nehru visited Eisenhower at his Gettysburg Farm.

The coveted prize for Suhrawardy was a meeting with Eisenhower. This materialized on July 10, 1957, at the White House. In return for US civilian and military aid to Pakistan of $2.142 billion in the previous year, Eisenhower asked for secret intelligence and military facilities on the Pakistani soil. Suhrawardy agreed, according to Syed Amjad Ali, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington.
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The United States was allowed to fly its high altitude U-2 reconnaissance planes over the Soviet Union from the Pakistani Air Force's section of the Peshawar airport. In return Eisenhower agreed to include F-104 fighter jets and Patton tanks, both superior to India's weapons, in Washington's arms shipments.

After lengthy negotiations, the two governments signed a ten-year agreement in July 1958. It provided the six-year-old US National Security Agency (NSA) a base at Badaber, ten miles from Peshawar.

The agency's task was to monitor communications at the sites of ballistic missiles and nuclear tests in Soviet Central Asia, and other related exchanges.
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At home Suhrawardy came under pressure to confirm March 1958 as the date for the general election under the new constitution. Arguing that he needed two years to implement his program, he advanced that date to the end of 1958. President Mirza feared that Suhrawardy's success as premier would weaken his hand. So he fired Suhrawardy in October. He called on Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar, a Gujarati-speaking contemporary of Jinnah, to head the new government. Chundrigar failed to assemble a cabinet.

Mirza's next choice fell on Noon, a Punjabi feudal lord and leader of the Republican Party. Noon headed a coalition of five groups, including the Muslim League, which assumed office in mid-December 1957. It was during Noon's tenure that the NSA started building the Peshawar Air Base complex, with Washington's overgenerous aid to Pakistan running at $1.5 billion annually.
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Known locally as Little America, the completed Badaber complex included technical infrastructure, residential quarters, and sports facilities, with access to it controlled by the United States.

Domestically, Mirza reveled in political intrigue. As a result the Muslim League withdrew from the coalition. On September 28, 1958, its leaders threatened to dislodge Noon's government through extraconstitutional means, if necessary.

That gave Mirza a convenient rationale to scrap the constitution on October 7, 1958. He claimed it was unworkable because of dangerous
compromises. He dismissed the national and provincial cabinets, dissolved the national and provincial legislatures, and banned all political parties. He imposed martial law and appointed Major-General Ayub Khan as the chief martial law administrator.
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When he and Ayub Khan could not work out the modalities of power sharing, Mirza unilaterally appointed Ayub Khan prime minister and selected a cabinet of technocrats for him. Ayub Khan protested Mirza's high-handedness. An arch manipulator, Mirza tried to gain support of Ayub Khan's rivals within the military. Informed of Mirza's chicanery, Ayub Khan, backed by the high command, dispatched three generals to the presidential residence in the middle of the night on October 26–27 to put Mirza on a plane to London. Ayub Khan became the sole ruler. By abolishing the post of prime minister, he became the president.

He explained to the nation that Pakistan needed stability that could only be achieved by turning out “the inefficient and rascally” politicians responsible for political instability and letting the army play a central role in administering the republic. Since day-to-day administration remained with civil servants, it led to an alliance between the upper ranks of bureaucracy and the military.

With that an era ended in Pakistan. It now stood starkly apart from India, where the second general election in 1957 had returned the Congress Party and Nehru to power. By then the stances of the two neighbors on Kashmir had become unbridgeable.

Military ties between Karachi and Washington were reinforced as a consequence of the Joint Resolution to Promote Peace and Stability in the Middle East passed by the US Congress in March 1957. It authorized the president to use the armed forces to assist any nation or group of nations in the Middle East against armed aggression from any country “controlled by international communism.”
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Washington treated Pakistan as part of the Middle East by virtue of its defense alliance with Iran and Turkey under CENTO.

Kashmir Issue Hardening

In the wake of their bilateral meeting in London during the Commonwealth prime ministers' conference in June 1953, Bogra and Nehru decided to continue their dialogue on Kashmir and other issues. During his three-day visit to Karachi toward the end of July, Nehru was received
warmly at the official and popular levels, with Bogra repeatedly referring to him as “my elder brother.” They parted with an agreement to meet in Delhi in October.

But Shaikh Abdullah's overnight arrest in early August led to a change in the timing. Anti-India protests in the Kashmir Valley at Abdullah's detention were suppressed with a heavy hand by his successor, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad. Across the border, Abdullah's incarceration turned him into a hero. The demonstrators in major Pakistani cities demanded urgent and strong action by their government on Kashmir.

Pressed by Bogra, Nehru agreed to meet in Delhi on August 16. Their joint communiqué referred to a fair and impartial plebiscite agreed to “some years” ago and a lack of progress because of certain “preliminary issues.” It was decided to appoint committees of military and other experts to advise the prime ministers to resolve the “preliminary issues” as a preamble to appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end of April 1954. The administrator would then outline preparations for holding a plebiscite in “the entire State [of Jammu and Kashmir].”
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This communiqué went down badly in West Pakistan. Its critics denounced the sidelining of the United Nations, the proposed replacement of Admiral Chester Nimitz of the United States as the plebiscite administrator, and the possibility of zonal plebiscites. Popular disapproval and the lack of unanimous backing by his cabinet tied Bogra's hands. His initial enthusiasm died when Nehru repudiated his agreement about the return of refugees to their homes because of “practical difficulties.” That meant disfranchising hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the Jammu region who had migrated to West Pakistan out of fear.

As US arms poured into Pakistan, Nehru, in his letter to Bogra on December 3, 1953, said that American military aid would have direct bearing on the Kashmir issue, and advised the Pakistani government to stay away from power blocs. Later, when the delegates of the two countries met in Delhi to discuss demilitarization, the Indians insisted that the issue of US military assistance be discussed first. The Pakistanis refused. The meeting ended with the agenda untouched.

In his letter of March 29, 1954, Bogra explained to Nehru that Washington's military aid had nothing to do with either the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir or the right of self-determination for Kashmiris. Nehru ignored the argument. Two weeks later he informed Bogra that the situation had changed as a result of the US-Pakistan military pact and that the deadline of appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end
of April had become redundant. “It is with profound regret that I have been led to the conclusion that our talks regarding Kashmir have failed,” concluded Bogra in his letter of September 21.
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If, by some miracle, Bogra would have seen the note Nehru addressed to Kashmir's prime minister Abdullah on August 25, 1952, from Sonamarg in Kashmir, he would have concluded that his “elder brother” was just going through ritualistic motions about a plebiscite. In it Nehru virtually conceded that he had decided against a plebiscite “towards the end of December 1948.” He had accepted the UN Commission for India and Pakistan's plebiscite proposals on December 23, 1948, in order to achieve a cease-fire, since the Indian Army had reached the desired line on the ground. He was determined to maintain “the status quo then existing” by force. “We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power,” he wrote. “But that superiority is not so great as to produce results quickly either in war or by fear of war. Therefore, our national interest demands that we should adopt a peaceful policy towards Pakistan and, at the same time, add to our strength.”
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In short, Nehru, a self-righteous moralizer, sacrificed morality and legalism on the altar of power politics.

Compared to this sensational admission, his revelation in April 1956 that about a year earlier he had made an unsuccessful offer to Bogra involving a permanent de jure partition of Kashmir along the cease-fire line was bland.
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Nehru's Henchman in Srinagar

While Nehru conducted diplomatic dialogue with Bogra, in Srinagar Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad proved more pro-India than Indians themselves. Led by him, 64 of the 74-strong Constituent Assembly members ratified the state's accession to India on February 15, 1954. “We are today taking the decision of final and irrevocable accession to India and no power on earth could change it,” declared Bakshi Muhammad.
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Later that year he said that Shaikh Abdullah would be “detained as long as the future of Kashmir remains undecided.”
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