186 ISLAM AT WAR
Pakistani soldiers were killed. An undeclared war began in the state of
Jammu and Kashmir, and on September 6, 1965, India launched attacks
against the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Kasur.
A full-scale war began without formal declaration. During the night of
September 7 the Indian I Corps launched an attack east of Sialkot with
an armored and three infantry divisions. The Pakistanis sent their armored
division forward to engage the Indian armored division. The result was
one of the largest armored battles to occur since World War II, known as
the Battle of Assal Uttar.
The Pakistanis launched an ambitious counterattack with their armor
that, had it succeeded, would have cut off all of Punjab west of the Beas.
Instead, the Indians broke the poorly managed Pakistani forces.
Indian timidity and overcautiousness wasted this victory. They also
failed to concentrate their forces into one solid mass and dissipated their
efforts in two separate attacks, one by truck-borne infantry and the other
by their armored force. The combination of Indian incompetence and Pa-
kistani tenacity in the defense ended the battle with an inconclusive result.
The Pakistani army was holding the line, but with great efforts and
heavy losses. It suffered from poor leadership from top to bottom. This
deficient leadership was a major reason that the Pakistani 1st Armored
Division was nearly destroyed at Assal Uttar. Indian reverses at Khem
Kanar, however, so panicked the Indians that the operational commander
thought about withdrawing to the Beas, only to have his decision overruled
by the army commander.
After fourteen days, on September 23, 1965, the United Nations Se-
curity Council intervened, a cease-fire was declared, and the war was over.
The cease-fire line of 1948 was reestablished, and the troops of both coun-
tries pulled back.
It is apparent that the motivated Muslim troops of Pakistan may not
have been trained as well as possible, but they enjoyed considerable fight-
ing ability. This distanced them somewhat from the Arab and Egyptian
soldiers facing Israel and might be explained by the desire to keep their
homeland safe—and it is not unlikely that some of the fine old military
traditions of the British Raj had remained with both new nations.
War broke out again six years later. Clearly Indo-Pakistani relations had
never been good, and they deteriorated further when civil war erupted in
Pakistan. It is now frequently forgotten that Pakistan was divided into two
parts, separated by the great bulk of India in between. The East Pakistanis
wanted greater autonomy, and the West Pakistan army fought to deny it
to them. The fighting forced 10 million refugees into India. The Pakistan