188 ISLAM AT WAR
Pakistanis held an impregnable position, but the officers’ spirit broke and
they chose to surrender.
Pakistan was defeated, but the UN intervened and forced a cease-fire
in mid-December. Pakistan was thrown into tumult and political chaos
and has been struggling since that time to establish a stable government.
In the three wars between India and Pakistan, some Pakistani officers
demonstrated the same Middle Eastern tendency to command from the
rear. The instances of leadership from the front ranks were too few to
significantly change the outcome of the war,particularly as the balance
of forces arrayed against them was so great. In addition, the Pakistanis
failed to fully employ their forces. That is, because the artillery arm was
looked down upon in the caste system within the Pakistani military, it was
underutilized and the balance possible from a well-coordinated, combined
arms attack was never brought to bear against the Indians.
The bitterness of the Indo-Pakistani wars has been such that in recent
times both nations have felt the need to develop nuclear weapons. It is
clear that the thirty years since their last great fight have seen enormous
technical development in Pakistan. It is fortunate that this has been mir-
rored and made possible by a modernization of government and society.
In fact this modernization suggests that the differences between the two
governments will be resolvable only if Pakistan reaches the ability to deal
with the Kashmiri question on political rather than emotional and religious
lines. That both nations possess nuclear weapons is disturbing, but India,
with her much larger armies, has foresworn first use of her nuclear arsenal.
Pakistan is not really threatened by the large Indian army—the wars have
been about Pakistani hopes for Kashmir, not an Indian invasion of the
Pakistani homeland. It is difficult to imagine that either nation would have
much to gain by nuclear warfare.
In the heart of the old Persian Empire, the two newly independent
governments of two ancient states found Islamic theology and politics
adequate for a brutal war. The roots of the Iran-Iraq war can be traced to
hostilities that have existed between these two nations back before the
days of the Ottoman and the Safavid (Persian) empires. The disputes re-
volve around boundaries and the interference in each other’s internal af-
fairs through ethnic and sectarian minorities that reach across their mutual
borders. The current round of disputes began after the end of World War
I and the emergence of Iraq as a quasi-independent state under the British
mandate in 1921. All of these modern disagreements focus on control of
the strategic waterway known as the Shatt al Arab—the mouth of the
combined Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.