Pakistan: The Paper and the Posting

The Coincidence

Years before Pakistan became his command, it had been his homework. While Bob was earning a master’s degree at the Air University at Maxwell, a macro-economics course required a paper on the economy of an assigned country. His assignment was Pakistan — a place he could barely locate.

“My favorite course was one on macro-economics. Part of the course was to write a paper on the economy of various places. My assignment was Pakistan. I barely knew where the place was but I did the required reading and did my paper.”

The reading left an impression that would matter later: he came away convinced the country was already, in his words, “over the line as a self-supporting country” — more people than its land could feed, agriculture dependent on irrigation, no native energy. Then, near the end of his command at Tyndall, two sets of orders arrived at once.

“Toward the end of our stay at Tyndall, I got promoted to M/Gen. and at about the same time got orders to Pakistan as chief of the MAAG. I had to go to the Pentagon for some briefings, and thought that my assignment was truly coincidental with my paper on that country.”

The Country Team

A new major general, he joined the U.S. “country team” in Karachi — embassy, an AID mission, and his military assistance program, all instruments of the Cold War policy of containment: a cordon of friendly states around the Soviet Union. His graduate-school skepticism met the reality of the aid mission, and he was not impressed.

“At my first attendance at a meeting of the ‘country team’ I learned, to my dismay, that the first priority of the AID mission was to improve the infant mortality rate in the country. Just who would feed these extra children was not a matter for discussion. I became pretty disenchanted with those meetings.”

The work of a MAAG chief was as much diplomatic as military — down to a seat, he’d forgotten until his daughter reminded him, on the Karachi school board.

Ayub Khan’s Warning

Soon after he arrived, Pakistan’s air force commander, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, introduced him to the president, Field Marshal Ayub Khan. In conversation, Ayub told the new American general exactly where Pakistan’s guns were really pointed — and it was not at the enemy the containment program had in mind.

“Ayub told me that his main enemy was not China but India, who had done them out of Kashmir… Of course, this was certainly not the reason we were providing military assistance to both countries, which was to be a part of the containment program against the USSR. I reported this to the ambassador and to CINC South, my military boss. I suspect that neither agency did anything about it, but it was no great surprise to me when the shooting started later in the year.”

The War

The Second Kashmir War broke out in 1965. Bob watched the policy fold in on itself — two American-armed nations turning American weapons on each other.

“All the military equipment on both sides was provided by the US, and we certainly didn’t equip them to fight each other.”

With aid suspended the moment the fighting began, the Pakistanis read the cutoff as betrayal. Bob spent much of the war up at army headquarters in Rawalpindi trying to learn how it was going, and got a cold reception for his trouble.

“The Paks took this as a very unfriendly gesture and almost accused me of being a spy for India… And when the shooting stopped, there had been a lot of bloodshed but little else, and the basic issue of Kashmir was still unsettled. And so it is until this day.”

His own counsel — that a mission regarded as hostile was wasting its time — went unheeded. He argued to withdraw; the staff at MacDill chose to stay and let the assignment wind down. He filled the empty days, by his own account, reading the wire traffic in the embassy and playing golf.