The leaders and large sections of the people of Pakistan tend to live in a self-created world of illusions. They have always lived in such a world ever since the birth of the country in 1947.
2. They teach their children in school that civilization was brought to the sub-continent by Islam. They grow up not knowing the history of the sub-continent before the advent of Islam
3. They have always believed that one Muslim is equal to two Hindus. They teach their soldiers that Hindus cannot fight. They believed that their alliance with the US and the US military equipment supplied to them had made them invincible and that India would never be able to defeat them. They invaded Kashmir in 1965 thinking that Kashmir was theirs for the taking.
4. After a few days of fighting they realized that it was not. They realised too that Hindus can fight-----like hell. They found that all the Patton tanks and other modern equipment given to them by the US could not save them from the counter-attacks by the Indian Army. They fled from battle at Khem Karan after abandoning their Pattons.
5. But, they teach their children and soldiers that they won the 1965 war and that they forced India to sue for peace.
6. They looked down with contempt upon the Muslims of the then East Pakistan because most of them were descendents of converts from Hinduism. They convinced themselves that like the Hindus, the Bengali Muslims cannot fight.
7. They treated them like second class citizens of the country and suppressed them thinking that the Bengalis will not rise against their suppression.
8. They did and threw them out in 1971. The Bengali freedom-fighters and the Indian Army fought hand in hand in putting an end to the colonization of East Pakistan. Bangladesh was born. Over 90000 of the officers and soldiers of the Pakistan Army surrendered without a fight when the Indian Army and the Bengali freedom-fighters entered Dhaka. Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto came crawling to Shimla to get them released.
9. They teach their children and soldiers that through his clever diplomacy Bhutto forced Indira Gandhi to release the prisoners of war.
10. When Gen.Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in 1977 and assumed power, many of their political leaders appealed frantically to the leaders of India and Afghanistan to help them escape from the country. If the authorities of India and Afghanistan had not helped them to escape to Europe, they would have landed in the gallows as Bhutto did.
11. When they returned to Pakistan from political exile after the death of Zia in 1988, they projected themselves as national heroes, who had hoodwinked the Army, gone into political exile and kept up the fight against the Army and for the return of democracy. They never spoke a word about the help rendered by India and Afghanistan. If India and Afghanistan had not helped, many of the political leaders of Pakistan may not be alive today.
12. In 1989, the very same political leaders who owed their survival to India colluded with their Army in sending a large number of terrorists trained by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) into J&K. They thought that Kashmir was ripe for picking. Twenty-one years later, they are nowhere near the realization of their illusory dreams.
13. In 1994, they created the Taliban and helped it to capture Kabul in September 1996. It occupied large parts of Afghanistan with the help of the ISI and the Pakistan Army. The Pakistanis thought that was the end of the Indian influence in Afghanistan. They realized with a shock that it was not. Secular elements in Afghanistan, helped by India, Iran and Russia, hit back at the Taliban and its ISI patrons and facilitated the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban rule post-9/11. There was an anti-Pakistan uprising in Kabul and many Pakistanis, who were working for the Taliban in Kabul, were hunted down, caught, killed and their dead bodies thrown into the gutters of Kabul by the local population.
14. In 1999, the Pakistan Army under Gen.Pervez Musharraf occupied Indian territory in the Kargil Heights by taking advantage of the withdrawal of the Indian Army posts during winter. They had wild dreams of “liberating” the Siachen Glacier and the Kargil area of J&K. The Indian Army hit back and inflicted heavy casualties on the Pakistan Army. The US insisted that the Pakistan Army should withdraw from the territory occupied by it. Musharraf and after him, Mr.Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, flew to Beijing and sought China’s support for their occupation. To their shock, China refused to support them. M.Nawaz Sharif flew to Washington DC to plead with the US for a face-saving formula so that they can withdraw without humiliation. The US declined to provide any. They were forced to withdraw unconditionally. They projected their Kargil humiliation to their people and soldiers as a great military victory by awarding a large number of gallantry medals to each other.
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