Memoirs of a Bystander a Life in Diplomacy
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Memoirs of a Bystander A Life in Diplomacy IQBAL AKHUND MEMOIRS OF A BYSTANDER A Life in Diplomacy IQBAL AKHUND Reproduced by Sani H. Panhwar (2021) The authorin hisUn itedN ationsoffice,M arch1987. CONTENTS Acknowledgement .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1 Preface .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 2 1. The Early Years .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 5 2. P ak istan .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 17 3. The Foreign S ervice .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 28 4. Kashm ir .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 34 5. The Un itedN ations— 1961-1964 .. .. .. .. .. 51 6. W ar— 1965 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 66 7. Tashk en t .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 90 8. Interreg n um .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 105 9. Cairo— 1968-1971 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 116 10. B an g ladesh W arA g ain .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 156 11. The N ew P ak istan .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 182 12. P rometheusUn boun d The nuclear question .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 209 13. ThirdW orldCaesar Zulfikar Ali Bhutto .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 238 14. A S im ple M an .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 280 15. B eirut .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 317 16. Epilogue .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 361 Appendices .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 370 DEDICATION To my wife Lala and to our grandchildren Teymour, laliana, Zorina, Dunya. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my children who besides encouraging me to write, provided the instruments for doing it, a laptop computer and printer and taught me to use it; to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Karachi for the use of their libraries; to Farzana Shakur of the PHA for taking time out during a very busy period to trace some important references; to Micki and Slavy Vershuren for resolving a computer emergency; to Erik Safdar and Roshanare for help in reviewing and revising the manuscript and to Tyaba Habib, for the mind and heart she put into editing and giving shape to the book. Memoirs of a Bystander - A Life in Diplomacy; Copyright © www.bhutto.org 1 PREFACE In the more literate countries of the world, memoirs of public men is a well-established literary genre. Retired generals and diplomats, in particular, are prone to sharing their memories and experiences with their fellow men. It gives one the opportunity to drop names, to take credit for things done, or merely witnessed; to magnify one's own role; to vindicate, justify, propagate; or merely to re-live what has been and rue what might have been. In Pakistan the practice has not yet quite taken hold. We treat the past as another country to which one visit was enough. A well-read instructor at the Quelta Staff College once said to me, 'In our country accumulated experience is not passed on; each generation has to start afresh.' There exist indeed lacunae in the nation's collective memory. Most of Pakistan's founding fathers died taking their memories with them. The Quaid himself, Liaquat Ali Khan, Shaheed Suhrawardy, and many lesser lights left relatively few papers, notes or diaries that would throw light on the historic and tumultuous events in which they played a part. The circumstances behind some of the most crucial events in the country's history remain shrouded in secrecy—the assassination of Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan; military action and defeat in East Pakistan; and, notwithstanding the public attention focused on the event, the trial and execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. There were obvious reasons for these matters being hushed up, but even on subjects of more general public interest, silence prevails. After nearly half a century of Independence, no Foreign Office papers have been published. Many matters remain the subject of speculation and conjecture including the 1948 tribal incursion into Kashmir; how it came about that having accepted Moscow's invitation, Liaquat Ali went instead to Washington; how and why Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact and SEATO. This book covers a relatively narrow canvas. It is a footnote to the early years of Pakistan's diplomatic history. There are no disclosures made and no secrets unveiled. Much of what is written here is known or surmised. Nor is this a memoir in the sense of being an account of my own career, but rather of what I saw and heard and sometimes took part in. I hope it will be of interest as an inside account of the diplomatic trade by someone who practiced it for forty-odd years. These memoirs span a period of nearly sixty years, from the thirties to the nineties— decades of tumult and transformation that saw wars and cataclysms, the fall of empires and the decline of ideologies; and now at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the world seems to be moving away from the nation state to the global village. Loyalties shrink as the world becomes one world. These were years that saw the end of the British Empire in India and the emergence of Pakistan. The turbulence that followed has Memoirs of a Bystander - A Life in Diplomacy; Copyright © www.bhutto.org 2 not ended yet, either between the two countries, or within them. Each is still trying to come to terms with itself even as it shies away from coming to terms with the other, though the two processes are closely and fatefully interlinked. The title perhaps smacks of false modesty but is true in three ways. Firstly, a diplomat today, despite his title of 'Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary', is essentially an observer who remains tethered to the government he represents by the cord of modern telecommunications. A Pakistani diplomat is a bystander in the further sense that the options of action and initiative available to a country of Pakistan's size and situation are limited. Pakistan is not among those few countries that have the power or influence to shape world events and who are, relatively speaking, free agents on the world scene. Like the great majority of the worlds states, Pakistan must take things as it finds them and adjust to them as well as it can. Lastly, to some extent, by temperament too I am a bystander. Throughout my life I always had the feeling of standing a little outside of whatever was going on, watching things happen even when I participated in the unfolding of events. This sense of detachment has stayed with me through a long career during which I was involved in, or witness to, events that were important in the history of our nation and on the world stage. I don't, know whether such an attitude is necessarily useful in a diplomat, but in a writer it may cause his work to appear as lacking in a point of view. I trust that the reader will not find that to be the case with this book. In the popular mind a diplomat is a smooth talker who should not be taken at his word. The profession has been tarred from the inside, alas! by the treacherous pun of King James' ambassador to Rome, Sir Henry Wooton, 'An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.' Nothing can be further from the truth, for a diplomat's word is his currency, and if he debases it by telling lies, no one will accept it any more. A diplomat must always tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, though he need not at all times tell the whole truth. Pakistan's short but troubled history has been marked by many sudden shifts and contradictions, and Pakistani diplomats had to spend a good bit of their working life explaining these vicissitudes. This was not as difficult as may be supposed, for behind the many changes of government and regime, national policy remained broadly unchanged. But a certain detachment helped one to maintain a sense of proportion and to put in perspective, at least in one's own mind, the virtues of the 'present government' and the villainies of the previous one. A young woman from Lahore, very put-together and of her times, recently asked me whether I still had faith in the country's future. I replied, 'Yes, I do' To this she said, 'Thai is the difference between your generation and mine; we no longer believe in the future!' Memoirs of a Bystander - A Life in Diplomacy; Copyright © www.bhutto.org 3 But I don't think that is true of young people in general, or was true of the young woman herself. The remark came from a sense of anger at the way things have gone in Pakistan but also of a frustrated hope that they can be belter. As long as the young are angry, there is hope. Clifton, Karachi 10 April 1995 Memoirs of a Bystander - A Life in Diplomacy; Copyright © www.bhutto.org 4 CHAPTER 1 THE EARLY YEARS In the seventies the BBC showed a serial on the Raj and it was followed by a spate of books about those who ran it—Virginia Woolf's chivalrous young men 'who negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance';1 or in the words of Philip Mason, 'the imperial ruling class of public school boys trained on classics, cold baths and bodily exercise.'2 There were reprints of diaries or letters written by British officials or their wives, biographies and works of social history, coffee-table books describing and illustrating a glamorous world of hunts, tiger shoots, fancy dress balls and languid love affairs. There were snapshots of sahibs on polo ponies, memsahibs in picture hats, flaxen-haired babas in the arms of inky-hued ayahs, of gingerbread bungalows with rolling lawns in front of trellised verandahs. Not all these people were upper class, but in the cantonments and civil lines of dusty district towns, they lived a pastiche of English upper class life, to which was added more than a touch of oriental flamboyance. A memoir of the mid- nineteenth century lists the titles and duties of fifty-four servants employed in a typical household—khansamah, sirdar, mashalchi, punkha-walla, water-carrier, cook, grooms, syces, etc.