The Sahabzada never stooped to conquer

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Note on Gen Sahibzada Yaqub Ali ​Khan 

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​by

 Col (Retd) ABDUL QAYYUM 

Part III: Perception

Having observed the Sahabzada over many years and in a variety of situations, my own understanding of the man having grown over the years without any bias toward unwarranted adulation or contempt, I like to think I know the Sahabzada better than many. My summary perception of the man follows.

Yaqub Khan has been the most outstanding general the Pakistan Army has produced, including those who rose higher than him in formal rank or official authority. It is no particular honour to be associated in any way with the Pakistan of our times but I do believe that the quality of his generalship would have won wider recognition had he served in say the British, the French or the German Army. His style of leadership was essentially insular and English, its intellectual content essentially occidental and continental. His legacy to the Pakistan Army, although widely acknowledged and admired, is clearly on its way out. Little understood and even less absorbed, it has been instinctively rejected as alien to the native mould. The transplant has failed. The fault is as much ours as his, the loss more ours than his. If the legacy does survive in some minuscule and mutilated form, say at the National Defence College, it will continue as an isolated annex of the native’s residential palace.

The style and the intellectual content of the Sahabzada’s generalship was suited to the higher direction of war. Since we never had a war, not really, and the vision of our generals seldom went beyond the range of regimental command, it was a death foretold. Now, not far from his rocking chair, I wonder what the Sahabzada makes of it all. He will find some consolation though in the diplomatic phase of his illustrious career. The debacle in East Pakistan (1971), in the twilight zone of his own transition from the military to the diplomatic, will continue to rankle not only because of the bravado of those who sought a military solution to a political and psychosocial problem, but also because of his failure to dissuade them, and having failed not to resign earlier than he did as a conscientious objector. Once again it was a death foretold and the Sahabzada was trapped among the lemmings rushing to the sea. And yet, he may console himself over the fact that he did not order the military action in March 1970, nor did he preside over the surrender to a foreign army in 1971.

Like a revolution, an army devours its own geniuses. This is particularly true of countries in the Third World. On the individual plane every Napoleon marches steadily to his own Waterloo, but we may focus our attention for the while on the institution itself. It is the army which helped the Sahabzada become what he had it in him to be. It sent him to the Ecole de Guerre and when he came out of it as the Ecole wanted him to be, it scoffed at him for having gone there It groomed him, without knowing it, to be the commander of an armoured division and then stared at him in derision when he talked of “launching pads”, of the many nuances of the operational environment in the Sialkot sector, of the chain of command and the importance of staff duties in the conduct of operations, divisional level and above. As an institution, the army understood only the battle at the battalion level. This was war, real war, the rest was humbug. Of operations at the divisional and corps level, and the conduct of war at the apex, it knew little and did not care to know more.

Since the Sahabzada insisted, they sent him to the National Defence College. When he asked his star-studded students to leave the Staff College (Quetta) behind as he had done, they smiled. When they left, they reverted to their battle at the battalion level. The army which prized its gladiators found a clever and easy way to get rid of the Sahabzada. It made him the commander of a corps and then shoved him out to distant East Pakistan as GOC Eastern Command.

There the Sahabzada blew his lungs out: this is not war, this is civil war. There must be stringent limits to the use of force as an instrument of policy and he warned of the dangers of force once unleashed careening out of control. I told you, said the top brass: he is no warrior, only a paper tiger! The gladiators not far below applauded. When the tigers were unleashed, they inflicted on East Pakistan (in 1970 already Bangladesh) a wound that will never heal, not even the scar that we would now be content with. Equally horrendous, they forced a fourth class army to its knees before a third class adversary. Even now they continue to exult over gallantry at the battalion level.

When Yaqub Khan entered the field of diplomacy, honed and chastened by many years of the rigours of high command, his intellectual and cultural accomplishments made him at home in many capitals of the world, particularly those of consequence in our day. Our genius at the top (1972) and his minions in the Foreign Office were glad to have him out where he was – in Paris, Washington or Moscow.

They were suspicious of his military background and the respect that he still evoked in the army that discarded him. The few who applauded, applauded his English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, a smattering of Arabic and Bengali. I forgot, also his mother tongue. Things changed when the genius was out (LBW and hit-wicket) and Zia-ul-Haq sauntered in, bat in hand (1977). It took a Zia-ul-Haq (“of all people”, I have heard it said) to bring the Sahabzada home and make him the Foreign Minister.

As minister, the Sahabzada taught our boys to read, write and, above all, to think. Many in the Foreign Office even today will bear witness to my assertion. The Sahabzada not only formulated and conducted our foreign policy well, he groomed others to do likewise, come their day. The Sahabzada had an eye for men. He knew how to pick, choose and polish. Go ask an Ashraf Qazi or a Rafat Mahdi, and they will tell you what I mean.

When the Sahabzada stood up in the Senate to explain our foreign policy, most of his audience yawned. Not surprising, but surely painful. The Sahabzada was always better understood abroad than at home, in the halls of Montezuma or simply chatting with Henry Kissinger. His frequent flights abroad were, I suspect, as much an escape as a compulsion to return. Like Jonathon Livingston Seagull, he loved his boys in the Foreign Office.

When the Sahabzada called it a day as Foreign Minister, he had the wisdom not to become a politician, not here, so help us God! Just as he knew the limits of force (1971), so also he knew the limits of power (1988), and his own limitations in this sorry scheme of things entire.

I have seen the Sahabzada long enough and from close enough to admire him both as a military commander and as our Foreign Minister. At one stage I wondered how he could possibly serve under Zia-ul-Haq. Now I know. For one thing, he knew Zia-ul-Haq better than most and he did not quarrel with destiny when his GSO-I became the CMLA/COAS/President. For another, Zia-ul-Haq knew the Sahabzada better than many and he never ceased to pay him the respect that was his due. When an equation is well balanced, the entities may switch sides. They remain the same, only the signs change as the law ordains. No entity runs out of the equation. If it is cricket you play, captain one day and only bowler or batsman the next, you play on. Many I know will say they were not playing cricket at all. I have very good reasons to disagree.

While still on the Sahabzada’s professional performance, how would he have fared if destiny had steered him into another profession? As a catholic priest he would have risen to be a cardinal, sonorous of speech and resplendent in his crimson and black robes. As an actor on stage, he would merit his place of honour in Stratford – on – Avon. As a professor of philosophy in Cambridge or Harvard, he would have been as abstract and abstruse as he appeared to our Senate. That should have taken him to professor emeritus. A politician? No, for God’s sake, no. I have said that before! A Senator? Well, that he was, but alas, not in the days of imperial Rome! A trouble-shooter? With Kissinger, yes; to the Polisario, yes; with Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, no! What about a few lectures on national security? To King Hasan II of Morocco, yes; to Mirza Aslam Beg and his friends, no! I could go on, but more is not necessary.

I find it instructive to contemplate that the Sahabzada’s formal academic qualification was matriculation, ‘O’ level to be precise. By that count, he would barely qualify as a Naib Qasid, just as surely as Mr. Catchpole would have refused many of our present day Ph.Ds, admission into class VI. What are we to make of this, except to observe how far a man may go if he is ready to educate himself. I have met few men in Pakistan as erudite as the Sahabzada. His library, where he sips tea with his friends, is a joy to be in. The range of the books is vast – from history, philosophy, metaphysics, logic and mysticism to strategy and tactics, science, fiction, travelogue, biography, the fine arts and architecture. My enumeration does not presume to be complete. His selection is rigorous, the layout is in his mind. The last time I was there (1997) we talked about Ibn Arabi and Zen Buddhism. I was also glad, and proud of my contribution (not financial), to see the Great books of the Western World (54 volumes) add splendour to his already illustrious collection. At the RIMC reunion the other day (March 1998), so cosily arranged by Brigadier Mukhtar Karim at the Adventure Inn (Islamabad), I talked to him about Nirad C. Chaudhri’s Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse and he said he would get a copy. We also talked about Pakistan, the land of our day and the horsemen, more precisely the donkey-riders who go galloping on their donkeys, down a motorway into the wide blue yonder.

The Sahabzada is a great conversationalist, cast in the classical mould which rejects the idea of flitting from flower to flower without sipping the honey. He can sip long, and he expects the others to sip when he is talking. When he talks he is expansive, exhaustive, with precision no bar to eloquence, loud and clear. Sometimes it is a voice from very far away, sometimes from very near. Some think he is pompous. I disagree, his Stratford-on-Avon notwithstanding. It takes at least two to make a conversation and the Sahabzada shuts up soon enough when there is no one to talk to, attendance without presence or presence without preparation! Alas, there are not too many Henry Kissingers around. Some say the Sahabzada is boring. Of course he is, if you go to him expecting to hear more about cabbages than kings. He wont say it, but I know he does not like cabbages. Muzaffar Malik, who derived much of his vocabulary from the Sahabzada, called everyone who appeared a little dense to him a Kaddu. A very distant derivation that, because when the Sahabzada spoke he spoke mostly in English, except when talking to JCOs and J

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wans. When I told Muzaffar that Cabbage would be the more appropriate word, he insisted on calling me a Kaddu.

The trouble with the Sahabzada, among other troubles, is that he speaks English. In the Pakistan of our day that language evokes either stupefaction or contempt, or both. You then have the sorry spectacle of a versatile linguist not being understood, or being misunderstood, even in the language that we commonly speak. Talking in French, Russian or German would not help. Were the Sahabzada to speak in Urdu, which he infrequently does, I know of many who would be mystified to hear the language as it was originally spoken in homes where language mattered. English or Urdu, the trouble is not with the language or the Sahabzada, but the sorry pass to which linguistic competence has come in a land which has given up on thinking. It had to be so, because the two are inseparably interlinked: no thought, no language; no language, no thought. Each stunting the other, we remain stunted in both. Urdu has the advantage, particularly in its vulgar form, of striking a chord with the common crowd and even the intelligentsia in our land. So, why wont the Sahabzada switch to Urdu? I suspect he finds English the more appropriate medium of communication, for both perception and expression, when the ideas to be communicated are subtle, lofty or deep, scientific or cold, not too warm or elusive, very far or just too close. The Sahabzada knows we can be very warm and very elusive in Urdu, and he will go with us to a Mushaira any day, but that is about all. When the rational intellect is in operation, the Sahabzada sticks to English. It helps him to be precise, clear, disciplined, intense in his focus on an idea, clinical in its exposition. This hankering after precision, clarity and discipline makes the Sahabzada so difficult to swallow. We like it woolly and warm, he likes it cold and straight. No snuggling with the Sahabzada, when the rational intellect is in operation! The trouble is it is so often, so long, so intensely in operation.

The Sahabzada runs the risk of being dubbed as another intellectual in a land where so few think. We forget that as rational animals we are all expected to think, an activity not as uncommon as it has become. What distinguishes the Sahabzada, however, from the rest of us who also think is his exaltation of the rational intellect to a point where it becomes the supreme controlling authority in the mental make-up of a man. It leads to what George Santayana called “the life reason”. The Sahabzada is not the only one in this category of men, not even in Pakistan. Unlike Zia-ul-Haq, he has seldom found it possible to act contrary to reason. The less said about Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto the better, his many intellectual accomplishments notwithstanding. What makes the Sahabzada a true representative of “the life of reason” is a decent blend of rational activity and a solid moral purpose which is universal in its content. Whether he learnt this “in the sand-pile at Sunday school” I do not know but this is how David Fulghum sums it up (All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten, Random House (Ballantine Books), New York):-

Except for warm cookies and a nap every afternoon, the Sahabzada I have known seldom faltered in his observance of these basic rules. Look at our men at the top. With very few exceptions, they have shared nothing, seldom played fair, hit people all over the place. They have seldom put things back where they found them, never cleaned up their own mess. They have taken, shamelessly and voraciously, things that were never theirs. They did not even wash their hands before they ate what their hands never earned. They have never been good at flushing, either their own potty or that of previous governments. They have slept not just of an afternoon but at a stretch for fifty years. I do not have to go on and you do not have to be a research scholar to confirm the veracity of what I have said.

The Sahabzada has always been a stickler for punctuality: unlike Zia-ul-Haq who was always running late, unlike Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who thought it was his privilege to keep others waiting. When the Sahabzada called you at 10. O’clock, he meant 10 O’clock, period. If you came a minute too early, you ran the risk of catching him with his pants down. If you came a minute late, you found him waiting for you staring at the clock. The Sahabzada never kept anyone waiting. It was the same with the submission of returns to a higher authority, replying to a letter regardless of whom it came from, appearing at a conference, a lecture or a dinner, calling on a friend or catching him on a stroll at the appointed time and place. The Sahabzada never kept anyone waiting.

The Sahabzada has always been fussy, even fastidious, in matters of personal cleanliness and dress. I have seen him wash his hands more often than he needed to, change his dress like an actor for every new scene. He has always been correctly dressed, often exasperatingly so, with an eye for sartorial elegance too exalted for me to comprehend. Sometimes I have been amused, but I always took care to conceal my amusement. Better though than Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tearing his shirt at a public meeting; several notches lower than Zia-ul-Haq in his simple Shalwar and Kurta half an hour before sundown and the call to prayer.

Whenever he wanted a drink other than water, the Sahabzada asked for Cidrex (apple juice, that is, for the curious among the defenders of Islam). But that was long ago, when 11 Cavalry (FF) was 11 Cavalry (FF). Now, he puts up with 7-Up. He continues to be frugal in the substance of his meals, with just a shade (or some shades) of relaxation in style. He remains a stickler for discipline, good order, decorum, decency – all those qualities of self-restraint which have been for so long part and parcel of his unwritten inner constitution. He was, unlike Zia-ul-Haq, incapable of launching a coup; unlike Benazir, incapable of screaming in revolt. He always stood in awe before the majesty of the law, howsoever dilapidated its condition of a given moment in time. Unlike Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he went by the rules and never manipulated the law. Unlike Zia-ul-Haq, he never rolled up his sleeves in support of a friend in need or in pursuit of a foe in flight. Admirable in some ways and not so admirable in some, particularly when you consider the good among your friends (the bad have no business to be within the circle) and when the foes in flight are among the supreme rascals of the time. The Sahabzada always refused to make a wider mess of things. In the process, he failed to clear the mess from before, added very little of his own and went away content with clearing his own little mess. The Sahabzada is, in my estimate, precisely the kind of man we need as a constitutional president. But we have got what we deserve: Rafiq Ahmad Tarar.

Far from the madding crowd, on top of the hill – that is where the Sahabzada deserved a habitation and a name. But it was not to be, because the crowd was just too big, the ratio of rascals to good men highly unfavourable, the proportion of Muslims to the peddlers of Islam fatally adverse. It could not have become the acropolis, it would have remained the Aiwan-e-Sadar. I suspect the Sahabzada is glad he never got there, the triumph of reason over blind enterprise: better the Foreign Minister that he was, not the silly and sorry president that he might have become. The Sahabzada is no angel, but he instinctively withdrew from where even angels fear to tread. Not so with Zia-ul-Haq, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir, Nawaz Sharif. They raced in with Iblis for company and Iblis rejoiced when his minions gave even Zia-ul-Haq the slip.

Much as I know the construction of the Sahabzada’s mind and much as I have observed him over the years, there is one area that remains totally dark. I know nothing about the emotional life of the man and it is dangerous to speculate without a minimal level of observation and immediate knowledge. Mediate inference, Sir Francis Bacon observed, without an adequate base of empirical data, is an unwarranted enterprise. I shall not speculate. I shall only observe that the Sahabzada was an intensely private man, discreet, wanted no stranger in his bedroom, not even to gaze on a Renoir. The Begum remained inscrutable, her talk giving me no clue to the structure of either her mind or her experience. One of their boys took some lessons from me in English composition, but he went out as breezily as he came in, with God knows what on his mind.

I know the Sahabzada was well-versed in human psychology and had a profound interest in mysticism, from Zen to Talmudic to Theravadan, Christian and Islamic. Where he went from there I do not know and I never asked. Unknown are the ways of the spirit, even to the man lying awake in the dark.

On a more mundane level, I do not know whether the Sahabzada picked up the baby and allowed it to wet his three-piece suit from Saville Row. Once again, I do not know. What I do know is I never saw the Sahabzada even in a night gown, let alone anything more brief. Very different from my father, who could talk to a university professor or the janitor, clad in whatever he was in: a Sherwani or just a lungi (no ganji, no sandals). Like the Sahabzada, he kept no one waiting. But he was no Sahabzada.

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Part IV: Epilogue

Contrary to common practice, I am not going to show this manuscript to the Sahabzada. He will read it after it has been published, as I hope he will. This will assure me and all who read it that this assessment is mine, not a doctored one nor a command performance. Whether I am right or wrong does not bother me, because I have been genuine, hopefully not dumb, hopefully also clear and forthright. I do not have to talk to the Sahabzada any more, I do not have to “interview” him as they say. I have talked to him often and long enough, from 1953 to 1998.

Talking to other people is another matter, for a clearer perception of one’s own perceptions. The procedure is valid so long as there is no preconceived purpose, no desire to arrive at modifications one way or the other except in stringent pursuit of the truth. This is more difficult than we usually think, particularly when the object of our enquiry is a man or a woman, not an event or an issue. Talking about Zia-ul-Haq or the Sahabzada is a more exacting exercise than talking about the Indian Ocean and national security. It is also more interesting.

Only yesterday I was out on just such an exercise, called to lunch by my sister-in-law. Also present were her daughter and an amiable gentleman by the name of Abbas. The younger woman was not too young, an observation to assure you that she was mature. She was also good looking, well groomed, intelligent, successful, a woman on the trot in Pakistan’s rough polo-ground. I add the good looking bit, because you know how it is with women who have been denied destiny’s first compliment to womanhood. I expected her, quite rightly, to be neither bitter nor sour, objective and candid in her comments on the topic foremost on my mind these days.

Before lunch Parveen took a back-seat and I squatted on the floor next to my sister-in-law to read aloud the anecdotes of my encounter with the Sahabzada. There were peals of laughter, squeals of delight (thank God for intelligent female company) and some exclamation of wonder and disbelief. I screeched to a halt when the anecdotes were over. I had no intention of going on to my own estimate of the man. It was time for lunch, time for the younger woman to talk, time for me to listen.

She said she was drawn to the Sahabzada by tales of his intellectual eminence and cultural splendour. She said she was disappointed. She found him, in a word, shallow. As I munched my rice, which was good, I did some elaboration within myself: pompous, windy, expansive, ornate, high pressure with nothing to compress. She cited examples from lectures she had attended, conferences she had attended, board meetings where the Sahabzada spoke from his place of eminence and even Mahboob-ul-Haq listened in respectful silence. The Sahabzada never stooped to conquer; and without any desire to be conquered, she found him intolerable. She said she had never met a man who could speak so eloquently for so long, and end up saying nothing. She quoted several phrases, several turns of speech and flocks of words in flight which I readily recognized as vintage Sahabzada. She recalled a meeting on the empowerment of women at which the Sahabzada devoted the longer part of his address to the philosophy of the quintessential woman, her psyche, her soma, her needs and her aspirations in a cruelly male-dominated society. Such deprivation, said the Sahabzada, was intolerable. The younger woman at lunch found him even more so.

So, I said to myself: a man much too preoccupied with himself, with no clue as to how to tame the shrew, making much ado about nothing, prolonging the agony for others. The woman at lunch was visibly distressed. He goes round and round, she complained, round and round without a centre to his circle. My mind strayed to the whirling dervishes of Konya and Jalaluddin Rumi’s beautiful poem quoted in part by A.J. Arberry in his ‘Sufism’ (George Allen and Unwin, London). I was jolted out of my reverie when the woman at lunch suddenly stopped: “I told you, he is shallow. Thank you very much. I have to go now for a conference at 3.30 P.M.” Woman on the trot, thank you for your comments.

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So, what has gone wrong? Has my estimate of the Sahabzada been stupid or is the lady’s estimate altogether too harsh? Question not wrongly formulated, because it has led me to at least a tentative answer. The explanation may lie in the human condition of the observers, compounded by the condition of the object itself. I saw the Sahabzada when I was young and impressionable; what is more, when he was on the rise. The lady saw the Sahabzada when she herself was fully mature (over the edge from motherhood into grand-motherhood); what is more, she caught the Sahabzada on the decline. I have seen him also across a much wider range of activity. There is, of course, much more to a man than the manner of his speech. The lady’s observations are intense and acute, not wrong but limited. As for compassion, the lady may find it possible to forgive the Sahabzada say twenty years from now when she becomes, I pray, a great grandmother. It takes that long to understand why old men (and women) talk too much. The greater tragedy, as I see it, is when they become altogether silent, staring at the wall or rocking in their chair. I have never been a patient man myself, but now I tremble as I see it coming. We do not choose how long we live, God decides.

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Col (Retd) ABDUL QAYYUM