An Air Marshal remembers

Soldiering and politics are poles apart but they did find a perfect amalgam in the person of M Asghar Khan. After retiring as Pakistan's Air Force Chief, he threw himself headlong in politics in 1968 on Z A Bhutto's urging to fan the flames of the popular upsurge against President Ayub Khan. Ironically, it was Bhutto's government in which he survived three assassination attempts. Later General Zia's regime kept him in a continuous detention for 1603 days because of his refusal to cooperate with the junta.

With several books to his credit and having held important positions in public life, it is believed that all that he has penned down about Ayub, Bhutto and Zia in his latest work, "My political struggle" is on good authority.

Presently, for over a year, the legal fraternity has been struggling to establish constitutionalism in Pakistan but back in 1958, after Ayub had abrogated the 1956 constitution and was worried about the framing of a new one, it was none other than the then Chief Justice of Pakistan, who supported the dictator with these words: "This is no problem. We will draw up a constitution for you and you should, after having it published in the papers, address four public meetings... and ask them (people) whether they approved of it. The answer would definitely be in the affirmative. "Manzoor Hai," they would say and you will thus have the people's mandate" (p544). During the 1965 war with India, Ayub did not want to annoy the Americans but at the same time the country badly needed the military hardware so he sent Asghar Khan to China to seek aircraft but with standing instructions that the aircraft instead of being flown straight to Pakistan, should first be sent to Indonesia, put into crates and then shipped to Karachi. When Asghar Khan made this outlandish request, the bewildered Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai replied, "You are fighting a war, we can fly these aircraft to Peshawar or Sargodha tomorrow from Kashgar, and you want these sent by sea?" Wryly, the retired Air Marshal confides that it was Yahya Khan, who had done all the planning for Ayub's military takeover and his brother, who controlled the civil intelligence which engineered public unrest in Punjab against Ayub that eventually brought down his government (pp 12-13).