Yahya Khan

General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan Qizilbash, H.Pk, HJ, S.Pk, psc (Urdu: آغا محمد یحیی خان; February 4, 1917 – August 10, 1980) was the third President of Pakistan from 1969 to 1971, following the resignation of Ayub Khan. He had one son, Ali Yahya and one daughter, Yasmeen Khan.[1]

Early life

Yahya Khan was born in Chakwal, Punjab, Pakistan,[2][3] in 1917 and traces his ancestry to Persia by way of antiquarian knowledge.[2] His Shia family descended from the elite soldier (Qizilbash) class of Nader Shah, the Persian ruler who invaded North and North-Western India in the 18th century.[4] However, according to a number of sources, including Time magazine, Yahya Khan was an ethnic Pashtun (Pathan).[5][6]
Four Pashtuns have accupied the important senior army post of Chief of Staff since 1958 — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan...[7]
—Mehtab Ali Shah
Few Pakistanis knew anything about Yahya Khan when he was vaulted into the presidency two years ago. The stocky, bushy-browed Pathan had been army chief of staff since 1966.[8]
—Time Magazine
[edit]Army career

Yahya Khan, H.Pk, HJ, S.Pk, psc joined the British Army, and served in World War II as an officer in the 4th Infantry Division (India). He served in Iraq, Italy, and North Africa.
Yahya Khan was commissioned from Indian Military Academy Dehra Dun on 15 July 1939. An infantry officer from the 4/10 Baluch Regiment, Yahya saw action during World War II in North Africa where he was captured by the Axis Forces in June 1942 and interned in a prisoner of war camp in Italy from where he escaped in the third attempt.
[edit]Career before becoming commander-in-chief
In 1947 he was instrumental in not letting the Indian officers shift books from the famous library of the British Indian Staff College at Quetta, where Yahya was posted as the only Muslim instructor at the time of partition of India.[9]
Yahya became a brigadier at the age of 34 and commanded the 105 Independent Brigade, which was deployed on the ceasefire line in Kashmir in 1951-52. Later Yahya, as Deputy Chief of General Staff, was selected to head the army's planning board set up by Ayub to modernise the Pakistan Army in 1954-57. Yahya also performed the duties of Chief of General Staff from 1958 to 1962 from where he went on to command an infantry division from 1962 to 1965.
Upon the formation of Pakistan, Khan helped set up an officer's school in Quetta, and commanded an infantry division during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. Immediately after the 1965 war Major General Yahya Khan who had commanded the 7th Division in Operation Grand Slam was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General, appointed Deputy Army Commander in Chief and Commander in Chief designate in March 1966. At promotion, Yahya Khan superseded two of his seniors, Lt Gen Altaf Qadir and Lt Gen Bakhtiar Rana.[10]
As commander-in-chief
Yahya energetically started reorganising the Pakistan Army in 1965. The post 1965 situation saw major organisational as well as technical changes in the Pakistan Army. Till 1965 it was thought that divisions could function effectively while getting orders directly from the army's GHQ. This idea failed miserably in the 1965 war and the need to have intermediate corps headquarters in between the GHQ and the fighting combat divisions was recognised as a foremost operational necessity after the 1965 war. In 1965 war the Pakistan Army had only one corps headquarter (i.e. the 1st Corps Headquarters).
Soon after the war had started the U.S. had imposed an embargo on military aid on both India and Pakistan. This embargo did not affect the Indian Army but produced major changes in the Pakistan Army's technical composition. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk well summed it up when he said, "Well if you are going to fight, go ahead and fight, but we're not going to pay for it".[11]
Pakistan now turned to China for military aid and the Chinese tank T-59 started replacing the US M-47/48 tanks as the Pakistan Army's MBT (Main Battle Tank) from 1966. 80 tanks, the first batch of T-59s, a low-grade version of the Russian T-54/55 series were delivered to Pakistan in 1965-66. The first batch was displayed in the Joint Services Day Parade on 23 March 1966. The 1965 War had proved that Pakistan Army's tank infantry ratio was lopsided and more infantry was required. Three more infantry divisions (9, 16 and 17 Divisions) largely equipped with Chinese equipment and popularly referred to by the rank and file as "The China Divisions" were raised by the beginning of 1968. Two more corps headquarters i.e. 2nd Corps Headquarters (Jhelum-Ravi Corridor) and 4th Corps Headquarters (Ravi-Sutlej Corridor) were raised.
[edit]President of Pakistan

Ayub Khan was President of Pakistan for most of the 1960s, but by the end of the decade, popular resentment had boiled over against him. Pakistan had fallen into a state of disarray, and he handed over power to Yahya Khan, who immediately imposed martial law. Once Ayub handed over power to Yahya Khan on 25 March 1969 Yahya inherited a two-decade constitutional problem of inter-provincial ethnic rivalry between the Punjabi-Pashtun-Mohajir dominated West Pakistan province and the ethnically Bengali Muslim East Pakistan province. In addition Yahya also inherited an 11 year old problem of transforming an essentially one man ruled country to a democratic country, which was the ideological basis of the anti-Ayub movement of 1968-69. As an Army Chief Yahya had all the capabilities, qualifications and potential. But Yahya inherited an extremely complex problem and was forced to perform the multiple roles of caretaker head of the country, drafter of a provisional constitution, resolving the One Unit question, satisfying the frustrations and the sense of exploitation and discrimination successively created in the East Wing by a series of government policies since 1948. All these were complex problems and the seeds of Pakistan Army's defeat and humiliation in December 1971 lay in the fact that Yahya Khan blundered unwittingly into the thankless task of fixing the problems of Pakistan's political and administrative system which had been accumulating for 20 years and had their actual origins in the pre-1947 British policies towards the Bengali Muslims.
The American author Ziring observed that, "Yahya Khan has been widely portrayed as a ruthless uncompromising insensitive and grossly inept leader...While Yahya cannot escape responsibility for these tragic events, it is also on record that he did not act alone...All the major actors of the period were creatures of a historic legacy and a psycho-political milieu which did not lend itself to accommodation and compromise, to bargaining and a reasonable settlement. Nurtured on conspiracy theories, they were all conditioned to act in a manner that neglected agreeable solutions and promoted violent judgements".[12]
Yahya Khan attempted to solve Pakistan's constitutional and inter-provincial/regional rivalry problems once he took over power from Ayub Khan in March 1969. The tragedy of the whole affair was the fact that all actions that Yahya took, although correct in principle, were too late in timing, and served only to further intensify the political polarisation between the East and West wings.
He dissolved the one unit restoring the pre-1955 provinces of West Pakistan
Promised free direct, one man, one vote, fair elections on adult franchise, a basic human right which had been denied to the Pakistani people since the pre-independence 1946 elections by political inefficiency, double play and intrigue, by civilian governments, from 1947 to 1958 and by Ayub's one man rule from 1958 to 1969.
However dissolution of one unit did not lead to the positive results that it might have led to in case "One Unit" was dissolved earlier. Yahya also made an attempt to accommodate the East Pakistanis by abolishing the principle of parity, thereby hoping that greater share in the assembly would redress their wounded ethnic regional pride and ensure the integrity of Pakistan. Instead of satisfying the Bengalis it intensified their separatism, since they felt that the west wing had politically suppressed them since 1958. Thus the rise of anti West Wing sentiment in the East Wing.
The last days of Pakistani East Bengal

Yahya announced in his broadcast to the nation on 28 July 1969, his firm intention to redress Bengali grievances, the first major step in this direction being, the doubling of Bengali quota in the defence services.[13] Within a year he had set up a framework for elections that were held in December 1970. In East Pakistan, the Awami League (led by Mujibur Rahman) held almost all of the seats, but none in West Pakistan. In West Pakistan, the Pakistan Peoples Party (led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) won the lion's share of the seats, but none in East Pakistan. Though AL had 162 seats in the National Assembly against 88 of PPP, this led to a situation where Bhutto would have to give up power and allow Sheikh Mujib to be the Prime Minister of Pakistan. The situation also increased agitation, especially in East Pakistan as it became apparent that Sheikh Mujib was being denied of his legitimate claim to be the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Yahya Khan ordered a crack down to restore the writ of the government. Operation Searchlight began on 25 March 1971 and soon restored order. (During Operation Searchlight, Pakistani soldiers killed hundreds of Bangladeshis at night while they were asleep. The Pakistani army specifically targeted Bangladeshi students, professors, police, and Hindus. Order was not restored, as this article claims.) However, the gulf between the two wings now was too wide to be bridged. Agitation now transformed into a vicious insurgency as Bengali elements of Pakistani armed Forces and Police mutinied and fled to India from where they launched hit and run operations.
Operation Searchlight ordered by Yahya was a planned military pacification carried out by the Pakistan Army to curb the Bengali nationalist movement in erstwhile East Pakistan in March 1971[14] Ordered by the government in West Pakistan, this was seen as the sequel to Operation Blitz which had been launched in November 1970.
The original plan envisioned taking control of the major cities on 26 March 1971, and then eliminating all opposition, political or military,[15] within one month. The prolonged Bengali resistance was not anticipated by Pakistani planners.[16] The main phase of Operation Searchlight ended with the fall of the last major town in Bengali hands in mid May.
The total number of people killed in East Pakistan is not known with any degree of accuracy. Bangladeshi authorities claim that 3 million people were killed,[17] while the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, an official Pakistan Government investigation, put the figure as low as 26,000 civilian casualties.[18] The international media and reference books in English have also published figures which vary greatly from 200,000 to 2,000,000 for Bangladesh as a whole.[17] A further eight to ten million people fled the country to seek safety in India.[19]
The Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State held a two-day conference in late June 2005 on U.S. policy in South Asia between 1961 and 1972.[20] Bangladeshi speakers at the conference stated that the official Bangladeshi figure of civilian deaths was close to 300,000, which was wrongly translated from Bengali into English as three million. Ambassador Shamsher M. Chowdhury acknowledged that Bangladesh alone cannot correct this mistake and suggested Pakistan and Bangladesh should form a joint commission to investigate the 1971 disaster and prepare a report.[21] A 2008 study in the British Medical Journal concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.[22]
Khan arrested Sheikh Mujibur Rahman upon Bhutto's insistence and appointed Brigadier Rahimuddin Khan (later General) to preside over a special tribunal dealing with Mujib's case. Rahimuddin awarded Mujib the death sentence,[citation needed] and President Yahya put the verdict into abeyance. Yahya's crackdown, however, had led to a Bangladesh Liberation War within Pakistan, and eventually drew India into what would extend into the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The end result was the establishment of Bangladesh as an independent republic. Khan subsequently apologized for his mistakes and voluntarily stepped down.
The US Role
As President, Khan helped to establish the communication channel between the United States and the People's Republic of China, which would be used to set up the Nixon trip in 1972.[23]
Pakistan was perceived in the United States as an integral bulwark against Communism in the Cold War. The United States cautiously supported Pakistan during 1971.[24] India, with a heavily Socialistic economy, signed a formal alliance with the Soviet Union in August 1971. Both Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger felt that the atrocities committed by Pakistan in Bangladesh were greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Moreover, noting that India was using the violence committed by all sides during this Pakistani civil war as a pretext for a possible military intervention, they suspected that India had aggressive intentions.[25]
Kissinger would work to prevent sectarian conflicts in Yemen and Lebanon from devolving into regional wars under Presidents Nixon and Ford. With the Soviet Union already covertly engaged in neighboring Afghanistan, the Nixon administration used Pakistan to try and deter further Soviet encroachment in the region.[26] The Awami League, the dominant political force in Bangladesh, was an explicitly Socialist party aligned with Moscow.
Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.[27] His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the Soviet Union.[28] Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.[29]
Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;[30] he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch".[31] Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she "listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference" but "took up none of the points." Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon "without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible." She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was "dropped altogether."[32] On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.[33] Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it[33] because he favored a cease-fire.[34] The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from Iran, Turkey, and Jordan to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries[35] despite Congressional objections.[36] The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh.[37] Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.
The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's threat to prosecute US supported Pakistani War Criminals led the US to withhold food aid and ultimately exacerbated the famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, the United States also objected to Bangladesh's exports of jute to Cuba, another factor in withholding aid. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.[38] The US claims, Mujib's regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.[25]
Fall from Power
Later overwhelming public anger over Pakistan's defeat by Bangladesh and the division of Pakistan into two parts boiled into street demonstrations throughout Pakistan, rumours of an impending coup d'état by younger army officers against the government of President Mohammed Agha Yahya Khan swept the country. Yahya became the highest-ranking casualty of the war: to forestall further unrest, on December 20, 1971 he handed over power to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, age 43, the ambitious leader of West Pakistan's powerful People's Party.
Shortly after Yahya stepped down, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto reversed Rahimuddin Khan's verdict, released Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and saw him off to London. Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in a supreme irony, ordered the house arrest of his predecessor, Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, the man who imprisoned Mujib in the first place. Both actions produced headlines round the world.
Death

Yahya Khan died in August 1980, in Rawalpindi.
Personal life

He was known as a heavy drinker, with a preference for whiskey. Khan's close close friend and mistress during his reign was Akleem Akhtar, otherwise known as General Rani (General's Queen).[39]