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WORK TITLE: Defeat Is an Orphan
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BIRTHDATE: 8/10/1948
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CITY: Scotland
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/defeat-is-an-orphan-9781849046411?cc=us&lang=en&#
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LC control no.: n 2009061640
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2009061640
HEADING: MacDonald, Myra
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670 __ |a Hurst Publishers website, viewed May 17, 2017 |b (Myra MacDonald; journalist and author specialising in South Asian politics and security; lives in Scotland)
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PERSONAL
Born August 10, 1948.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Reuters, foreign correspondent.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1948, Myra MacDonald is a Scottish journalist and author specializing in South Asian politics and security. For nearly three decades, she was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, stationed in both Delhi and Islamabad, and covering France, the European Union, Egypt, and India. She lives in Scotland. In 2007, MacDonald published Heights of Madness: One Woman’s Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War. Presented as a parable of India and Pakistan, the book covered the obscure Siachen war fought between India and Pakistan in the Karakoram mountains on the world’s highest battlefield.
MacDonald returned to the topic of Pakistan with her 2017 Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. Here, she covers the bitter long-lasting, post-nuclear relationship between India and Pakistan from 2001 to 2004, discussing the background of Islamist militancy in Pakistan, military confrontation, and India’s economic liberalization. Although tensions and dysfunction between the countries grew since 1947, trouble escalated with dual nuclear testing in 1998 and in 1999 with the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane by Pakistani militants. Rather than India winning the “Great South Asian War,” Pakistan’s dysfunction led it to losing the war. In Publishers Weekly, a writer commented that MacDonald’s portrayal of Pakistan “as ‘insufficiently imagined’—a state hostage to the idealizations of political leaders and defined in opposition to India—is arresting.”
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Andrew J. Nathan noted: “This is a slashing indictment of Pakistani strategy.” Nathan explained that MacDonald shows in the book how Pakistan’s obsession with India and the issue of Kashmir undermined Pakistan’s democracy and economy, led it to lose control of militant groups it had initially encouraged, and saw India exceed Pakistan in economics and international diplomacy. According to Suhasini Haidar online at the Hindu, MacDonald “has written an excellent work on the Siachen conflict (Heights of Madness) provides a well-thought out epilogue as well… McDonald is even-handed, albeit clearly more sympathetic to India’s case, which leads her to her conclusion of where ‘defeat and victory’ lie.” On the Tribune India Website, Sandeep Dikshit noted that MacDonald comes at the India/Pakistani tensions as a Western journalist, saying: “This ability to gather both versions and set them out clinically is where India and Pakistani journalists have missed out in their efforts at describing the battle in the high reaches.” Dikshit added: “Her balanced take on the nemesis of the Indian state and Afzal Guru is riveting.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Foreign Affairs, January-February 2017, Andrew J. Nathan, review of Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, p. 175.
Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2016, review of Defeat Is an Orphan, p. 47.
ONLINE
Hindu, http://www.thehindu.com/ (March 25, 2017), Suhasini Haidar, review of Defeat Is an Orphan.
Tribune India, http://www.tribuneindia.com/ (February 26, 2017), Sandeep Dikshit, review of Defeat Is an Orphan.*
Myra MacDonald is a former Reuters journalist who has reported on Pakistan and India since 2000. She is the author of “Heights of Madness”, a book on the Siachen war. Her second book, “Defeat is an Orphan, How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War”, will be published in July. She can be found on Twitter @myraemacdonald.
Cover for
Defeat is an Orphan
Defeat is an Orphan
How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
Myra MacDonald
A Hurst Publication
A full and frank history of an enduringly bitter post-nuclear relationship between India and Pakistan, covering the years 2001-2014
Set against the background of Islamist militancy in Pakistan, military confrontation in the plains and India's economic liberalization
Author was a correspondent for Reuters for nearly thirty years and was stationed in both Delhi and Islamabad
Myra MacDonald
Writer and independent analyst on South Asian security and politics
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Summary
Working on a book on how the relationship between India and Pakistan changed after their nuclear tests in 1998. Book will be published early next year.
Experience
Writer and independent analyst on South Asian security and politics
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University of Saint Andrews
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Heights of Madness
My book on the Siachen war, fought between India and Pakistan in the Karakoram mountains on the world's highest battlefield.
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Myra MacDonald
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Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the
Great South Asian War
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
Myra MacDonald. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-84904-641-1
MacDonald (Heights of Madness), a former Reuters correspondent and specialist on South Asian politics and security,
begins her account of Pakistan's decades-long slide into instability with a gripping retelling of the 1999 hijacking of
Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 by Pakistani militants. The celebratory atmosphere on board, full of "first-time flyers
anxious for their free whiskey-and-soda or beer," quickly turned into a nightmarish ordeal that brought passengers and
crew into the heart of "the spider's web"--the enemy territory of Pakistan. The hijacking serves to frame and focus
MacDonald's narrative of the ratcheting up of tensions between Pakistan and India, a process that had unfolded in fits
and starts since 1947 and accelerated after both nations conducted nuclear tests in 1998. India, MacDonald contends,
did not precisely win the "Great South Asian War"; rather, Pakistan, beset by internal rivalries and political
dysfunction, laid the seeds of its own defeat. Her image of Pakistan as "insufficiently imagined"--a state hostage to the
idealizations of political leaders and defined in opposition to India--is arresting, but the recent flare-up in hostilities
between the two South Asian giants undercuts the finality of her assertion that Pakistan was the ultimate loser in this
regional conflict. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 47. General
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Asia and Pacific
Andrew J. Nathan
Foreign Af airs.
96.1 (January-February 2017): p175.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy
BY HENRY WAI-CHUNG YEUNG. Cornell University Press, 2016, 312 pp.
The theory of the "developmental state" has shaped understandings of how the East Asian "tiger economies" flourished
from the 1960s through the 1980s. It attributed their successes to wise interventions by government technocrats. But
starting in the early 1990s, states began to be less effective and global markets started becoming more complex, forcing
East Asian companies to find ways to compete on their own. Those who succeeded linked up (or, as Yeung says,
"coupled") with ever-larger and more elaborate global supply chains in one of three ways. Some provided cutting-edge
design and manufacturing services to leading brands (as Taiwan's Foxconn did for Apple). Others, including big
shipbuilding firms in South Korea and Singapore, learned to specialize. And still others broke out as global brand
names, such as Acer in Taiwan and Samsung, LG, and Hyundai in South Korea. This is a fascinating and richly
informative contribution to the field of business history and to the study of the political economy of advanced industrial
development.
Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence
BY SHEENA CHESTNUT GREITENS. Cambridge University Press, 2016, 240 pp.
The "third wave" of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s was followed by what some have called "the authoritarian
resurgence," leading scholars to renew their attention to the workings of repressive regimes. But few have studied one
of the most important institutions in any authoritarian system: the political police. Greitens' original and wellresearched
analysis uses case studies--Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, the Philippines under
Ferdinand Marcos, and South Korea under Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan--to explore the different ways that
dictators organize this coercive apparatus. She finds that they tend to fragment it into multiple competing organizations
when they want to guard against coups, but they integrate and streamline it when they are worried about popular
resistance. She also finds that better-organized and more penetrative coercive systems tend to use less violence than
fragmented ones, since they do a better job of spying on citizens and deterring dissent.
Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots ofMilitarism, 1866-1945
BY CARTER J. ECKERT. Harvard University Press, 2016, 512 pp.
This pathbreaking book contributes to both modern Korean history and Japanese colonial history by exploring the
instruction that Park Chung-hee (who went on to lead South Korea from 1961 to 1979) and others of his generation
received when they were officer trainees in the Japanese colonial army in the 1940s. The selective and demanding
Manchurian Military Academy and Japanese Military Academy instilled in their cadets a firm belief in willpower,
discipline, total mobilization, and risk taking. Park displayed these characteristics in spearheading South Korea's
explosive industrial development while also ruling as a ruthless dictator. The book is not a biography, but it uses Park's
early career as a window onto Japanese militarism, which shaped the ethos of the men who later guided the first
decades of an independent South Korea.
Philippine Politics: Possibilities and Problems in a Localist Democracy
BY LYNN T. WHITE III. Routledge, 2015, 280 pp.
The Philippines is a large country (its population exceeds 100 million) divided into many small parts (over 7,000
islands and 42,000 administrative villages), which are often further split into clans controlled by rival oligarchs--and
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then fractured yet again by feuds within those clans. Although the country's national institutions are strong on paper,
White finds that the local trumps the national, as clientelism and violence work their way up to the very top of the
system. Money, undue influence, and violence permeate the executive branch, Congress, and the judicial system,
leading to stagnation and polarization in the country's economy and politics. An active civil society and occasional
eruptions of "people power" have done little to change the Philippine way of politics. White's analysis of these
problems is comprehensive. Writing before the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency last year, White correctly
predicted that the modest reforms introduced by the previous president, Benigno Aquino III, were unlikely to last.
Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
BY MYRA MACDONALD. Oxford University Press, 2017,320 pp.
The Philippines is a large country (its population exceeds 100 million) divided into many small parts (over 7,000
islands and 42,000 administrative villages), which are often further split into clans controlled by rival oligarchs--and
then fractured yet again by feuds within those clans. Although the country's national institutions are strong on paper,
White finds that the local trumps the national, as clientelism and violence work their way up to the very top of the
system. Money, undue influence, and violence permeate the executive branch, Congress, and the judicial system,
leading to stagnation and polarization in the country's economy and politics. An active civil society and occasional
eruptions of "people power" have done little to change the Philippine way of politics. White's analysis of these
problems is comprehensive. Writing before the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency last year, White correctly
predicted that the modest reforms introduced by the previous president, Benigno Aquino III, were unlikely to last.
Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
BY MYRA MACDONALD. Oxford University Press, 2017,320 pp.
This is a slashing indictment of Pakistani strategy by a journalist who has covered South Asia for decades. Mter
Pakistan carried out a nuclear test in 1998 in response to tests conducted by India, its intelligence and military leaders
believed that the nuclear umbrella would give them the cover to conduct a proxy war against India built around
undeclared armed operations, hijackings, terrorist incidents, and the destabilization of Afghanistan. They were right.
But MacDonald shows in dramatic detail how this obsession with India (and in particular the problem of a divided
Kashmir) undermined Pakistan's democracy and economy, how peace opportunities were lost, and how Islamabad lost
control of militant groups that it had initially fostered. Meanwhile, India has pulled ahead in the economic and
diplomatic competition between the two countries. MacDonald also criticizes U.S. policy in the region, which has tilted
toward India but not as far as she believes it should.
Migrants, Refugees, and the Stateless in South Asia
BY PARTHA S. GHOSH. SAGE, 2016, 384 pp.
The heightened global attention paid to migrants has largely bypassed South Asia, yet the problem there is as
longstanding and severe as anywhere else. In this informative survey, Ghosh estimates that there are 50 million
migrants, refugees, and stateless people in the region, among them populations transferred during wartime among
Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan; caste and religious groups fleeing persecution; and Afghans, Chinese, Nepalese,
Rohingyas, Sri Lankan Tamils, Tibetans, and others who have fled violence or repression during the past seven
decades. These population movements have added to the already daunting complexity of societies in the region,
intensifying political volatility and sharpening security issues. With the exception of Afghanistan, no South Asian
states are party to the UN Refugee Convention. Still, compared with other regions, South Asia has treated its refugees
relatively well, partly through assistance programs and partly through benign neglect. Most migrants have gotten jobs,
and many have even become citizens of their countries of refuge.
Force and Contention in Contemporary China: Memory and Resistance in the Long Shadow ofthe Catastrophic Past
BY RALPH A. THAXTON, JR. Cambridge University Press, 2016, 488 pp.
Thaxton has been visiting a cluster of villages in a poor area of rural China for decades. Here, he reports that post-Mao
reforms have only extended the official abuse that characterized life under Mao. The peasants' view of local
government is shaped by their memories of suffering during the famine of 1958-61, when local cadres forced them to
comply with disastrous policies set by Beijing. Now they see a new generation of cadres exploiting ostensible reform
policies to oppress them yet again, this time with unfair taxes, corruption, police abuse, inflated electricity prices, and
election manipulation. The villagers fight back, ineffectively, with small acts of resistance and by petitioning to higher
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levels. But the problems are so deep that Thaxton discerns a "total loss of trust" in government, which could someday
lead to armed rebellion, if the government showed signs of weakness. Whether things are this bad all over China is an
open question. But Thaxton's research casts a dark shadow over the sunny conventional wisdom about China's rural
reforms.
Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership
BY CHENG LI. Brookings Institution Press, 2016, 528 pp.
Li has produced one of the most in-depth studies of Chinese politics in recent years. Combining a comprehensive
database of information about Chinese elites with exhaustive qualitative research, he maps the groups of officials who
helped President Xi Jinping rise to power and whose careers have prospered under Xi. He identifies two main factions
that tend to compete for influence: a "populist" coalition whose leaders mostly emerged from the ranks of the Chinese
Communist Party's Youth League and an "elitist" coalition dominated by the children of high-ranking officials from
earlier eras and their allies in the business and entrepreneurial class. This is a helpful framework, but it does not always
persuasively explain recent developments in Chinese politics or lead to convincing forecasts of the future. For example,
the elitist coalition leaders Jiang Zemin and Zeng Qinghong helped pave Xi's path to power, but since then, Xi has
hardly repaid their kindness: he vilified and purged Jiang's protege General Xu Caihou and Xu's followers, which
suggests that Xi was more interested in dominating the military than in cooperating with Jiang. Li also argues that if Xi
were to establish a dictatorship without sharing power, he would risk "robust resistance" from parts of the populist
coalition. But Xi has placed trusted followers in key positions, which has presumably increased the costs and risks of
defying him. Despite these problems with Li's analysis, his book stands as a definitive study of Xi's reign to date.
VICTOR SHIH
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Nathan, Andrew J. "Asia and Pacific." Foreign Af airs, Jan.-Feb. 2017, p. 175+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477642129&it=r&asid=a12ba168f07fba44c6637c7475537b44.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477642129
REVIEWS
No winners in this battle
Suhasini Haidar MARCH 25, 2017 18:33 IST
UPDATED: MARCH 25, 2017 22:57 IST
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Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War Myra McDonald Penguin Random House ₹509
A journalist who has covered both sides of the India-Pakistan faultline explains why ties between the two are so strained
In a relationship like the one India and Pakistan have shared over the past 70 years, there are few moments for reflection, few pauses to take stock of winners and losers. Yet, it is this task journalist Myra McDonald sets for herself in the book Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. In order to do so McDonald focuses on the period since the turn of the century (1999-2015), coming to her conclusion that India has the upper hand and victory in a war that has been played with every version in the book: overt, covert, using Army regulars, and with proxies, as well as the diplomatic, economic and above all, the moral war.
The Kandahar trail
The book begins in December 1999 with the hijack of IC-814 from Kathmandu, a flight that took its 178 passengers and their nation on the worst possible nightmare ride to Kandahar. At the end of that week, India had suffered several blows, its government brought to its knees in front of the world, who agreed to release Masood Azhar, who went on to build a thriving terror empire that attacks India to this day, along with Al Umar chief Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, who directs attacks inside Jammu and Kashmir, and Sheikh Omar Ahmed Saeed, the man convicted for the killing of Daniel Pearl and who organised the funding for the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001.
While these were heavy blows, the unkindest cut was the response of the international community that watched the week’s unfolding horror without offering assistance, nor did it feel the need to hold the terrorists, their welcoming Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, that gave those terrorists a hero’s welcome back to account for it.
McDonald, who was based in India from 2000-2003, and has written an excellent work on the Siachen conflict (Heights of Madness) provides a well-thought out epilogue as well, bringing the book up to date with the impact of the ‘surgical strikes’ announced by the government after the Uri attack in 2016, and of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. As a journalist who has covered both sides of the India-Pakistan faultline, McDonald is even-handed, albeit clearly more sympathetic to India’s case, which leads her to her conclusion of where ‘defeat and victory’ lie. Lest anyone doubt her ability to turn the critical eye on India’s actions, her chapter on the flawed and unjust investigation and trials of those suspected to have conspired in the Parliament attack of 2001 is important. One is left wondering if such a shoddy process is the Indian government’s way of covering up for its own lapses, and its own poor preparation, and whether India is in denial of its vulnerability as much as Pakistan is in denial of its diabolical duplicity.
Some lapses
There are, however, lapses in McDonald’s narrative that are unfortunately common to other accounts of India-Pakistan relations, both western and Indian.
To begin with, there is the temptation to see the relations in a time prism: that begins after the nuclear tests of 1998. In the jacket-blurb of the book, it speaks of how India and Pakistan ‘restarted the clock’ after they both held nuclear tests and as a result Pakistan used ‘militant proxies’ with ‘reckless reliance’ thereafter.
The truth is Pakistan’s ‘reckless reliance’ on proxies did not begin in 1998, but all the way back in 1948, during the first Kashmir war. Later, the use of Sikh militants who hijacked planes to Lahore in the 1980s, or the D-Company that has lived in Karachi after the Mumbai blasts in 1993 were all part of a similar strategy.
Before Uri, there was Pathankot; before that there was Mumbai 26/11, the train bombings, the Parliament attack, IC-814 and so on.
Another lapse, shared with other writers on the subcontinent, is to describe the international community, and in particular the U.S., as naïve players, who mistakenly choose to pursue a South Asia policy that unwittingly allows Pakistan its terror war on India. The U.S. is neither naïve nor foolish. If it has pursued a certain course for decades, then that must be seen for what it is: a policy.
While the author painstakingly details the lead-up from the IC-814 hijack to the 9/11 attacks, she doesn’t probe why the CIA missed all the links between the Jaish-e-Mohammad and al-Qaeda and the Taliban pre-2001. Similarly, on the curious case of David Headley, now convicted in the U.S. for his role in planning the Mumbai attacks, the book fails to investigate why the U.S. government entered into a plea-bargain with him for his life without even informing Indian authorities, forcing the Indian government to do the same in 2015, or to let him travel to India in March 2009, months after the Mumbai attacks, when he was under U.S. surveillance.
In Pakistan, the U.S. has undertaken unilateral drone strikes against several terrorists suspected of harming U.S. citizens, but has never turned its gaze on Hafiz Saeed with any seriousness. Even a much touted $10million ‘bounty’ turned out to be a reward for information against Hafiz Saeed, as McDonald records, which the U.S. intelligence agencies should have in plenty.
Indeed, if Pakistan has ‘lost’ this war for parity with India through ‘a thousand cuts’, there seems little evidence of introspection within. While defeat might mean the notional loss of U.S. trust, Pakistan will always be an important interlocutor for the U.S. when it comes to Afghanistan.
The diplomatic isolation of Pakistan that McDonald describes is only one part of the story. The other part is Pakistan’s link-role in China’s OBOR (One Belt One Road) plans, that is bringing even Russia into a closer embrace. For all its self-defeating tendencies, Pakistan is an orphan with a lot of backers. For India, faced with more important wars with poverty, illiteracy, water shortages and other, there are no winners in this battle for South Asia.
Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War; Myra McDonald, Penguin Random House, ₹509.
CAPSULE REVIEW January/February 2017 Issue Pakistan
Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
by Myra Macdonald
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan
This is a slashing indictment of Pakistani strategy by a journalist who has covered South Asia for decades. After Pakistan carried out a nuclear test in 1998 in response to tests conducted by India, its intelligence and military leaders believed that the nuclear umbrella would give them the cover to conduct a proxy war against India built around undeclared armed operations, hijackings, terrorist incidents, and the destabilization of Afghanistan. They were right. But MacDonald shows in dramatic detail how this obsession with India (and in particular the problem of a divided Kashmir) undermined Pakistan’s democracy and economy, how peace opportunities were lost, and how Islamabad lost control of militant groups that it had initially fostered. Meanwhile, India has pulled ahead in the economic and diplomatic competition between the two countries. MacDonald also criticizes U.S. policy in the region, which has tilted toward India but not as far as she believes it should.
Book Review
Review: Defeat Is an Orphan
Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War by Myra MacDonald (Oxford University Press, $34.95 hardcover, 320p., 9781849046411, January 1, 2017)
In Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, Myra MacDonald quickly covers the milestones of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, fought on and off since 1947, without lingering on episodes that have already been written about at length. (Readers curious about the conflict's inception would be advised to take a look at Nisid Hajari's Midnight's Furies for more information on the subject.) Instead, MacDonald focuses on the period from 1998--when India and Pakistan held nuclear tests--to the present day, putting an emphasis on the strategic missteps that allowed India to overtake Pakistan in the two countries' long, bitter rivalry.
Nuclear tests in 1998 were an ecstatic moment for Pakistan, promising strategic parity for the first time with its much larger neighbor. Emboldened by its newfound nuclear umbrella, however, Pakistan increased its sponsorship of militant groups, a policy that would eventually alienate the international community and undermine the country's domestic security. Pakistan had embraced proxy war as a viable strategy for decades in fighting India over the disputed border territories Jammu and Kashmir, and in fighting the Soviet Union and the Indian-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The United States, not yet grasping the threat of international terrorism, supported Pakistan as a valuable Cold War ally.
Over time, though, the Islamist groups that Pakistan encouraged became a dangerous liability. Furthermore, Pakistan's militarized society proved self-reinforcing, impeding the peace process with India and prompting destabilizing military coups. Indian interests, on the other hand, lay in improving relations with the international community (including a much warmer relationship with the U.S.) and in growing its economy. To some degree, MacDonald explains, the rivalry became one-sided: "India had no need to win a war against Pakistan--Pakistan was doing enough damage to itself to lose the competition with its bigger neighbour it had once hoped to win."
Defeat Is an Orphan has lessons for American readers. The U.S.'s various alliances with Pakistan come across as devil's bargains. The militant Islamist groups that both countries aided in fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan would mutate into terrorist threats. The U.S. leaned heavily on Pakistan's support for its own invasion of Afghanistan, turning a blind eye to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence's continued training and support for groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the horrific 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
MacDonald's history is primarily a work of argumentation, but it is supported by vivid, terrifying accounts of attacks carried out by Pakistan's proxies, including the 2001 attack on India's Parliament, the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 and the brutal internal actions of the Pakistani Taliban that led to deadly attacks on girls' schools and the shooting of Malala Yousafzai. According to MacDonald, Pakistan's ideological blindness and short-sighted strategies led to it "fighting a war it did not itself understand" and helping to inflict the current scourge of Islamist terrorism on the wider world and on itself. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books
Shelf Talker: Myra MacDonald's Defeat Is an Orphan argues that Pakistan has lost its decades-long rivalry with India thanks in large part to its shortsighted embrace of militant Islamist groups.
Posted at: Feb 26, 2017, 1:12 AM; last updated: Feb 26, 2017, 1:12 AM (IST)
BOOK REVIEW: DEFEAT IS AN ORPHAN: HOW PAKISTAN LOST THE GREAT SOUTH ASIAN WAR BY MYRA MACDONALD.
War half-fought, book half-written
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what the eye missed: MacDonald’s description of the Agra Summit and the situation after Al Qaeda’s attack on World Trade Centre brings in details that have escaped many a retelling
Sandeep Dikshit
The enduring hostility between India and Pakistan as well as the unabated and deep interest of the West in Pakistan continues to spawn tomes by the dozen every year. Each book purports to be different from the other. And they do diverge at points, because the authors come from different walks of life.
This one too has a different flavour because Myra MacDonald has a rare advantage. As she is from the West, MacDonald had the advantage of spending years on both sides of the divide unlike the hurried and chaperoned trips by the Indians and Pakistanis. Add to it her experience with an international wire agency, and her two books (the first one on the Siachen dispute, Heights of Madness) provide a detailing that only a journalist with the instincts of a foot soldier can provide.
Defeat is an Orphan opens with the same incredible goosebumps-generating details about the 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC-814 as her account of Param Vir Chakra awardee Bana Singh’s assault on Qaid post in Siberian conditions. It continues with an evenhanded view of the Kargil conflict, a brilliant tactical operation by the Pakistani army that rapidly degenerated into a strategic disaster and was finally mediated by the White House. This ability to gather both versions and set them out clinically is where India and Pakistani journalists have missed out in their efforts at describing the battle in the high reaches.
Like the Kargil conflict, MacDonald’s description of the subsequent Agra Summit and the situation after the Al Qaeda’s plane-missiles on the US travels far and wide, bringing in details that have escaped many a retelling — last-man-standing against the Taliban, Ahmad Shah Masoud’s, warning to the Europeans before he was felled by a rocket launcher concealed in a TV camera.
But MacDonald’s social circle of the same lot of liberal, elitist, mutual backslapping crowd of journalists at times tends to diminish her work. To suggest that the Americans were guiding the peace process with Pakistan, she relies on the usual suspects who have set the tone and tenor of the perception about both countries. Their musings have shown them to nurture an unchanging worldview, either due to deep ties with security agencies since the days of the Punjab insurgency or with Washington.
This makes it inevitable for contradictions to appear. If the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar was an ISI operation and the fourth attempt to spring Masood Azhar out of Indian custody, then how does she conclude that two years later (page 130), Jaish had developed the tendency to go its own way? If Jaish had this tendency, why did the ISI go to such trouble to hijack the plane?
At the same time, she resists the lure, to which every Indian author succumbs, to provide a one-sided narrative. Her balanced take on the nemesis of the Indian state and Afzal Guru is riveting. The erudite Guru’s frequent and inhuman roughing up by the security forces, although part of the fate suffered by over-ground militants and criminals in any thana of the subcontinent, should give a good idea that security minders, whether on this side of the border or the other, are cut from the same cloth.
As the book ploughs through the political fabric of the Pakistani state, it also provides a glimpse into the reasons for the ability of its army and militant organisations to regain public sympathy after every wrong tactical call that has cost the citizens heavily. This is because there is no civilian national institution with the manpower, energy and organisational skills like the army and to a lesser extent Hafiz Saeed & Co. in reaching out to those affected by national calamities like floods and earth quakes.
Every detail about the Mumbai attacks of 2008 has been wrung out earlier and so there is a feeling of having read all of it before. But the book springs back to capture mind space with a telling of Pakistan’s relationship with its North-West, captured by a single sentence — its understanding was inherited from the British (and stays that way). But it falls back on her old trusted friends for an account of the ‘surgical attacks’ and ends as tamely as the German Hein Kiessling’s recent account of the ISI. This is not because of any failing by the two but because the subcontinent’s account is always a developing story. The most recent parts are always going to be missed out. Which is why Pakistan may not have lost the great South Asian War, as suggested by MacDonald.
Myra MacDonald’s Defeat is an orphan
In a concerted effort to define the term ‘Great South Asian War’, MacDonald ends up with disclosing at least five instances when RAW failed to forestall the next ominous event for India since its formation in 1968
14-Feb-17 by Dr Qaisar Rashid
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Myra MacDonald’s Defeat is an orphan
The learning curve of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), is faulty. This is the central idea of Myra MacDonald’s book, “Defeat is an orphan: How Pakistan lost the Great South Asian War,” published by Penguin Random House India in 2017. MacDonald is a journalist who specialises in South Asian politics and has worked for Reuters for nearly thirty years. She lives in Scotland. This opinion piece intends to discuss MacDonald’s certain ideas expressed in the book.
In a concerted effort to define the term ‘Great South Asian War’ – the meaning of which is still obscure despite reiterating the term nine times in the book — MacDonald ends up with disclosingat least five instances when the RAW, besides the Intelligence Bureau, failed to forestall the next ominous event for India since its formation in 1968.
Regarding the first instance, MacDonald writes on page 158: “When Pakistan tried to trigger a revolt in the (Kashmir) Valley in 1965 by infiltrating its own men, it was unable to drum up enough local support and failed...To assert its authority on its side, India made a succession of deal with Sheikh Abdullah, and later with his son Farooq Abdullah, giving power to their National Conference party in exchange for cooperation with Delhi. Kashmir became ‘a constituent unit of the Union of India’ and the autonomy promised by Article 370 (of the Indian Constitution in 1952) was gradually watered down. The National Conference came to be seen as Delhi’s representative in Kashmir rather than Kashmir’s representative in Delhi. Then when an alliance of secular and Islamist parties banded together in the Muslim United Front (MUF) to challenge the party in 1987 state elections, the polls were widely seen as rigged in favour of the National Conference. After that, rumbling discontent slowly gathered steam until it became a full-blown separatist revolt (by 1989). With no hope of having their grievances addressed through the democratic process, young men crossed the LoC to seek military training from Pakistan.” This self-explanatory para accentuates the failure of the RAW in advising the Indian government against the rigging of Kashmir elections that prompted an uprising against India owing to reasons local to Indian-held Kashmir but with the potential for influencing Pakistan. The Kashmir insurgency is still extant and has drawn in India’s half army and Pakistan’s attention.
Regarding the second instance, MacDonald writes on page 36: “In 1983, Pakistan carried out a ‘cold test’ – exploding a nuclear-capable weapon without the fissionable core. It followed up with about two dozen cold tests over a number of years. By 1986 or 1987, Pakistan is believed to have weaponised its nuclear programme.” Here, MacDonald says that, despite all clear indicators, the RAW not only failed to assess Pakistan’s having a credible nuclear weapon but it also failed to predict Pakistan’s next move in case India tested its nuclear device. The incapacity of the RAW cost India profoundly, as by testing nuclear weapons on May 11, 1998, India offered a valid opportunity to Pakistan to test its nuclear weapons and claim strategic parity, which Pakistan had lacked against India since 1947. Pakistan did avail itself the opportunity successfully. On page 29, MacDonald writes: “(T)he Pakistani (nuclear tests on May 28, 1998) effectively countered Indian doubts about Pakistan’s nuclear capability and by restoring the strategic balance between the two countries...” These mistakes on the part of the RAW not only made India lose its nuclear edge (obtained through a nuclear test on May 18, 1974) over Pakistan, but these mistakes also allowed Pakistan to equipoise strategically the oversized military of India. Consequently, India had to forsake the Sunderjee doctrine (1981-2004).
Regarding the third instance, MacDonald writes on page 60: “Pakistan had started this (Kargil war (in 1999) and in crossing the LoC (Line of Control) breached its international agreements. Whatever mitigation Pakistan might claim — India had, after all, started the Siachen war in 1984 — was lost in the noise.” Further, on page 55, MacDonald writes: “India was simply too complacent. Poor intelligence and its expectation of peace after the nuclear tests had lulled it into a false sense of security.” Taken both these statements together, MacDonald is saying that after the Indian army had captured Siachen, the RAW failed to help the armyforesee Kargil coming. Similarly, MacDonald writes on page 60: “(I)n Kargil, Pakistan had longer supply lines across more challenging terrain than India, which had access to the Srinagar-Leh road. Without fresh ammunition and supplies of food, the Pakistani troops would not be able to hold indefinitely.” Here, MacDonald is saying that the difference between Siachen and Kargil was that, in Siachen, India captured the height first and then defended it with the help of its full army and equipment; in Kargil, Pakistan captured the height first but did not defend it with the help of its full army and equipment. If Pakistan had also done that, a new Siachen would have embodied in Kargil. In fact, the lop-sided nature of the conflictin Kargil made the Pakistan army withdraw — live to fight another day.
Regarding the fourth instance, MacDonald writes on page 18: “After two attempts to free (Masood) Azhar (who was arrested in Kashmir in February 1994) — the kidnapping of westerners in Delhi and Kashmir (in October 1994 and July 1995 respectively) — failed ... In June 1999, another (third) attempt was made to free him by digging a tunnel into the high-security jail where he was held.” By this time, it became known that the companions of Azhar were making attempts to get him released. However, after these three futile attempts, Azhar’s companions made a successful fourth attempt by hijacking Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 en route from Kathmandu (Nepal) to Delhi (India) in December 1999 and got him released. By inference, if the fourth attempt had also met failure, there might have been the fifth one and so on. MacDonald shows that the RAW not only failed to study the rescueattempt pattern but it also failed to predict the next move of Azhar’s companions.
Regarding the fifth instance, MacDonald writes on page 121: “(Atal Bihari) Vajpayee had already warned the United States that India’s patience was running out after the October 1 (2001) attack on the state parliament in Srinagar. On December 13 (2001), it snapped. ‘This was not just an attack on the building (of Indian parliament), it was a warning to the entire nation’...” Here, MacDonald says that the RAW failed to help India foresee a militant attack on Indian parliament coming from disgruntled Kashmiri elements after they attacked Kashmir’s parliament.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com
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How Pakistan lost the Great South Asian War
DR QAISAR RASHID• FEB 25, 2017 • 1183
“Defeat is an orphan: How Pakistan lost the Great South Asian War” Author: Myra MacDonald Published by Penguin Random House India, 2017
Myra MacDonald is a journalist who specialises in South Asian politics and has worked for Reuters for nearly thirty years. She lives in Scotland. This opinion piece intends to discuss MacDonald’s certain ideas expressed in the book.
IN a concerted effort to define the term ‘Great South Asian War’ – the meaning of which is still obscure despite reiterating the term nine times in the book — MacDonald ends up with disclosing at least five instances when the RAW, besides the Intelligence Bureau, failed to forestall the next ominous event for India since its formation in 1968.
Regarding the first instance, MacDonald writes on page 158: “When Pakistan tried to trigger a revolt in the (Kashmir) Valley in 1965 by infiltrating its own men, it was unable to drum up enough local support and failed...To assert its authority on its side, India made a succession of deal with Sheikh Abdullah, and later with his son Farooq Abdullah, giving power to their National Conference party in exchange for cooperation with Delhi. Kashmir became ‘a constituent unit of the Union of India’ and the autonomy promised by Article 370 (of the Indian Constitution in 1952) was gradually watered down. The National Conference came to be seen as Delhi’s representative in Kashmir rather than Kashmir’s representative in Delhi. Then when an alliance of secular and Islamist parties banded together in the Muslim United Front (MUF) to challenge the party in 1987 state elections, the polls were widely seen as rigged in favour of the National Conference. After that, rumbling discontent slowly gathered steam until it became a full-blown separatist revolt (by 1989). With no hope of having their grievances addressed through the democratic process, young men crossed the LoC to seek military training from Pakistan.” This self-explanatory para accentuates the failure of the RAW in advising the Indian government against the rigging of Kashmir elections that prompted an uprising against India owing to reasons local to Indian-held Kashmir but with the potential for influencing Pakistan. The Kashmir insurgency is still extant and has drawn in India’s half army and Pakistan’s attention.
Regarding the second instance, MacDonald writes on page 36: “In 1983, Pakistan carried out a ‘cold test’ – exploding a nuclear-capable weapon without the fissionable core. It followed up with about two dozen cold tests over a number of years. By 1986 or 1987, Pakistan is believed to have weaponised its nuclear programme.” Here, MacDonald says that, despite all clear indicators, the RAW not only failed to assess Pakistan’s having a credible nuclear weapon but it also failed to predict Pakistan’s next move in case India tested its nuclear device. The incapacity of the RAW cost India profoundly, as by testing nuclear weapons on May 11, 1998, India offered a valid opportunity to Pakistan to test its nuclear weapons and claim strategic parity, which Pakistan had lacked against India since 1947. Pakistan did avail itself the opportunity successfully. On page 29, MacDonald writes: “(T)he Pakistani (nuclear tests on May 28, 1998) effectively countered Indian doubts about Pakistan’s nuclear capability and by restoring the strategic balance between the two countries...” These mistakes on the part of the RAW not only made India lose its nuclear edge (obtained through a nuclear test on May 18, 1974) over Pakistan, but these mistakes also allowed Pakistan to equipoise strategically the oversized military of India. Consequently, India had to forsake the Sunderjee doctrine (1981-2004).
MacDonald writes on page 60: “Pakistan had started this (Kargil war (in 1999) and in crossing the LoC (Line of Control) breached its international agreements. Whatever mitigation Pakistan might claim — India had, after all, started the Siachen war in 1984 — was lost in the noise.”
Regarding the third instance, MacDonald writes on page 60: “Pakistan had started this (Kargil war (in 1999) and in crossing the LoC (Line of Control) breached its international agreements. Whatever mitigation Pakistan might claim — India had, after all, started the Siachen war in 1984 — was lost in the noise.” Further, on page 55, MacDonald writes: “India was simply too complacent. Poor intelligence and its expectation of peace after the nuclear tests had lulled it into a false sense of security.” Taken both these statements together, MacDonald is saying that after the Indian army had captured Siachen, the RAW failed to help the armyforesee Kargil coming. Similarly, MacDonald writes on page 60: “(I)n Kargil, Pakistan had longer supply lines across more challenging terrain than India, which had access to the Srinagar-Leh road. Without fresh ammunition and supplies of food, the Pakistani troops would not be able to hold indefinitely.” Here, MacDonald is saying that the difference between Siachen and Kargil was that, in Siachen, India captured the height first and then defended it with the help of its full army and equipment; in Kargil, Pakistan captured the height first but did not defend it with the help of its full army and equipment. If Pakistan had also done that, a new Siachen would have embodied in Kargil. In fact, the lop-sided nature of the conflictin Kargil made the Pakistan army withdraw — live to fight another day.
Regarding the fourth instance, MacDonald writes on page 18: “After two attempts to free (Masood) Azhar (who was arrested in Kashmir in February 1994) — the kidnapping of westerners in Delhi and Kashmir (in October 1994 and July 1995 respectively) — failed ... In June 1999, another (third) attempt was made to free him by digging a tunnel into the high-security jail where he was held.” By this time, it became known that the companions of Azhar were making attempts to get him released. However, after these three futile attempts, Azhar’s companions made a successful fourth attempt by hijacking Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 en route from Kathmandu (Nepal) to Delhi (India) in December 1999 and got him released. By inference, if the fourth attempt had also met failure, there might have been the fifth one and so on. MacDonald shows that the RAW not only failed to study the rescueattempt pattern but it also failed to predict the next move of Azhar’s companions.
Regarding the fifth instance, MacDonald writes on page 121: “(Atal Bihari) Vajpayee had already warned the United States that India’s patience was running out after the October 1 (2001) attack on the state parliament in Srinagar. On December 13 (2001), it snapped. ‘This was not just an attack on the building (of Indian parliament), it was a warning to the entire nation’...” Here, MacDonald says that the RAW failed to help India foresee a militant attack on Indian parliament coming from disgruntled Kashmiri elements after they attacked Kashmir’s parliament.
The Article First Appeared In Daily Times
A very, very cold war
Nature never declares a ceasefire on soldiers — Pakistani or Indian — in Siachen...Gillian Wright reviews Myra MacDonald's Heights of Madness.
INDIA Updated: Dec 10, 2007 16:49 IST
Gillian Wright
Gillian Wright
None
Book:Heights of Madness
Author: Myra MacDonald
Publishing house: Rupa
Price: Rs 395/-
Pages: 242
This is the first book on Siachen by a journalist who has been to both the Indian and the Pakistan-controlled sides of the highest battlefield on Earth. On both sides, troops live in isolated outposts where their common enemy is the thin air and the extreme cold. Myra MacDonald, formerly Reuters chief in New Delhi, sees no point in the conflict that costs India alone Rs 3 crore a day and where most casualties are due to the weather.
But in the main she does not editorialise. In simple, straightforward and highly readable prose, she lets the actors in this extraordinary story speak for themselves.
Siachen means ‘the place of roses’, after the wild Sia roses that grow below the snout of the glacier. This magnificent and terrible terrain was hardly known before Independence. At the meeting in Karachi in 1949 to draw up a ceasefire line between Indian and Pakistani forces, its status was left undefined. No one imagined that it could ever be a flashpoint.
Then, in the 1970s, the Pakistanis began what an Indian brigadier called "cartographic aggression" — they started allowing foreign climbers to explore the mountains in the area. India and Pakistan both began patrolling and suspecting one another of intending to occupy the glacier and the neighbouring Saltoro range. MacDonald manages to track down Stobdan Kalon, the Sherpa on India’s first expedition to Siachen in 1978. That expedition scaled not only the glacier but also the 24,631 feet Teram Kangri peak without the benefit of modern equipment.
The Siachen conflict began in 1984, the same year as Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh riots and the Bhopal Gas disaster. Ladakhi scouts and men of the 4th battalion of the Kumaon Regiment occupied a pass above Siachen in the blizzards of April, a month before the Pakistanis believed any movement was possible. According to MacDonald, the aim of India’s Operation Meghdoot was to put on a show of force, stake a claim to Siachen and withdraw before the winter.
To the Pakistanis, such an umambitious plan was inconceivable. Convinced that India must be aiming at something bigger, they reacted and the conflict escalated.
On her visits to Siachen, MacDonald finds that the altitude makes her unable to think or to take coherent notes. She rashly urges helicopter pilots to fly on even in dangerous weather. Perhaps the effect of altitude is one of the reasons she finds that even Indian soldiers’ memories of the same events differ while Pakistani and Indian accounts of the same battles are irreconcilable. Wisely, MacDonald does not even attempt to reconcile them. Each individual is given his say.
Through interviews she builds up a detailed picture of the lives of the jawans during the tours of duty on Siachen, which leave them emaciated, sun-blackened and often frostbitten or psychologically disturbed. Siachen makes you believe in ghosts and men leave out an empty bed for any visiting spirits of soldiers who have died there. She devotes a whole chapter to Bana Singh, who won India’s highest bravery award for an audacious attack on a Pakistani outpost at 21,000 feet in 1987. At that height, rifles jammed and he used a bayonet and grenades to overcome the enemy.
On both India and Pakistan sides, she finds a similar regimental spirit and a similar commitment to keep every inch of territory. However, the Pakistan army to her seems much richer, its standards of living in the conflict zone higher. Its PR machine bombarded her with information, using power point presentations and scale models that showed the entire region as ‘Siachen’ and made the frontline seem much longer than it did in India.
MacDonald was able to visit Siachen when there was a ceasefire in place. But nature, she reminds us, has declared no such ceasefire. She clearly believes that peace initiatives need to allow troops down once and for all from those heights of madness.
Gillian Wright is a writer and translator based in New Delhi