Did Pakistan Misread the Tashkent Agreement as a Victory?

When the news of the Tashkent Declaration reached Pakistan on January 10, 1966, it didn’t just arrive actually it exploded across the country like a political shockwave. Streets filled with anger. Students marched in protest. People shouted that General Ayub Khan had “given away” Pakistan’s supposed military victory – traded, they believed, under Soviet pressure and Indian deceit.

On the surface, the outrage felt simple and justified. But beneath that rage lay a far more complex truth one that reveals a deep mismatch between what ordinary Pakistanis thought had happened in the 1965 war… and what had actually unfolded on the battlefield.

The short answer is ‘YES’. Pakistan’s perception of the Tashkent Agreement as a humiliating setback was largely the result of a misunderstanding carefully shaped by its own state propaganda. The longer and more revealing truth is this:

The agreement wasn’t a betrayal of a great victory.

It was a face-saving exit from a military campaign that had gone wrong from the very beginning, a war effort that failed both in planning and execution, even as the public was told a very different story.

The Operation That Started It All

Pakistan’s 1965 conflict with India didn’t open with tanks rolling across borders or a formal declaration of war. It began quietly in the mountains and valleys of Kashmir with something far more covert. This was Operation Gibraltar – a secret plan built on the belief that Kashmir was already a ticking volcano of resentment. The idea seemed bold… even brilliant… on paper.

Thousands of Pakistani soldiers would slip across the Line of Control, disguised as locals. They would blend into towns and villages, spark an uprising, and trigger what Islamabad believed was an inevitable Kashmiri revolt against Indian rule. Once chaos broke out, Pakistan expected momentum and territory to fall naturally into its hands.

The entire strategy rested on a single assumption:

That Kashmiri Muslims were oppressed, restless, and simply waiting for someone to light the fuse of rebellion.

That belief shaped every decision that followed. And yet it turned out to be disastrously wrong.

By August 1965, as Operation Gibraltar unfolded in the shadows, something Pakistan’s planners never anticipated happened… The Kashmiri population did not rise up. There was no mass revolt. No widespread rebellion. Instead, many locals reported infiltrators to Indian authorities exposing the entire operation. The moment that was supposed to spark “liberation” instead revealed a harsh truth:

Pakistan’s war had been built on a misreading of Kashmiri sentiment.

And from that point onward… the conflict began slipping out of Pakistan’s control. Instead, they did something far more damaging to Pakistan’s military designs. Local residents informed Indian Army authorities about the infiltrators, alerting them that they were not fighting dissident insurgents but regular Pakistani Army troops in disguise. The Indian military response was swift and overwhelming. By the end of August, most of the infiltrators had been captured or killed, and the operation lay in ruins.​

Yet the Pakistani public knew none of this. General Ayub Khan, whose subordinates had assured him that China would open a second front against India in the north (a promise that never materialized), did not know on August 29 nine days before the war officially widened that Operation Gibraltar had already failed. More critically, he and his government apparatus ensured that the public would remain equally ignorant.​

The Propaganda Machine at Full Throttle

Here’s where the story becomes instructive about the power of information control. Pakistan’s state-controlled media didn’t report the failure of Operation Gibraltar. Instead, it constructed an alternative reality. Pakistani newspapers declared that the military was performing admirably. Radio Pakistan broadcast coded messages to infiltrators still fighting in the field. The narrative built was one of heroic resistance and imminent victory.​

One of the clearest windows into what really happened inside Pakistan’s ruling circles comes from Altaf Gauhar, a senior bureaucrat, trusted insider, and later a respected military analyst. As Information Secretary under Ayub Khan, he wasn’t just observing events… he was sitting inside the very rooms where decisions were being shaped. Years later, in his writings on the Ayub era, Gauhar pulled back the curtain on the scale of miscalculation and denial surrounding the war. He revealed a telling episode.

Pakistan’s High Commissioner in New Delhi, Mian Arshad Hussain, had been closely watching the mood inside India as tensions escalated. On September 4, 1965, sensing what was coming, he sent an urgent and unmistakable cable to Islamabad.

His warning was blunt: India was preparing to launch a major counter-offensive on September 6.

This was not speculation… not rumor… not battlefield chatter.

It was a clear strategic alert from one of Pakistan’s most important diplomatic posts , a signal that the war Pakistan thought it was controlling was now slipping decisively into India’s hands. And yet, despite the warning, the leadership in Rawalpindi continued to believe that they still held the advantage.

That confidence… would soon prove disastrously misplaced.

This intelligence critical for military planning was suppressed by the Foreign Ministry, which dismissed it as unnecessary panic.​

The controlled press continued its mythmaking. Major Pakistani newspapers like Dawn and Jang published stories predicting India’s imminent collapse. One report actually compared India’s fate to that of Hitler and Mussolini, suggesting Pakistan would deliver a similar end to Indian leadership. These weren’t fringe publications or independent editorial voices, they operated under strict military oversight, particularly under Ayub Khan’s 1962 press controls that had subordinated the media entirely to state narratives.​

By the time the United Nations called for a ceasefire on September 22, 1965, the Pakistani public had been thoroughly conditioned to believe something that bore little relationship to military reality. The state-controlled media declared unambiguously – Pakistan had won. As one newspaper editorial proclaimed at the time: “India agreed to ceasefire so early because their leaders knew Pakistan would prevail. We could have captured the whole of India but we want to tell them that we…”​

The Inconvenient Numbers

The military reality told a starkly different story. When the guns fell silent and the combatants withdrew to pre-war positions under the Tashkent Declaration, the territorial accounting revealed an uncomfortable truth for Pakistan. India occupied approximately 710 square miles of Pakistani territory including strategically valuable areas in Sialkot, Lahore, and the Chumb sector. Pakistan, by contrast, held only 210 square miles of Indian territory, primarily in desert regions opposite Sindh with minimal strategic value.​

Equally telling was what neither side achieved. Kashmir remained under Indian administration. The military operation designed to detach it from India had collapsed entirely. The battlefield stalemate that observers noted in September 1966 masked a more fundamental reality: Pakistan had initiated aggression, failed to achieve its objectives, suffered greater territorial losses, and now faced a formal cessation that returned everything to the status quo ante.​

Strategically, Pakistan’s attempt to capture Akhnoor a vital communications hub that would have severed Indian supply lines between Kashmir and the rest of India had faltered at a critical juncture. Pakistan’s forces were actually positioned to take the town in early September, but when General Akhtar Hussain Malik (the commander orchestrating the advance) was unexpectedly relieved of his command and replaced by General Yahya Khan, operational momentum collapsed. The twenty-four-hour gap created by this command change allowed the Indian Army to regroup and successfully defend the position.​

Even Pakistan’s celebrated Air Force performance, while respectable by the standards of the era, had not translated into strategic advantage. Pakistani fighters had proven capable in aerial combat, and this would become a central pillar of the “victory” narrative. But air superiority in the Kashmir theater couldn’t prevent Operation Gibraltar’s unraveling or stop Indian advances in Punjab.

The Foreign Minister’s Rebellion

When Ayub Khan and his delegation returned to Pakistan carrying the Tashkent Declaration, they encountered a population that had been promised victory and received instead a ceasefire returning to pre-war lines. The political liability was immediate. But before the public demonstrations erupted, internal cracks appeared at the highest levels of government.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and the architect of the hardline position that had encouraged Ayub to pursue aggressive military action, found himself in an impossible position. Bhutto had assured Ayub Khan that military victory was achievable and that China would enter the conflict against India assurances that proved catastrophically mistaken. As the public erupted in anger over the Tashkent Declaration, Bhutto began spreading rumors of secret clauses in the agreement that allegedly favored India.​

These rumors were entirely fabricated. In fact, the Tashkent Declaration contained no secret clauses granting India concessions beyond the status quo restoration. But Bhutto’s strategy was shrewd: by claiming that Ayub had been “bullied” by Soviet mediators into unfavorable terms, Bhutto positioned himself as the defender of Pakistan’s interests even as he distanced himself from the failed war strategy he had championed.​

The internal friction was severe enough that Ayub demanded Bhutto either resign or take extended leave. Bhutto chose leave in June 1966, and within a month, resigned entirely under presidential pressure. The political rupture marked the beginning of the end for Ayub Khan’s regime. Bhutto would go on to form the Pakistan People’s Party and lead a populist crusade against Ayub’s government, ultimately contributing to the general’s forced resignation in 1969.​

When Ayub Finally Spoke, It Was Too Late

One particularly revealing detail illustrates the regime’s communication collapse. After returning from Tashkent, Ayub Khan refused to address the public for four days. He withdrew from public view, offering no explanation for the agreement, no context for the public to understand why the terms represented the best available outcome, and no narrative to counter the increasingly frenzied rumors of betrayal.​

This silence was catastrophic. In the absence of authoritative explanation, public imagination filled the void. Conspiracy theories flourished. Rumors of secret deals multiplied. On January 14, 1966, Ayub finally addressed the nation in an attempt to assuage public anger, but by then the damage to his political credibility was irreversible. The public had already concluded based on media propaganda they had internalized that they had been robbed of victory by their own leader.

Why the Myth Persisted

The psychological and political investment in the “victory” narrative proved remarkably resilient. Pakistan’s security establishment recognized that admitting the truth that Operation Gibraltar had been poorly conceived, based on false assumptions about Kashmiri sentiments, and executed with inadequate planning would require accountability. Instead, the mythology of victory was sustained and amplified.​

Consider the state’s long-term strategy. Pakistan institutionalized the narrative by designating September 6 as “Defence Day,” a national holiday celebrating the military’s performance. The military’s narrative of defending Lahore against Indian aggression became embedded in national consciousness. Generations of Pakistani schoolchildren learned a version of history that emphasized their forces’ bravery while omitting the failed Kashmir operation that had triggered the entire conflict.​

This was a propaganda victory that would have impressed Madison Avenue. Pakistan’s military didn’t win the war on the battlefield, but it managed to win a comprehensive victory in the court of public opinion creating a mythology so potent that it survived even the catastrophic defeat of 1971, when East Pakistan was dismembered and Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation.

The Tashkent Declaration: Restoring the Status Quo

When Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri signed the Tashkent Declaration on January 10, 1966, they agreed to restore the territorial and diplomatic status quo that had existed on August 4, 1965 – one day before Operation Gibraltar crossed into Indian Kashmir. Both nations would withdraw their forces to pre-conflict positions. No territorial gains would be retained by either side. No new agreements on Kashmir’s political status would be negotiated. Trade and diplomatic relations would be normalized.​

By any rational measure, this was not a victory for Pakistan. It was a restoration of the territorial situation that had prompted the military action in the first place. The agreement explicitly stated that neither side would resort to force and both would settle disputes through peaceful means. For a nation that had gambled on military conquest of Kashmir, returning to the pre-war configuration represented a return to the fundamental problem the war was supposed to solve.​

For the Indian side the declaration represented a more modest achievement. India had successfully repelled the infiltration in Kashmir, proven its ability to project power into Pakistani territory, and emerged with greater strategic prestige in the eyes of neutral observers. Time magazine captured the international assessment succinctly “Now it’s apparent to everybody that India is going to emerge as an Asian power in its own right.”​

Yet both governments faced domestic criticism. In India, the agreement was criticized for lacking a no-war pact or any Pakistani commitment to cease supporting insurgency in Kashmir. In Pakistan, the public fury stemmed from the perception engineered by the propaganda apparatus that victory had been surrendered. The reality was more complicated, there had been no victory to surrender, only a military operation that had failed, a brief conventional war that had been drawn, and a cessation that restored the territorial status quo.

The Cost of Misperception

The consequences of this misalignment between public perception and reality proved severe for Pakistan. The Tashkent Declaration became a symbol of national humiliation in the public consciousness, even though the agreement itself represented the best available outcome given Pakistan’s military failure. This psychological wound eroded public confidence in military leadership precisely when the institution needed to retain credibility and undertake necessary reforms.

Instead of implementing the institutional reforms and intelligence overhauls that the war’s failures demanded, Pakistan’s military establishment closed ranks around the mythology of victory. The underlying intelligence failures and poor strategic planning that had led to Operation Gibraltar’s disaster remained unaddressed. No systematic post-war analysis was conducted to examine why the assumption about Kashmiri support had proven so catastrophically wrong. No reforms were implemented to prevent similar miscalculations in the future.

This institutional failure would echo forward with tragic consequences. Just six years later, in 1971, Pakistan’s military would launch another operation based on catastrophically flawed assumptions about public sentiment this time in East Pakistan. The failure to learn from 1965’s intelligence disasters contributed to an even more devastating outcome the dismemberment of the nation and the creation of Bangladesh.​

The Enduring Legacy of the Myth

Even after six decades, the shadow of 1965 has never really lifted from Pakistan’s national memory. The story told to the public in the aftermath of the war the story of defiance, heroism, and military triumph still endures, almost untouched. Every year, Defence Day is commemorated as a celebration of victory -a triumph that in reality never took place on the battlefield.

Across textbooks, speeches, and televised tributes, the same narrative repeats itself. Generations of Pakistanis have grown up absorbing a carefully curated version of history, one that skips past the failure of Operation Gibraltar, amplifies selective Air Force successes into sweeping strategic achievements, and frames the Tashkent Agreement not as a return to the pre-war status quo……but as a betrayal.

The myth became larger than the war itself. And over time, it hardened into something more powerful than fact- a national belief system, passed from one generation to the next.

In the process, the more uncomfortable truths were quietly buried:

• That the war was miscalculated at its very conception.
• That the battlefield gains never matched the promises made.
• That Tashkent was not the capitulation people were told it was…
• but a diplomatic attempt to step back from a conflict that had already gone badly wrong.

The legacy of 1965, then is not just about what happened during the war. It is about how a nation chose to remember it.

This mythology persists despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Western analysts, neutral military historians, and even some senior Pakistani military figures have documented the actual sequence of events. Pakistan’s Air Marshal Nur Khan, the Pakistan Air Force’s commander during the war, acknowledged after his retirement that the Pakistan Army not India should be held responsible for starting the conflict.​

The gap between public perception and historical reality represents something larger than mere nostalgia for a lost victory. It reflects the effectiveness of a state propaganda apparatus that successfully constructed an alternative reality potent enough to survive for sixty years despite mounting evidence to the contrary. And it reveals the political vulnerability created when military establishments prioritize institutional prestige over honest reckoning with failure.

Conclusion: The Victory That Never Was

Pakistan’s interpretation of the Tashkent Declaration as a humiliating defeat rested on a foundation of misinformation about what the 1965 war had actually produced. A military operation based on faulty assumptions had failed within weeks. A conventional war fought across multiple theaters had ended in a stalemate. A peace agreement that restored pre-war boundaries was presented to an expectant public as a betrayal of military triumph.

The Tashkent Declaration itself was not a missed opportunity for Pakistan. It was a rational restoration of the status quo following a failed military gamble. But because the Pakistani public had been systematically misled about the actual progress of the war by state-controlled media and government propaganda, the agreement appeared to them as an abandonment of victory when in reality, there had been no victory to abandon.

This is the deeper tragedy of Pakistan’s experience with the 1965 war. Not that the nation was defeated on the battlefield, but that its military establishment chose to construct mythology rather than confront failure. The Tashkent Declaration didn’t misrepresent Pakistan’s military achievement. But by that point, Pakistan’s own media had already done the misrepresenting and the nation would spend the next sixty years living within that fabricated reality.