Fighting to the End Quotes

“While the 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times for US–Pakistan ties, Pakistan again became closely allied with the United States in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan argued that US military assistance was required to expand the Pakistan Army, ostensibly because doing so would enable Pakistan to better counter the emerging Soviet threat, even though Pakistan sought this assistance to strengthen its position vis-à-vis India. Consequently, with US military and economic assistance, by 1989, the Pakistan Army had grown to nearly 450,000 and had become increasingly reliant upon US weapon systems.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan presents an example of how more than six decades of ossified historical inaccuracies and distortion can resist the sanitizing effect of the global information technology revolution and the resulting expansion of access to abundant—if, alas, low-quality—information.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistani media coverage of the military should also be read within the context of the army’s management of knowledge about the institution and its role in managing security and domestic affairs of the state. While in recent years many commentators have praised Pakistan’s press for its relative freedom, self-censorship is still very common, as is deference to the army’s preferred narratives. The intelligence agencies’ willingness to use lethal methods against intransigent journalists and other domestic critics has repeatedly earned Pakistan the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists (Committee to Protect Journalists 2011).”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Weinbaum (1996) notes the reliance on conspiracy narratives in Pakistan and the resulting suspicions, which are “readily sustained in the absence of full, creditable information. [Conspiracy theories] offer disarmingly simple and not entirely implausible explanations, and no amount of evidence can refute them. … [The] more the evidence seems to disprove the theory, the deeper the conspiracy is conceived to be” (Weinbaum 1996, 649).”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“The military cultivates civilians including scholars, journalists, and analysts, providing them selective access to the institution and punishing them—either with physical harm (or the threat of it) to the author or her family members or simply with the denial of future access—should they produce knowledge that harms the interests of the army. Since access is perhaps the most valuable currency among those who wish to be and remain experts on the military, the army uses this implied transaction to produce sympathetic assessments of the armed forces and their actions and goals.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan’s generals would always prefer to take a calculated risk and be defeated than to do nothing at all.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“chagrin”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Strategic culture is an integrated “system of symbols” (e.g., argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conception with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan has to recognize that it simply cannot match India through whatever stratagem it chooses—it is bound to fail. The sensible thing, then, is for Pakistan to reach the best possible accommodation with India now, while it still can, and shift gears toward a grand strategy centered on economic integration in South Asia—one that would help Pakistan climb out of its morass and allow the army to maintain some modicum of privileges, at least for a while. The alternative is to preside over an increasingly hollow state. (Cohen et al. 2009, emphasis”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“strategies that fail to attain a state’s objectives will, in all probability, evolve or be abandoned” (Glenn 2009, 533). Ashley”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are India-specific.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Commodore Tariq Majeed, in a 1992 essay titled “Weaknesses and Limitations of Indian Naval Capability,” argues that India’s navy is inferior according to every metric used. One of his reasons for the Indian Navy’s ostensible inferiority to that of Pakistan is that it has been forced to induct women.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Nehru sought the United Nations’ (UN’s) intervention. After protracted negotiations, the UN succeeded in arranging a ceasefire, which came into effect on December 31, 1948. The ceasefire required Pakistan to withdraw its regular and irregular forces while it permitted India to maintain a minimum force for defensive purposes. Once these conditions were met, Kashmir’s future was to be decided by plebiscite. Pakistan never withdrew, and the plebiscite never took place. The terms of the ceasefire left about three-fifths of Kashmir under Indian control, with the balance of the state going to Pakistan.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan first tried to seize Kashmir in 1947. As British decolonization of South Asia loomed, the sovereign of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, hoped to keep the country independent of either of the two new states, India or Pakistan. As Singh held out, marauders from Pakistan’s tribal areas invaded the territory of Jammu-Kashmir in hopes of taking it for Pakistan and were supported extensively by Pakistan’s nascent provincial and federal governments. This attack expanded into the first war between India and Pakistan. When it was over and the cease-fire line was drawn, Pakistan controlled about one-third of Kashmir, and India controlled the remainder. Although the war ended in a stalemate with international intervention, Pakistan may have rightly concluded that the strategy of using irregular fighters succeeded. After all, Pakistan had claimed at least some part of Kashmir, which it would not have had”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“report estimates that there are about 10,000 active and retired Pakistani military personnel currently in Bahrain (Husain 2011).”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“At least through 1999, Pakistan continued to provide technical and training assistance to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar (Henderson 1999).”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War

“Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India.”
― C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War