ABSTRACT
Operation Gibraltar, Pakistan's ill-fated bid to force India's hand on Kashmir had begun, but the element of surprise had been lost at the start. To explore where had the Pakistanis gone wrong, this chapter briefly examines events in Kashmir that led up to the 1965 war. In the early 1960s, inter-services intelligence directorate (ISI) and intelligence bureau (IB) were monitoring promising developments in Indian Kashmir, where an ongoing dispute between New Delhi and the mercurial Kashmiri politician, Sheikh Abdullah, was fueling unrest. In December 1963, the theft of a relic of the Prophet Mohamed from a shrine in Srinagar triggered mass protests that were only suppressed when the Indian army intervened. Even though Gibraltar had failed to instigate a revolt, the leadership proceeded with grand slam whereby regular army units violated the Kashmir ceasefire line on 1 September and tried to seize the Akhnur crossroads.
