World: The Curious Battle of Kasur

According to the rival claims, both Pakistan and India won a stunning victory over each other last week around the border city of Kasur. The outside world has mostly had to take such grandiose boasts on faith since neither government encourages close press coverage of the war. But TIME Correspondent William Rademaekers managed to get to Kasur, a bustling Pakistani city of 100,000, 37 miles southeast of embattled Lahore and only five miles from the Indian border.

“Kasur is deserted and its inhabitants scattered over the countryside,” Rademaekers reported. “Buzzards wheel overhead and settle with a flourish of wings on the swollen carcasses of water buffalo. Dogs prowl through the rubble, stirring up black clouds of flies, as they try to reach putrid human flesh buried beneath the mud bricks and roof tiles of shattered houses. A few Pakistani police patrol the streets to prevent looting but, otherwise, Kasur is a blend of stomach-turning smells and silence.”

Gaping Holes. For Kasur, the war began Sept. 7 when an Indian column advanced to within two miles. For seven hours an artillery barrage rolled across the town, bringing ruin and death. A mosque collapsed on its worshipers. A U.S. Protestant mission school gaped with holes after direct hits. As the people fled many were trampled by stampeding buffalo or raked with shrapnel in the narrow streets.

Early last week the Pakistanis mounted a counteroffensive and drove the Indians back to the border. Some hungry, homeless inhabitants returned to Kasur, but now death rained down from the sky. On Sept. 14, Canberra bombers of the Indian Air Force blew up a two-block area with thousand-pound bombs and demolished a factory complex on the city’s outskirts. Kasur was hit almost daily by Indian jets pumping 20-mm. shells into anything that moved. An estimated 1,200 dead lie buried in the ruins.

In New Delhi, an Indian spokesman hailed the battle of Kasur as one of the most decisive victories of the war. The column advancing on Kasur had been the southernmost of four columns whose aim seemed to be to encircle and capture Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The Indians now claim that all four drives were decoys. Each column advanced only a few miles into Pakistani territory and then dug in: infantry in the front line, tanks huddled beneath trees and behind houses in the second, and in the third, artillery massed beneath camouflage netting. The Indians reasoned that Pakistan would have to drive these four columns from their soil or lose both the military and the political initiative.

Horseshoe Trap. According to New Delhi, the major Pakistani counterattack was directed at the Indians before Kasur, which was chosen as the target because a Pakistani breakthrough would permit either a drive toward New Delhi or an attack northward that would cut across the Indian rear. The assault was mounted by the 1st Armored Division, reputed to be the best in the Pakistan army. The Indian strategy resembled that of Hannibal when he caught the Romans in a baglike trap and decimated them at Cannae. The Pakistani armored column burst through the first Indian line and plunged on only to find itself entrapped inside a horseshoe-shaped line of well-fortified Indian positions. Recoilless rifles, mounted on jeeps or dug into ground emplacements, poured a heavy fire into the massed Pakistani tanks. Support fire rained down from Indian 3.7 howitzers. With the temperature in the 100s, the buttoned-down tanks were like ovens; the dust clouds raised by the explosions blinded the tankers, which milled about like a frightened herd.

At Kasur, the Indians claim to have captured or destroyed nearly half of, the 1st Armored’s 220 tanks and to have killed two Pakistani generals in the process. Since generals are seldom found in armored spearheads, the Indians explain their presence on the field as owing to the fact that “the battle was going so badly.”

Destroyed Myth. The jubilant Indian press last week printed the army’s claim to have already destroyed 284 U.S.-built Patton tanks, which had never before been battle-tested. The progress of the war, crowed the Indian Express, “destroys much of the myth of the meek and mild Hindus as it has the legend of the superiority of the American-built and American-supplied Patton tanks and Sabre jets.”

Western military observers, who have been as frustrated as newsmen in getting to the front lines, are not at all convinced. Contrasting the claims of both sides, one expert said, “the figures just don’t match—one or the other must be totally off.” And, despite the joy in New Delhi at its army’s great tank victory, the awkward fact was that Pakistan still held Kasur.