I have a few Pakistani civilian friends living in the Karachi area today, in 2014. I still hear regularly from these few.
I used to get, primarily in response to hundreds of letters printed in the Peshawar FRONTIER POST dozens of different civilian as well as academic (college teachers/professors and such) e-mails from all over Pakistan as well as from those at US colleges and universities.
The old (1963-65 era) US Military Advisory Assistance Group provided my officer housing my last 7 out of 18 months in Karachi in the P.E.C.H.S. suburb. My office was in the then US Embassy building. Major General George Ruhlen, USA, Ret., Dec. was very kind to me as a mere Lt., USAF, and took me on several of his USMAAG site visits around then West Pakistan. I was only in old East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) a few times....booked myself on USAF C-130 and C-141 missions to Dacca and return to Karachi in the early 1964 era. USAF then had ALS, the Air Logistics Systems, which became MATS, then MAC, now TRANSCOM (all services airlift services combined).
I liked the ALS system as I could send myself anywhere in the world without specific cost accounting funding citation(s). Later on Secretar of Defense McNamara introduced the MATS (USAF) cost accounting system, which we were not staffed to handle but "made do with as best we could." The days of shipping a USAF pilots MG sports car to overseas postings for free ended rather abruptly thanks to McNamara. I was furnished a four door mid size USAF Ford which I drove myself (native hired drivers were terrorizing vs. driving and controlling the/a car myself.) My staff car was painted an innocuous blue and white with a CD metal tag on a holder sticking up on the front bumper. Thus I never got a parking ticket in Karachi!
I visited Tripoli, Libya when King Idris still ruled there, going from Karachi to and out of old Wheelus AFB, which as a base during WW II saw lots of action. During the Cold War, pre-Kaddafi era, Wheelus was a major around the world RON base. Did several R&R self booked USAF flights to now gone USAF NATO air bases at Chattereaux and Evereaux. The people of Paris during the DeGaulle era were individually very friendly, but DeGaulle was a "cold fish" and responsible for shutting down back then all USAF bases in France. Modern day NATO military relations with France are of course excellent today. Other nations I was able to book myself site visits to "to survey the routes" included Iran under the Shah; Turkey; and Lebanon which was then peaceful and ruled by a King. My one planned trip under the old USAF ALS system to Burma resulted in a blown engine gasket in our old C-123 (flying blimp) as we failed to lift of from old Maripur Pakistan Air Force Fighter/Bomber Base outside Karachi, on the sea coast, in the Sind Desert.
As a reserve USAF Major on the Air Staff after the Shah left Iran, when the US planned the failed US Embassy hostages airlift, I was "spoken with" about topographical related flight conditions by pilots (I was/am not a pilot but ran all USAF airlift thru and inside West Pakistan). These US pilots subsequently were involved in that disastrous ending special mission. Desert sand storms are unpredictable, as I said to them way back then, and you could never plan on necessary flying conditions in the lower parts of Iran. Tehran was different because it was up in the mountains, which largely blocked out sand storms from the desert regions of Iran.
In civilian life for several years after doing my 6 years USAF active duty (then in the USAF Reserve as a secondary career) I was an International Banking Officer in NYC with Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., in the Asia Section, primarily in the Japan area, but we also covered India and then West and East Pakistan, as well as numerous other Asian nations. China was not a world banking player during those years. China opened up slowly as those old enough here to remember will recall.
Summing up this old and current cryptic overview, the several civilians since 911 to date whom I still get e-mails from, particularly religious minority Muslims in the NWFP, Baluchistan, Swat, and the "Frontier" rawest ungovernable parts of Pakistan, concern me at the recurring persecutions and outright murder(s) against them during different, minority Muslim sect religious observances. As well as against them merely because they exist and refuse to be dominated by either/or al Qaida and the most violent versions of the Taliban.
In my USAF youthful era in Karachi that sprawling city even in the early to mid-1960s had a small but thriving Jewish diaspora community. I expect folks would no longer identify themselves as Jews anywhere in Pakistan today for fear of quick extermination by the terrorists. Christian missionaries in my era in the various Northern areas of Pakistan, in particular, were found from time to time decapitated by early radical Muslims, but not to the extent such is the case today.
Of course in modern day Saudi Arabia we read of Pakistanis there recently beheaded (four or six such men) for trading in illegal drugs inside that country. These are not "religious" decapitations...but a tough way to die under Saudi Arabia's strict legal system (sharia).
Wounded in the Rann of Kutch in late January, 1965 by being in the right place at the wrong time (I was a guest on a Pakistani boar hunt, but we never got to the hunting destination on the poorly identified Pakistan/India border) when an Indian tank shell below an oncoming truck into our PIA truck Land Rover. "I learned to fly" that day when I briefly was "air borne" or ejected from the bench in the back bed of the Land Rover truck as I flew sideway into the cab back wall of our vehicle, then up that cab wall, into the air and landed outside our Land Rover truck in a rather "hard" sand embankment beside the road. That all resulted in what today we know as a TBI, traumatic brain injury, among several injuries I and we sustained on that date, 30 January 1965.
My entire 18 month USAF tour of duty in Pakistan I was technically carried on the Air Attaché's Roster, so did get invited to all military and diplomatic functions, even though there is no such things as a Second then a First Lieutenant, USAF being an Assistant Air Attaché.
From the time I was wounded (defined as an indirect wounding from friendly forces fire) on 30 January 1965 until I PCSed in June, 1965 back to the States, I was detailed inside, "rode a desk as an additional duty" in the Embassy CIA Team Officer. This, on top of my old USAFSS (later named USAF Electronic Security Command) duties, which included support of the RB-57F intelligence program, when we brought in 2 RB-57Fs for missions similar to what the U-2 formerly did from Pakistan. My primary CIA "additional duty" tasking was to write an emergency 6937th USAFSS Base plan, due to the 1965 India-Pakistan War. The Emergency Plan was used after I PCSed to the States during the summer of 1965. We had a bit over 1,000 military and civilian personnel at the 6937th, Badabur, a suburban area of Peshawar in sight of K-2, the second highest mountain in the world...in the Himalayas. Key senior office and senior NCOs were allowed accompanied tours at our Peshawar/Badibur base, so there were US women and children on base to be evacuated, along with our military personnel.
For general public information (no longer classified) our 1965 War evacuation was a special USAF airlift directly from Peshawar across Iran into Turkey. This fact was printed in both TIME Magazine and the New York Times during 1965.
Excuse my rambling writing style here.
Out for now. Have a good new week.
