Pak Army spokesman caught on the wrong foot
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 28
In a serious professional lapse, the Director-General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Major General Asif Ghafoor, on Sunday tweeted a doctored video of Air Marshal Denzil Keelor (retd) and termed it as an ‘admission of Indian failure and losses on February 27, 2019’.
Hours later, on being called out over Twitter that the video was not post-Balakot (February 26, 2019) but a programme made in 2015 about India’s wars in the 1960s, Major General Ghafoor accepted his error saying “the clip of Air Marshal is revealed to be doctored….Unintentional omission is acknowledged, especially to Indians”.
Air Marshal Keelor is an Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter pilot, who was awarded Vir Chakra for his role in 1965 Indo-Pak War.
In the video, originally shot in 2015, the IAF ace is speaking about the 1962 war with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan. Air Marshal Keelor is heard saying: “Some of the things that happen are losses, for instance. During war, you win and you lose. Some of the losses were not right. They were due to tactical errors, due to inexperience and you can’t go to war with this type of inexperience.”
The video ends with him saying: “Firstly, it should have been made public. Because it gave a detailed account of the political failures, military leadership failures, tactical failures, strategic failures...which led to this debacle. We all know it. I don’t see any reason why people should be ashamed to show it.”
Major General Ghafoor used this video and claimed that the IAF veteran was admitting to failure of Balakot strikes on February 27.
The original video was posted on YouTube in August, 2015, three years before the Balakot airstrike, by a channel called Wild Films India. In the video titled ‘Nehru lost India the war’, the Air Marshal speaks about India’s battle losses.
In this, he said of the 1965 war that Pakistan had a radar system, interception system with ability to detect, identify, intercept and destroy, we did not have it”.
Major General Ghafoor in his first tweet assumed that Air Marshal Keelor was talking of the present scenario. The IAF veteran, now 85-year-old, lives a retired life in Lucknow and has not reacted so far.
