NON-FICTION: THE SAGA OF YAHYA KHAN.

The man who comprehensively lost a war against India - and thereby lost half his country - Gen Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan deserves a full and accurate telling of his story and the story of how the Pakistan Army dutifully followed him into the abyss.

This slim volume - General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan: The Rise and Fall of a Soldier 1947-1971 by Brig (Retd) A.R. Siddiqi - is not that book, especially since the author was responsible for Gen Yahya's image-building during the critical waning period of his rule.

It brings to mind the title of the classic autobiography of Gen Sir Francis Tuker, the last British commander in Eastern India, who presided over the end of the British 'watch and ward' function in the colony before its independence in 1947. While Memory Serves was Gen Tuker's title. Brig Siddiqi, a journalist inducted by direct selection into the public relations branch of the military, and author of two previous and most useful books on the military, ends his new book with the coda 'Reproduced as best as memory serves.'

Gen Tuker relied heavily on detailed contemporaneous diaries and notes; Brig Siddiqi's book is an amalgam of anecdote and war stories without the sourcing and overarching contextual analysis that would peel back the layers of the onion that is the Pakistani military, and its fraught relationship with the country's politics. It also appears to rely on segments of the author's more useful and less hagiographic The Military in Pakistan: Image and Reality. The result is a gap-toothed volume that provides some interesting glimpses, but leaves you wanting for more. Brig Siddiqi needed a heavy dose of fact-checking and detail on Gen Yahya and the events that brought him to the pinnacle of power and his fall from grace.

Gen Yahya belonged to the generation of the British Indian Army that acquired the habits and accent of the British. But, unlike some of his colleagues in both independent Pakistan and India, he was not a reader or deep thinker. Rather, he saw himself as a man of action. Luckily for him, he became a favourite of Gen Ayub Khan - the first Pakistani army chief - and was carried along in the wake of that relationship into key positions at different stages of his rapid rise in independent Pakistan.

President Ayub Khan reviews the war strategy in Sialkot, 1965 with his military men. Yahya Khan is first from the right | Photo courtesy Vintage Pakistan

Brig Siddiqi refers to his role in the early building of the military relationship with the United States, but fails to note that Gen Yahya, as deputy chief of general staff, was in the first key meetings that then defence secretary Iskander Mirza called to...