Biography of Ayub Khan

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Ayub Khan’s Biography Early Life Ayub Khan was born on 14 May, 1907, in the village of Rehana near the Haripur District. Ayub Khan was enrolled in school located in Sarai Saleh and then later on in Aligarh Muslim University in 1922 but did not complete his further education there because he was accepted in the Royal Military Sandhurst. Military Career Ayub Khan was commissioned an officer in the Indian Army in 1928 and was made the second-in-command of a battalion in India during World War II. After in 1947, he was promoted to the post of major general in 1948 to succeeding General Sir Douglas Gracey as commander-in-chief in 1951 of the army of the new emerging state of Pakistan. As Commander-in-Chief At this time the Pakistani army was a struggling institution with little or no discipline and training in the military. Ayub Khan, after becoming the Commander-in-Chief set about transforming the military. His first challenge came with the Rawalpindi Conspiracy affair in which Major General Akbar Khan and his colleagues had attempted to takeover Liaquat Ali Khan’s government. To handle this situation, Ayub Khan increased the field exercises drastically knowing that this will benefit the army through professional training but more importantly thought that a “barrack-bound” army is recipe for mischief (Cloughley, 1999, p. 27). He later on invested heavily in the improvement of the living conditions and benefits received by each soldier. In 1953 he visited the United States with the Prime Minister and Pakistan signed the SEATO and CENTO packs in 1954 and 1955 respectively. Ayub Khan wanted to create an efficient and modernize army, and eventually his efforts paid off when he won the loyalty of his troops. It was then seen that Ayub Khan, as a commander-in-chief and, for a brief period, minister of defense in 1954, was powerful enough to reject any policy he
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