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The ceremony of surrender of Pakistan’s army in Dhaka on December 16, 1971, marked one of the most decisive and humiliating moments in modern military history. As Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi of the Pakistan Army signed the instrument of surrender before the Indian General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the world’s then most populous Muslim nation was formally dismembered. East Pakistan became the independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and what remained was a geographically truncated, psychologically shattered Pakistan. The 1971 war was not merely a military defeat; it was a catastrophic national trauma that shattered the foundational ideology on which…