It didn't read like that to me at all. If anything more like the author's slightly pacifist (and actually, explicitly says of their father 'literally wouldn't hurt a fly'), making sense of their father's career.
But as sibling says, it like any obituary needs some context; what do you expect for someone who spent practically their entire career in the military? I think pick almost any other and it will be 'worse', if you didn't like that.
I wouldn't say so. The story needs this context to make sense and outside a war, where else would one need to rebuild large bridges under fire. As a technical achievement it certainly is something to be proud of.
During the war, Bengali nationalists also committed mass rape of ethnic Bihari Muslim women, since the Bihari Muslim community supported Pakistan.[18] Indian soldiers as well as Bengali militiamen were also identified as perpetrators of rape by scholar Yasmin Saikia.[19][20]
From an outside and mostly ignorant perspective, it does look like that war was more justified than most.
I don't know how any one could expect people to lay down and take what was going on - challenging election results with the military, making efforts to destroy the local language, keeping people in poverty, etc.
From an Irish perspective - I get it.
That said, it does rub me the wrong way a little that there's lines such as "If ever a war was justified, it was the Bangladesh war" in an obituary, where you have to be "that guy" if you want to challenge them. But when I think of how I'd react to such a line in an Irish obituary, it doesn't really bother me.
Maybe that's bias. But I can believe that to this guy, he's just saying it how it is.
There's also no intent that I can discern to influence current events. 'Propaganda' doesn't usually describe events from over 50 years ago, if anything that would be 'historical revisionism' - which I don't think this is.
All armies do fucked up things, but there are some armies that stand out for their brutality - Pakistani army is one of them. Here is a sample of what they did to their own citizens at the time
