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The Mullah, The Military, The Mess

The Mullah, The Military, The Mess

Author: Anand K. Sahay
Publication: Tehelka
Date: August 12, 2006
URL: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main18.asp?filename=Ne081206essayp26.asp

Introduction: The Pakistan army is ideologically contaminated. its stranglehold has held the country from realising Jinnah's vision. That's Pakistan's tragedy

This is not apocryphal. General Zia-ul-Haq's coup of July 5, 1977 that overthrew the civilian regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan was codenamed "Operation Fairplay"!

Considering that it is the Pakistan Army we are talking about, there ought not to be too great a surprise about this. The irony, however, resides in the fact that Bhutto had fast-tracked Zia over the heads of others to make him Army chief. Taking "Fairplay" to its logical end, Zia imprisoned Bhutto and hanged him two years later. As Nawaz Sharif was to learn to his cost, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's current Army strongman whom he had promoted over others to make chief a la Bhutto, has kept up the tradition of biting the hand that fed him.

Who knows, if Sharif were to return home from exile, the Musharraf dictatorship might deal with him the way Zia dealt with Bhutto? The record is quite unambiguous: the Pakistan Army is a very dangerous institution indeed.

And the story goes back a long way - almost to the founding of Pakistan. Liaquat Ali Khan, the landed aristocrat from Meerut who became the country's first prime minister, was shot dead at point-blank range in 1951 as he was addressing a public meeting, in full view of his security apparatus.

It was given out that a deranged Afghan had committed the murder. Jinnah was already dead three years. It was clear that if Liaquat too went, there would be a political vacuum, and all links snapped with the historical processes that had led to the establishing of Pakistan. Events unfolded exactly in this manner. The field was now open for a succession of feckless bureaucrats to adorn the positions of president and prime minister with the blessings of the Army whose star was in the ascendant from the day Pakistan was born, thanks to the security psychosis that was unleashed with the invasion of Kashmir within weeks of Partition.

In October 1958, the Army did away with the charade and General Ayub Khan seized power. Since then, for Pakistan, it has been a long, undistinguished, line of military-plotters with interludes of civilian governments politely called democracies. While suspicions remained, we shall never know if the Army got the first pm bumped off. But there is no question that the forces began to directly call the shots after Liaquat's liquidation and were the prime beneficiaries of that episode. When Jinnah and Liaquat were around, the Army had only enjoyed a special leverage in the power set-up on account of the role thrust upon it by the nascent State.

It is the alacrity with which the Pakistan Army moved to grab power five decades ago, and the avidity with which it has retained it, that makes it both dangerous and remarkable. Its self-appointed role was to keep democratic urges from crystallising and to keep alive the "Pakistan ideology", viz. the Muslims of the subcontinent were a common religio-cultural and political entity that must 'develop separately'- exactly the definition of "apartheid"- from other religious groups, noticeably the Hindus. The psychological ghettoisation of the Muslims who chose Pakistan does not seem to have led them very far as a State, civil society, or nation. Nevertheless, the Army has prospered. It also appears to have succeeded in its aims despite its failure to maintain national cohesion and presiding over the vivisection of the country (the creation of Bangladesh). Nor have defeats come in the way of the Army's entrenchment as the country's most powerful institution that casts a long shadow on every aspect of life. This, of course, is a comment on the emasculated state of other institutions. The rise in the power of the military - and the concomitant enfeeblement of other public platforms - is not least due to the pampering of the Pakistan military by the US which made it a frontline Cold War ally, emboldening the Pakistan Army into domestic and foreign misadventures.

Given the manner in which the Army of the "land of the pure" has dealt with its political class and its people, it is unrealistic for India to expect that the Pakistan Army, which really speaking, runs the State even when civilian governments are nominally thrown up, would behave honourably towards it. If anything, it is by pointing to the existence of India as a threatening neighbour that the Army is able to justify the continuation of its exalted status to the people of Pakistan.

It is therefore no surprise to learn that a Pakistan Army major, identified as Mohammed Hyder Turki of the 9th Baluch battalion on the basis of papers found on his body, was killed in a gunbattle with Indian troops in Kashmir last week. He was with a band of armed infiltrators. If a middle-level Army officer had crossed over into India in the guise of a terrorist, we may be certain that hordes of other ranks are doing exactly the same, under command, in direct violation of Pakistan's agreement of January 2004 with this country whereby Musharraf pledged not to let his country's territory be used for terrorist activities against India.

There was no such explicit agreement then, but in 1965 the Ayub government had launched "Operation Gibraltar" under which 5,000 Army men infiltrated into Kashmir to trigger an uprising, acting on the assumption that the Kashmiris were waiting for just such a push to revolt against India. As it happened, the ordinary Kashmiris handed over every Pakistani trooper they caught.

The story of the deceased Major Turki suggests that "Operation Gibraltar" is a continuing saga. We saw similar infiltration in 1948. That was the first time. "Gibraltar" came next. Kargil was to be the subsequent occasion of a similar nature.

But the difference was that the Kargil misadventure showed the extensive degree of ideological contamination of its armed forces on account of association with jehadi elements. Unbelievable though this is, regular troops and jehadi terrorists formed the same fighting units.

That, in truth, speaks of the degeneration suffered in the organising principle of the Pakistan Army, which is of exactly the same vintage as the Indian Army, and possesses identical fighting experience. Few would today disagree that the Pakistan Army has been losing its professional élan. But getting mixed up with the jehadis could undermine the Army's status as Pakistan's most viable institution.

The Pakistan Army is said to have a strength of 22 divisions, about half that of the Indian Army. That is an impressive figure, given that it does not need to guard two fronts, unlike India. The Army is predominantly drawn from Punjab but also has a significant presence of fighting men from the NWFP. The country's other nationalities - the Sindhis, the Baluch and the Mohajirs - are virtually missing from its ranks, as were Bengalis before the emergence of Bangladesh. For this reason, the Army is not viewed as a national force, not least on account of its involvement in Baluchistan and against the Mohajirs. It also eats up close to 70 percent of the budget.

The pervasive control of the Army on the country's foreign and security policies is legendary and is a subject of scholarly and journalistic attention. But the Army's stranglehold over public life is perhaps best summed up in Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal's eye-catching expression "the political economy of (its) defence". Not many know that the Army is Pakistan's biggest landlord and investment source. Naturally, it has the first claim on the country's resources, which far outweighs development.

In Pakistan's early years, the Army was influenced by the feudal classes and officered by Sandhurst-trained sons of the landed elite. Zia changed all that. Besides Punjabi in greater measure, he made it middle and lower middle-class with a distinct Islamist stamp, which exactly fits with the profile of the Lashkar-e-Toiba with which the isi, Pakistan's 'state within a state' and crucial branch of the Army, is said to be intimately linked. Naturally, it is impossible to see the transformation of Pakistan in a positive direction without the democratisation of its Army, whose tentacles are spread far and wide.

Sahay is a senior journalist


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