En el área Lista de campos de valor, seleccione un campo

A frequent complaint about the army in today’s Pakistan stems from its overwhelming power and ubiquity in all spheres of civil endeavour, and its

INTRODUCTION xli ability to operate outside the bounds of normal legal systems. As a result, when its members choose to ignore the law or take it into their own hands, the first instinct of the higher command is to keep the matter out of the publics eye. Concomitant with this tendency has been the growing power and involvement of the ISI agency and the Military Intelligence (MI) in domestic political and civil issues as policy advisors and implementers rather than providing policy-neutral intelligence for military purposes or conducting counter intelligence against the external enemies of Pakistan. The ISI, a highly effective counter intelligence entity, has often been called a ‘rogue’ agency or a ‘state within a state’. But it operates at the behest of the government, civil and military, and because its role has been confused by its masters, who want it not only to serve an intelligence function but also to implemente policy, it takes the heat for some of its actions on their behalf. The civilian Intelligence Bureau (IB), which used to be tasked with internal security matters is now an appendage of the military agencies. Under the Musharraf regime, it was headed by a retired brigadier, a friend of the COAS and president. Under the previous civilian regime of Prime Minister Sharif, the IB was used for political purposes and even then it was headed by a former military officer.

To make these agencies effective and to remove from them the opprobrium associated with their extra-legal actions, they need to be subjected to public scrutiny and controls, not only within the army’s structure but also before the parliament.

The army and the armed forces in general remain a key element in Pakistan’s polity. They are well entrenched and powerful and have moved to fill whatever power vacuum or gap that they see. While, unlike the Turkish army, they do not have any constitutional role in the country’s polity, they have crafted a role for themselves and equipped themselves to tackle whatever problems they face, without an invitation from the government. This has created an inherently unstable system.

An examination of the historical record of the Pakistan Army in this book yields a number of major themes over time:

• The Pakistan Army today reflects Pakistani society more than at any time in its history. Increasingly it is going to be based on urban recruitment, especially of its officer corps, and the pool of recruits will come from bigger towns and cities in areas other than its traditional recruitment ground in the Potohar plateau of northern Punjab.

• Internally weak political parties, tied to individual personalities or brought together by temporary and short-sighted common interests, have turned to involve the army in political affairs, only to later lament its active role and taking over of the reins of power.

xlii INTRODUCTION

• The army has gradually acquired a corporate structure and identity that appears to trump broader national interests. It tends to act autonomously in foreign dealings, particularly with the Middle East and the United States. It has penetrated the civilian sector and now controls large segments of civil administration. And, it has a wide economic footprint that goes well beyond the welfare needs of its ex-servicemen and women. Increasingly, the central decision making on political issues involves the corps commanders and the army chief. The newly instituted National Security Council gives the army and the other armed services a formal role in national policy-making.

• The increasingly important role of the army has been given a boost by the US relationship. The United States has at various times given its strategic and often short-term foreign policy interests precedence over sustaining democracy in Pakistan, by aligning with the army as a centre of power. It has been ready to deal with autocrats and dictators at the expense of fostering democracy. The powerful nexus between the US Department of Defense and the Pakistan Army has been a key element of this approach. Yet, whenever the crunch comes, the Pakistan Army acts in its own or national interest rather than bending to the dictates of its US partners.

• The army has generally performed well in its primary task of defending the country against external threats but it has failed to gauge the political will of its own people, leading to the loss of half the country in 1971 and to ill-thought out and autonomously executed military adventures beyond its borders in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999. Its junior officers and soldiers rank among the best in the world, but its senior leadership has let down the lower echelons in each of its wars.

• The Pakistan Army’s history also shows how it protects its corporate image and structure even against its own leadership when the leadership appears to be threatening the respect and operation of the army as an autonomous entity. It up-ended the Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan dictatorships, when public discontent arose against the army. It also failed to follow up on the investigation of the death of General Ziaul Haq and was reluctant to investigate the suspicious death of General Asif Nawaz. Interestingly, when a civilian prime minister removed General Jehangir Karamat, the army took the change in its stride and rallied behind its new leader.

• Related to the preceding theme is the selection and composition of the senior leadership of the Pakistan Army. It is a highly personalized system of selection in which the army chief plays a dominant role, and the longer a chief remains in power the more likely he is to promote

INTRODUCTION x liii compliant clones. This deprives the senior military leadership of the useful capacity of argument and debate in making decisions.

• Finally, Pakistan remains a key and strategically important country in a troubled region of the world, sitting as it does on the cusp of South Asia, Central Asia, and the Gulf. It also has nuclear arms, whose control and safeguarding is the key to the future stability of the region. For now the army has maintained effective control over the nuclear weapons.

But that has not allayed concerns.

These are the broad themes that emerge from a historical analysis of the Pakistan Army at key junctures in the nation’s history, and they lay the ground for a re-examination of the army’s role in Pakistan’s polity and suggestions for change. The army remains a key player on the political scene and will not easily relinquish its hold on power. Whatever new structure emerges over time will have to take the army’s nature and role into consideration and bring it into the equation, while increasing the role of the civil sector. The army’s leadership needs to be a willing participant in this effort to effect a smooth transition. Without such a shift, Pakistan’s search for nationhood and a stable political system may remain an elusive quest.

NOTES

1. Hamza Alvi, ‘Pakistan and Islam: Ethnicity and Ideology,’ S ta te a n d I d e o lo g y in th e M id d l e E a s t a n d P a k is ta n , Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi, eds., London and New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988.

2. General Jehnagir Karamat, ‘The role of the military and the future civil-military relations in Pakistan.’ Talk at Brookings Institution, Washington DC, 19 June 2000.

3. Arshad Zaman, former chief economist, planning commission, ‘National Security and Development Strategy in Pakistan.’ Paper presented at the National Defence College, 26 September 1998.

4. General (retd.) Mirza Aslam Beg, ‘The Powerbrokers of Democracy,’ T h e N a tio n , Lahore, 6 April 2007.

5. Kamal Azfar, ‘Doctrine of Necessity,’ T h e N a tio n , 2 April 2006.

6. Kamal Azfar, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum,’ T h e N a tio n , 10 September 2006.

7. In an interview with the BBC on Saturday, 17 November 2007 he declared ‘Have I done anything constitutionally illegal? Yes, I did it on November 3,’ he said, referring to imposition of emergency rule. ‘But did I do it before? Not once.’ T h e N e w s , Islamabad, 18 November 2007.

8. Mancur Olson, ‘Dictatorship, Democracy and Development,’ A m e r i c a n P o litic a l S c ie n c e R e v ie w , Vol. 87, No. 3, September 1993, pp. 567-576 and Mancur Olson, T h e L o g ic o f C o lle c tiv e A c tio n (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

9. Mahmood Monshipouri and Amjad Samuel, ‘Development and Democracy in Pakistan:

Tenuous or Plausible Nexus?’ A s ia n S u r v e y , Vol. XXXV, No. 11, November 1995.

10. Craig Baxter, ed., D ia r ie s o f F ie ld M a r s h a l M o h a m m a d A y u b K h a n 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 7 2 (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2007). Entry for Sunday, 15 January 1967, p. 49.

xliv INTRODUCTION 11. The International Institute of Strategic Studies, N u c l e a r B la c k M a r k e ts : P a k is ta n , A.Q. K h a n

a n d th e R is e o f P r o life r a tio n N e t w o r k s — A N e t A s e s s m e n t (London: IISS, 2007), pp. 109- 113.

12. Ayesha Siddiqa, M i l i t a r y In c .: I n s id e P a k is ta n 's M il i t a r y E c o n o m y (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

13. The Pakistan Army has a legion of brigadiers also who represent the one-star generals, but who are not referred to as generals, unlike, say, in the old British Indian army or the United States army.

14. Stephen Kinzer, C r e s c e n t a n d S ta r: T u r k e y B e tw e e n T w o W o r ld s (New York: Straus, and Giroux, 2001), pp. 164-65.

15. Interview with Ambassador John Monjo, former envoy to both Pakistan and Indonesia. See also Harold Crouch, ‘Patrimonialism and Military Rule in Indonesia,’ W o r ld P o litic s,

Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 571-587.

16. Crouch, ‘Patrimonialism’.

17. Siddiqa, M i l i t a r y In c.

18. Dr Parvez Hasan, ‘State and Pakistan Economy: Where have we come from? Where do we go?’

19. Ibid.

20. Mahmood-ul-Hasan Khan, ‘Defence Expenditure and Macroeconomic Stabilization:

Causality Evidence from Pakistan,’ State Bank of Pakistan, Working Papers, No. 6, December 2004.

21. World Bank W o r ld D e v e lo p m e n t I n d ic a to r s 2 0 0 6 .

2 2 . Saadat Deger and Ron Smith, ‘Military expenditure and Growth in Less-Developed

Countries,’ T h e J o u r n a l o f C o n flic t R e s o lu tio n , 27 June 1983.

23. Interview (conducted by author) with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

24. Provisional warrant of precedence. Notification. Ministry of the Interior (Home Division), Karachi, 22 February 1950.

25. Sharif interview.

26. Warrant of precedence for Pakistan published in Ministry of Home and Kashmir affairs (Home Affairs Division). Notification no. 21/2//61-Public, 7 March 1963 as amended from time to time. Corrected up to 26 June 1968.

27. Notification. Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Interior, Islamabad, 6 July 1970. Signed by AMS Ahmad.

28. Revised Warrant of Precedence. Government of Pakistan, Cabinet Secretariat, Cabinet Division. No. 7-2-2003-Min. I. Islamabad, 31 October 2006.

In H i s t o r y B o u n d

i

The Pakistan Army of today is rooted in the ancient history of the region that now constitutes Pakistan, and is bound as much by the geography of the region as by the forces that contributed to the culture and civilization of the Indian subcontinent. The peoples of Pakistan represent the ebbs and flows of tribal migrations into ancient India in the midst of countless invasions, mainly from the north-west. Cradled in the security of the Himalayas in the north and north-east, and separated from other lands by the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea on the south-east and the south-west respectively, India offered only its western frontier to intruders. And many came, leaving behind a culture and a congeries of tribes that, despite the passage of centuries, still retain the memories of ancient warring tribes of Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Central Europe.

The western marches of Pakistan are guarded by a range of mountains that spin off from the Pamir Knot and head westward toward the Hindu Kush range into the area now called Afghanistan and southward into the Sulaiman range into Balochistan. Though seemingly impregnable, this wall of mountains is broken by over a dozen major passes, some at high altitudes, others through deep chasms in the body of dried rocks that characterize much of this western frontier. Some geographers estimate as many as 23 passes. Yet, two entrances have gained prominence in history and folklore: the Khyber and Bolan passes, one feeding from the road that follows the Kabul River gorge eastward to Jalalabad and then veers south-east into the valley of Peshawar, and the other from the desert-like wastes of Kandahar into the plateau that now contains the city of Quetta. Further to the south and west is the almost perfect defence of the Makran desert adjoining the Iranian deserts of Balochistan and Dasht-i-Lut.

The northern wall of mountains is backed up by a series of parallel valleys with high and steep mountains which have made invasion for wayward intruders a death-trap. Even Alexander of Macedon, who stumbled into what was perhaps the worst invasion route into India, through the mountains of what is now Bajaur, nearly lost his life fighting entrenched mountain tribes of this region. It is not surprising, therefore, that invaders who had some knowledge of the topography of the area used the Khyber Pass to enter India.

For most, the base camp was the area of Kabul, where the mountains of the northern area of what is now Afghanistan debouched onto a plateau with rivers and orchards that offered promises of the sweeter waters of the Punjab and the riches of the Gangetic plains of India. The easterly flow of the Kabul River had carved a gorge in the mountain shield that protected the Indian frontier; this gorge became the path most frequently taken by invaders.

According to previously accepted histories and local folklore, the earliest documented invaders of India came from Western and Central Asia. More recent historians have challenged this interpretation of Indian history,

2 CROSSED SWORDS

blaming the Aryan theory on Western prejudices, favouring instead the possibility that all inhabitants of India came from elsewhere.1 These were the fair-skinned ‘Aryans,’ who routed and pushed into the South of the subcontinent the darker-skinned aborigines whom they called ‘dasyus’ or enemies and ‘Dasas’ or slaves. Since the Aryans took pride in their fairer colour, the Sanskrit words for colour varna came to mean ‘race’ or ‘caste’ and Aryan poets who composed the Veda some 3000-4000 years ago celebrated their gods who slayed the ‘Dasyus and protected the Aryan colour.’ They heaped scorn on the ‘noseless’ or flat-nosed natives while praising their own

‘beautiful-nosed’ gods.2 These Indo-Germanic people, the Aryans, were said to be the ancestors of the latter day Brahmin, Rajputs, and even the Englishmen who much later ruled India.3

The Aryans flooded the plains of India, setting up kingdoms and fortresses, and over time becoming absorbed into the culture of India. They came to constitute the caste of ‘Brahmin’, the priestly class of rulers and the Rajputs or ‘sons of rulers’—in other words the warriors—while relegating others to more menial occupations. Their southward spread was celebrated in the epic poems of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. War was elevated by them to a noble, almost religious experience.4