Pakistan: A Hard Country (29 page)
The cantonments are not just about providing pleasant and orderly surroundings for generals. They also contain a range of services for the ordinary soldiers and their families of a quality total y unknown as far as ordinary people in the rest of Pakistan are concerned. The US
armed forces, which also devote great attention to looking after the families and dependants of their servicemen, have been cal ed ‘the last vestige of the Great Society’ in the US (a reference to President Lyndon Johnson’s social welfare programme in the 1960s). The Pakistani armed forces could wel be cal ed the only element of a great society that has ever existed in Pakistan.
AN ARMY WITH A STATE
The cantonments were original y built by the British as absolutely conscious and deliberate statements of difference and distance from the society that surrounded them, their straight lines symbolizing order and rationality; and quite apart from the British-Indian architecture that stil dominates many of the cantonments, this sense of difference and distance is stil very present. In the words of a senior officer of Inter-Services Intel igence (ISI) with whom I talked in 2009: Under the British, the military was kept in cantonments very separate from society. That was a good model, because in Pakistan there is a permanent threat of politicization and corruption of the military. We fear this very deeply and try to keep ourselves separate. Within purely military institutions, things are honest and closely control ed. This is a matter of honour for officers and people keep tabs on each other.
Corruption comes wherever there is interaction with civilian bodies.
We have a great fear of the politicians interfering in military promotions and appointments. This could split the army and if you split the army you destroy the country. Look at what happened under Nawaz Sharif’s last government. Karamat [General Jehangir Karamat, then chief of army staff] accepted a lot from Nawaz, but in the end the army couldn’t take any more.
Whenever a civilian government starts trying to interfere in this sector, we have to act in self-defence.
This of course is quite against democratic rules; but before condemning the military for this, it is worth acknowledging the very real dangers presented by political splits in the military – and asking oneself the question whether, given their records, one would real y want the likes of Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari to be responsible for military appointments.
Commitment to the army, and to the unity and discipline of the army, is dril ed into every officer and soldier from the first hour of their joining the military. Together with the material rewards of loyal service, it constitutes a very powerful obstacle to any thought of a coup from below, which would by definition split the army and would indeed probably destroy it and the country altogether. Every military coup in Pakistan has therefore been carried out by the chief of army staff of the time, backed by a consensus of the corps commanders and the rest of the high command. Islamist conspiracies by junior officers against their superiors (of which there have been two over the past generation) have been penetrated and smashed by Military Intel igence.
Military morale has come under unprecedented strain from the war in Afghanistan and the very widespread feeling among ordinary Pakistanis that the military have become servants of the Americans.
So far, however, discipline has held, and in my view wil continue to do so unless the US does something that ordinary soldiers would see as a direct affront to their honour.
The Pakistani military, more even than most militaries, sees itself as a breed apart, and devotes great effort to inculcating in new recruits the feeling that they belong to a military family different from (and vastly superior to) Pakistani civilian society. The mainly middle-class composition of the officer corps increases contempt for the ‘feudal’
political class. The army sees itself as both moral y superior to this class, and far more modern, progressive and better-educated.
In the words of Lt-General (retired) Tanvir Naqvi: The run-of-the-mil officer feels very proud of the fact that the army is a very efficient organization and is therefore a role model for the rest of the country in terms of order, discipline, getting things done and above al patriotism. He is very proud of Pakistan and very proud of the army.1
This belief is also widely present in Pakistani society as a whole, and has become dominant at regular intervals. As Nawabzada Aurangzeb Jogezai, a Pathan tribal chieftain and politician in Balochistan, told me in accents of deep gloom concerning his own political class: In Pakistan, only one institution works – the army. Nothing else does. Look at the difference between Quetta City and Quetta Cantonment. When people here enter the cantonment, their whole attitude changes. You straighten your tie, do up your shirt, leave your gun at home, become very polite. When you cross the military checkpoint again, you go back to being the same old bandit. Because in the city order is kept by the police, who are weak, corrupt and shambolic and dominated by the politicians, but the cantonment is run by the army, and in the end, this country is always saved by the army. The politicians themselves cal for this when they have made enough of a mess of things or want to get their rivals out of power. Look at the PPP. Now they say that they are for democracy and against military rule, but in 1999 Benazir distributed sweets [a traditional sign of rejoicing and congratulation] when the army overthrew Nawaz Sharif.2
These feelings in the mass of the population are always diminished by periods of direct military rule, when the military has to take responsibility for the corruption and incompetence of the state system as a whole. However, admiration for the military always comes back again, as their relative efficiency in their own area is contrasted with the failings of civilian politicians. This was the case for example during the floods of 2010 – only two years after the last military ruler left office – when the military’s rescue and relief efforts were compared with the incompetence, corruption and above al indifference of the national and provincial governments and the civilian bureaucracy. As this chapter wil bring out though, this relative military efficiency is only possible because the military has far more resources than civilian institutions.
It is unfortunately true that whatever the feelings of the population later, every military coup in Pakistan when it happened was popular with most Pakistanis, including the Pakistani media, and was subsequently legitimized by the Pakistani judiciary. As Hasan-Askari Rizvi writes of the coup of 1999: ‘The imposition of martial law was not contested by any civilian group and the military had no problem assuming and consolidating power.’3 In his book on the Pakistani military, Shuja Nawaz describes how, when his brother General Asif Nawaz was chief of army staff during Nawaz Sharif’s first government in the 1990s, some of Mr Sharif’s own ministers would come to see his brother to complain about the prime minister and ask the military to throw him out and replace him with someone else.4
It is possible that developments since 2001 have changed this pattern. This is due to the new importance of the independent judiciary and media; the way that the military’s role both in government and in the unpopular war with the Pakistani Taleban has tarnished their image with many Pakistanis; and because Pakistan’s history of military coups has taught both the PPP and the PML(N) the dangers of intriguing with the military against their political opponents. It seems highly likely that in 2009 – 10 Nawaz Sharif would have made a determined push to use mass protest to bring down the PPP national government, had he not been sure that this would inevitably bring the military back into the centre of politics, and therefore later risk repeating the experience of 1999 when the military ousted him from power too. General Kayani and the high command also deeply distrust the Sharifs.5
However, this change is not proven yet, and depends critical y on how Pakistani civilian governments perform in future. On that score, by the summer of 2009, only a year after Musharraf’s resignation, many Pakistanis of my acquaintance, especial y of course politicians who had failed to find a place in the Zardari administration or the PML(N) government of Punjab, and in the business classes, were once again cal ing for the military to step in to oust the civilian administration of President Zardari. They did not necessarily want the military to take over themselves, but to purge the most corrupt politicians and create a government of national unity or a caretaker government of technocrats.
Civilian governments themselves have often asked the military to step into aspects of government, because of its greater efficiency and honesty. For example, in 1999 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, faced with a disastrous water and power situation, put the military in charge of these sectors in order to bring some order and enforce the payment of fees. Both the Sharif and Musharraf administrations also used the military in the field of education, to search for ‘ghost schools’ (ones which are official y listed as operating, but in fact do not exist because the money for them has been stolen by officials, local politicians or both). In July 2009, the military – in the person of Lt-General Nadeem Ahmed, commander of the First Corps at Mangla, and his staff – were put in charge of co-ordinating relief and reconstruction in Swat and elsewhere.
Apart from its inherent qualities and a strong measure of popular support, the military’s power comes from the fact that it has far greater financial resources than any other state institution – indeed, than almost al the rest put together. Voltaire remarked of Frederick the Great’s Prussia that ‘Where some states have an army, the Prussian army has a state.’ In view of the sheer size and wealth of the Pakistan military and associated institutions compared to the rest of the state, much the same could be said of Pakistan – especial y if the nuclear sector is included.
By world standards, the scale of the Pakistani army is very great. As of 2010, it had 480,000 men (with another 304,000 serving in paramilitary units), almost as large as the American, and far bigger than the British army. These are not the demoralized conscripts of Iraq in 2003 or the rag-tag Taleban militias of Afghanistan in 2001, but highly motivated volunteers. Fears of the effects on international terrorism if Pakistan were to col apse have focused on the fate of the country’s nuclear deterrent; but a more immediate – and absolutely inevitable – result would be the flow of large numbers of highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosives experts and engineers, to extremist groups.
The Pakistani army is the world’s largest after China, Russia – and India, which is of course the rub. In the Middle East, South-East Asia, Africa or South America, Pakistan would be a regional great power.
India, however, eclipses it on every front. The Indian army as of 2008
had 1.1 mil ion men, twice Pakistan’s numbers; but the Indian military budget, at the equivalent of $23.5 bil ion, was almost seven times Pakistan’s $3.56 bil ion, just as India’s GDP, at more than 1 tril ion dol ars, was eight times Pakistan’s $126 bil ion.6
Pakistan’s military spending in that year made up some 17.5 per cent of the government’s budget. This was a radical reduction from the 1980s, when the military proportion of Pakistan’s budget was around 60 per cent. With India spending on the military 14.1 per cent of a vastly greater 2008 budget, Pakistan’s expenditure was not remotely enough to compete with India. Meanwhile, this military spending has gravely undermined the ability of both India and Pakistan to provide essential services to their citizens.
THE MILITARY FAMILY
The Pakistani military likes to think of itself as a big family – and in some ways it is more like a Pakistani big family than it likes to think. Its success as an institution and power over the state comes from its immunity to kinship interests and the corruption they bring with them; but it has only been able to achieve this immunity by turning itself into a sort of giant kinship group, extracting patronage from the state and distributing it to its members.
Much Pakistani corruption is obviously about personal gain. Equal y important, however, is corruption as patronage – the recycling of state money by politicians to win, retain and reward supporters, and (which comes to the same thing) to help members of the politicians’ kinship groups. Outright individual corruption in the Pakistani military is, as one would expect, centred on weapons procurement and those branches of the military dealing with civilian businesses. The most notorious case (or, at least, the most notorious that was exposed) in the past twenty years involved the chief of the naval staff from 1994 to 1997, Admiral Mansur-ul-Haq, who was convicted of taking massive kickbacks from a submarine contract and was eventual y sentenced to seven years in jail, which he managed to have radical y reduced by paying back most of the money. Such cases, however, seem to be relatively rare – and, by the standards of Pakistan in general, remarkably rare.
A journalist in the Sindhi town of Larkana explained this lack of outright corruption in the military as fol ows: One friend of mine, a colonel in the army, is about to retire. He has been al ocated a plot of land in Islamabad, which he can either build a house on or sel for a big profit, and there is also a job in the Fauji Foundation. So he doesn’t need to steal.
