Pakistan: A Hard Country (30 page)

Another friend, an SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police], wil also retire soon, and he wil have nothing but his miserable pension to live on, so he has to secure his retirement through corruption.

A military friend told me of some retired military men, like Colonel Shafiq-ur-Rehman, who have become wel -known Pakistani humorist writers, ‘but they write humour, not satire, because they are happy, live comfortably and play a lot of golf’.

In the Pakistani military, as in some Western defence establishments, one can almost speak of ‘il egal’ and ‘legal’ corruption.

The first is theft pure and simple, as in the case of Mansur-ul-Haq. The second is benefits to servicemen – and, much more importantly, to retired servicemen – not accessible to the rest of the population. In this, it is worth noting, Pakistan is not so different from the US, where senior officers and officials on retirement step into senior jobs with private corporations dealing with the military, and use their military knowledge and connections for personal gain.

Concerning the military patronage system, public criticism in Pakistan has focused on three areas: the appointment of retired officers to senior jobs in the administration and state-owned corporations (true, but also true in the US, albeit to a lesser extent); the ability of officers to buy land through instalment plans on easy terms in Defence Housing Associations (or to be al ocated a free plot after thirty-two years’ service); and militarycontrol ed businesses. Some of this criticism is fair, but some reflects ignorance both of military needs and of Pakistani realities.7

Thus the Pakistani military, like al militaries, suffers from the problem of a sharply tapering promotion pyramid as officers and soldiers get older, and the need to retire large numbers of officers in their forties or fifties into an economy which cannot provide nearly enough middle-class jobs to support them. Access to plots of land is in itself a reasonable way of ensuring a decent retirement, and is part of a South Asian tradition going back to British and indeed Mughal days.

Also reflecting this old tradition is the military’s grant of land to wounded soldiers and the families of soldiers kil ed in action.

The state also reserves certain junior categories of state service for ex-soldiers, including 50 per cent of places for official drivers.8 Officers of the rank of captain or its equivalent are also al owed to transfer to the senior ranks of the civil service and police if they pass the relevant examinations. Apart from this regular system, however, over the years a great many retired or serving senior officers have been appointed to positions in the diplomatic service, the bureaucracy, state-owned industrial and power companies and the administration of universities.

In February 2008, General Kayani ordered that al serving (but not of course retired) officers resign from positions in the civilian sector.

General Naqvi justified the system of land purchase to me in words that have been used by other officers to justify the patronage system as a whole:

The officer in general sees himself as leading a frugal life compared to the civilian officials, let alone the politicians and businessmen. An officer’s career may seem privileged, but it involves a nomadic life, living for long years in freezing or boiling garrisons in the middle of nowhere, not being able to look after your children after a certain age because they have to be sent off to school and live with your parents. Wages have gone down radical y compared to the private sector over the past thirty years, though you are stil quite handsomely rewarded at retirement. That is why it is so important to have the possibility to buy land for a house over a long period and on easy terms ...9

The problem is that the military’s power within the state (or importance to the state) has meant that over the years the state has given these Defence Housing Associations (DHAs) free land in what used once to be outer suburbs of cities but are now among the most expensive pieces of real estate in Pakistan. In the case of the Lahore DHA, according to the BBC, the real value of a plot increased in the six years from 2000 to 2006 from $65,000 to more than $1.5 mil ion.10

Inevitably, officers are buying their plots at subsidized rates and then sel ing them at market ones; and generals, who can acquire up to four plots depending on their rank (or even more at the very top – Musharraf had seven), are making fortunes – perfectly legal y. Like US

generals taking jobs with arms companies, this might be said to come under the heading of behaviour which isn’t il egal but damned wel ought to be; and is indeed attracting some criticism within the military itself. In the words of Major-General (retired) Mahmud Ali Durrani, They should have given every officer just one plot and then there would have been no criticism, but people got greedy. When I was a captain, I was the only officer I knew who had a car of his own (a present from my father) – and I couldn’t afford to buy a new tyre! Everyone used to bicycle to work. But then society and the middle classes became more affluent, and the officers felt that they had to catch up. The army couldn’t afford higher pay, so they looked for other ways.11

With the exception of the state-owned armaments companies, Pakistan’s military businesses were created to look after retired and disabled soldiers. The foundations were laid by the British Military Reconstruction Fund for retired and wounded Indian soldiers during the Second World War. In 1953, the Pakistani military decided to invest their share of the remaining funds in commercial ventures, with the profits stil being used for the same purpose.

In 1967 the resulting complex of industries and charitable institutions was renamed the Fauji Foundation. By 2009, the Fauji Group (the commercial wing) had assets worth Rs125 bil ion ($1.48 bil ion), and the Fauji Foundation (running the welfare institutions), Rs44 bil ion. A popular misconception notwithstanding, the Group’s commercial activities are not exempt from taxation, and in 2005 – 6 they paid Rs32.4 mil ion in taxes. Its spending on welfare, however, is tax-exempt as a charity.

The Fauji Board is headed by the chief secretary of the defence ministry (a civil servant), and made up of serving senior officers. The chief executive is a retired general. The Fauji Group started in textiles, and now owns or has shares in fertilizer, cement, cereal and electricity plants, security services and experimental farms. Fauji cornflakes confront many Pakistanis every day for breakfast. As of 2009 the group employed 4,551 ex-servicemen and 7,972 civilians. It obviously is a lucrative – though limited – source of patronage for ex-officers and NCOs.

When servicemen retire, only they themselves (and not their families) are guaranteed military health care. The Fauji Foundation, with a budget of around Rs4 bil ion a year, therefore provides health care, education and vocational training for the children and dependants of ex-servicemen, and for the parents, widows and families of soldiers kil ed or disabled in action.

Men actual y serving are helped by the welfare trusts of the army, navy and air force, with help for their families’ education and support for amenities like sports clubs. The Army Welfare Trust has total assets of some Rs50 bil ion ($590 mil ion), and owns among other things 16,000 acres of farmland, rice and sugar mil s, cement plants, and an insurance company. Unlike the Fauji Foundation, the welfare trusts benefit from lower rates of tax and other state subsidies.

As of 2009, the Fauji Foundation runs 13 hospitals, 69 medical centres and mobile dispensaries, 93 schools, 2 col eges (one for boys and one for girls), and 77 technical and vocational training centres.

Since its creation, it has provided Rs3.2 mil ion stipends to the children of soldiers. It also runs a private university, with a proportion of funded places for the children of ex-servicemen. Having spent some time visiting military hospitals and talking with soldiers who have been disabled in the fight with the Taleban, I must confess that al this seems to me both necessary and admirable. In addition, the Fauji industries have a reputation for being wel run and looking after their workforce.

The chief objections raised against them are threefold. Firstly, that the military should not be involved in commercial business on principle.

This seems to me just another case of insisting that Pakistan rather selectively fol ow Western models. Since the 1990s, the Chinese military has divested itself of its formerly huge direct commercial holdings, but it has done so by spinning these off into independent companies run by retired officers – similar to those of the Fauji Foundation. The Chinese economic model is emerging as a serious rival to that of the West in Asia, so there is no particular reason why the Pakistani military should be judged according to Western patterns in this matter.

The paral el with China is also interesting from another point of view.

As the Chinese, South Korean, Taiwanese (and even to some extent Japanese) examples show, high levels of corruption and of state links to private companies are entirely compatible with the highest rates of economic growth. What appears essential, though, is that the corruption be informal y regulated, limited, and above al predictable; and that both the corruption and the relationship with companies exist in an atmosphere which demands that patronage produce economic results, and not merely the endless circulation of money and sinecures.

If Pakistan could move towards this kind of corruption, it would have taken an immense step towards economic, political and indeed moral progress.

This argument also partial y answers one of the most serious objections to the industries owned by the military: that the Fauji and Army Welfare Fund industries’ link to the state gives them unfair commercial advantages. It is true that the Welfare Fund has benefited from subsidies, but at least they appear to have been ploughed back into its industries and not simply stolen, as has been the case with so many state loans to private business.

Moreover, if the military businesses were deriving real y massive competitive advantages from the state, it should be above al rival businessmen who complain, and in my experience this is not the case.

On the contrary, ‘it is better that the military is involved in industry – it helps them understand industry’s concerns’, as an industrialist friend told me. Only half-jokingly, he suggested that rather than the Fauji Group being run by a retired general, it should be a requirement for generals being considered for chief of the army staff that they should have previously run the Group – ‘that way, our next military ruler would be an experienced businessman’.

It would also be quite unfair to see the role of ex-soldiers in society as chiefly the result of state patronage. As in some Western societies – but to a far greater extent – retired soldiers are also prized by private businesses and NGOs for the qualities of discipline, honesty, hard work and indeed higher education that they have acquired during their military service – qualities which alas are not so common in wider Pakistani society.

Thus one of the most moving and convincing tributes to the military that I have seen was paid by the Citizens’ Foundation educational charity, mentioned in the last chapter. The Foundation, which is funded by a mixture of business and individual contributions, largely employs ex-officers as its administrative and directing staff. This is both because of their reputation for efficiency and honesty, and because the soldiers, having spent so much of their lives in garrisons, are prepared to go and work in the countryside and smal towns, in a way that most educated Pakistani civilians are not.

There has, however, been one very dark spot on the military’s involvement in the economy. This was the use in 2002 – 3 of the paramilitary Rangers to brutal y suppress protests by tenants on agricultural land owned by the military at Okara in Punjab after the terms of their tenancy were arbitrarily changed. This behaviour was no worse than that of the ‘feudal’ politicians whom officers profess to despise – but also no better. The Okara case indicates the improbability of the military ever returning to the land reform agenda of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and of launching a serious assault on the ‘feudal’ elites – of which the army itself has to some extent become a part. It was apparently, however, a unique case, which has not been repeated on military-owned land elsewhere.

The imperative to look after retirees and soldiers’ families is especial y strong in the Pakistani military because of the central role of morale in Pakistani military thinking. Recognizing from the first that the Pakistani armed forces were going to be heavily outnumbered by the Indians, and that Pakistan could only afford limited amounts of high technology, a decision was made to rely above al on the morale and fighting spirit of the soldiers. This emphasis also reflected self-perceptions of Muslim Punjabis and Pathans as natural fighters, and the legacy of British belief in loyalty to the regiment.

As part of the effort to maintain strong morale, the Pakistani armed forces offer both high pay and excel ent services – services that are good by world standards, not just the miserable ones of Pakistan in general. They offer these services not just to the soldiers and their immediate families, but to retired soldiers and the parents of soldiers.