Pakistan: A Hard Country (31 page)
The effect has been to make military service very attractive indeed for many ordinary Pakistanis, and to ensure a high quality of recruits.
The family aspect of the Pakistan military was il ustrated for me by a visit to the Combined Military Hospital in Peshawar in July 2009, an old red-brick British building with Pakistani additions. Until the fighting with the militants began, its biggest task was delivering babies – 1,321 of them in 2008, ‘because Pakistani soldiers are very vigorous, you see’, as Colonel Bushra, the female head of the family wing (and indeed a grandmotherly kind of officer), told me with a twinkle.12
When I visited the hospital, of its 600 beds, 47 were occupied by the parents of soldiers, some 60 by children, and around 40 by non-military civilians. The hospital and its seventy doctors provide important additional services to the horribly underfunded and overloaded civilian medical services of Peshawar, with specialist paediatric and intensive care units, incubators for premature babies (four when I visited), and so on.
It was not just the equipment, but also the cleanliness and general atmosphere of the hospital that were striking after some of the truly ghastly state medical institutions I had visited in Pakistan. And the effort needed to maintain both cleanliness and diligence in the middle of the South Asian monsoon wil not need emphasizing to anyone who has lived through monsoons in the plains.
As the hospital commander, Brigadier Khalid Mehmood, in an interview on the same day, told me, ‘Al this is so that when the soldier is fighting at the front, he knows that his family are being looked after at home. This is crucial for maintaining the morale of the soldiers, on which in the end everything else depends. This means not just medical services, but also education, and help with finding jobs when the soldier retires.’
The brigadier also exemplified the other family aspect of the Pakistani military. He is by origin an Awan from Guj ar Khan in the Potwar region of Punjab, stil the most important Pakistani military recruiting ground, and his father, grandfather, uncle and father-in-law were al officers. Most of the wounded officers I met were also from families with previous military connections.
To create services and surroundings like this hospital, two things are necessary: a strong sense of col ective solidarity and esprit de corps, with the dedication and honesty that this creates; and a great deal of money. Neither element can exist without the other. The Pakistani military is a striking institution by the standards of the developing world, and an absolutely remarkable one for Pakistan. Pakistani military discipline, efficiency and solidarity have repeatedly enabled the Pakistani military to take over the state, or to dominate it from behind the scenes. They have used this power in turn to extract enormous financial benefits for the armed forces.
However, the military’s col ective spirit has meant that in general these resources have not simply been recycled into patronage or moved to bank accounts in the West, as would have been true of the civilian politicians. They have mostly been used for the benefit of the armed forces; and these rewards in turn have played an absolutely critical part in maintaining military morale, discipline and unity.
The effects have been similarly Janus-faced. The military has repeatedly overthrown Pakistani ‘democracy’, and the scale of military spending has severely limited funds available for education, development, medical services and infrastructure. If continued, this imbalance risks eventual y crippling the country and sending Pakistan the way of the Soviet Union – another country which got itself into a ruinous military race with a vastly richer power. On the other hand, the rewards of loyal military service have helped to prevent military mutinies and coups by junior officers – something that would plunge Pakistan overnight into African chaos, and usher in civil war and Islamist revolt. As Tan Tai Yong writes of the British Indian army, in terms very relevant to the forces of Pakistan today in their fight with the Pakistani Taleban:
Clearly, the tasks of securing the reliability of the Indian Army did not merely pertain to military discipline and punishment; the maintenance of its social base – the soldier at his home – was equal y, if not more important, as 1857 showed. One could plausibly argue that it was in the soldiers’ homes and vil ages, and not in the regiments, that the loyalty of the army was often won or lost. Similarly, the maintenance of the recruiting ground did not merely entail ensuring a constant supply of recruits.
More than that, it demanded the safeguarding of the interests of the general military population – recruits, serving soldiers, pensioners and their dependants – as a whole.13
This is hardly an academic issue. Since 9/11, the Pakistani military has been forced into an al iance with the US which a majority of Pakistani society – including the soldiers’ own families – detests. At least until 2007 – 8, when the Pakistani Taleban emerged as a direct threat to Pakistan itself, much of the military was extremely doubtful about military action against Pakistani militants, seeing this as a campaign against fel ow Pakistani Muslims for the good of and on the orders of the US. As a lt-colonel fighting the Pakistani Taleban in Buner told me in July 2009,
The soldiers, like Pakistanis in general, see no difference between the American and the Russian presences in Afghanistan. They see both as il egal military occupations by aliens, and that the Afghan government are just pathetic puppets. Today, also, they stil see the Afghan Taleban as freedom-fighters who are fighting these occupiers just like the Mujahidin against the Russians. And the invasion of Iraq, and al the lies that Bush told, had a very bad effect – soldiers think that the US is trying to conquer or dominate the whole Muslim world.
But as far as our own Taleban are concerned, things are changing.
Before, I must tel you frankly, there was a very widespread feeling in the army that everything Pakistan was doing was in the interests of the West and that we were being forced to do it by America. But now, the militants have launched so many attacks on Pakistan and kil ed so many soldiers that this feeling is changing ...
But to be very honest with you, we are brought up from our cradle to be ready to fight India and once we join the army this feeling is multiplied. So we are always happy when we are sent to the LOC [the Line of Control dividing Pakistani and Indian Kashmir] or even to freeze on the Siachen. But we are not very happy to be sent here to fight other Pakistanis, though we obey as a matter of duty. No soldier likes to kil his own people. I talked to my wife on the phone yesterday. She said that you must be happy to have kil ed so many miscreants. I said to her, if our dog goes mad we would have to shoot it, but we would not be happy about having to do this.
Between 2004 and 2007 there were a number of instances of mass desertion and refusal to fight in units deployed to fight militants, though mostly in the Pathan-recruited Frontier Corps rather than the regular army. By early 2010, more than 2,000 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries had been kil ed. In these moral y and psychological y testing circumstances, anything that helps maintain Pakistani military discipline cannot be altogether bad – given the immense scale of the stakes concerned, and the appal ing consequences if that discipline were to crack.
HISTORY AND COMPOSITION
Given the circumstances of its birth, it is somewhat surprising that the Pakistani military survived at al – and, at the same time, it was precisely because Pakistan’s birth was so endangered that the new state came to attach such central importance to its military, and from the first gave the military such a disproportionate share of its resources. As Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, stated in 1948, ‘the defence of the state is our foremost consideration. It dominates al other governmental activities’. 14 This is a statement with which almost al subsequent governments (civilian and military) would have agreed. It is stil true today – though the defence of the state is now belatedly being seen in terms of defence against religiously inspired revolt as wel as against India and ethnic separatism.
From the first, therefore, the leaders of the Pakistani state felt acutely endangered from within and without: from India of course, but also from Afghanistan with its claim to Pakistan’s Pathan territories, and equal y importantly by internal revolt. This combination of threats led to the creation of what has been cal ed Pakistan’s ‘national security state’. The same sense of external and internal threats has led to the creation of a powerful national security establishment in India also – but on a far smal er scale compared to the Indian state as a whole, and with a far smal er role for the uniformed military.
Relative size and geography have contributed greatly to the sense of danger, often spil ing over into paranoia, which characterizes the Pakistani security establishment. With the exception of the barren and thinly populated bulge of Balochistan in the south-west, Pakistan is basical y a long thin country on either side of the River Indus. Its second largest city, Lahore, is virtual y on the Indian frontier, and the crucial highway linking Lahore and Karachi is, for long stretches, within 50
miles of Indian territory.
This led in the past to a frequent obsession with strategic depth in the Pakistani military, which has had particularly damaging effects on Pakistani policy towards Afghanistan – seen as a potential source of that increased depth. In February 2010, the then COAS (Chief of Army Staff), General Kayani, publicly defined ‘strategic depth’ as meaning ‘a peaceful and friendly Afghanistan’, and offered to help train the Afghan National Army. 15 However, most of the Pakistani military see such a stable and friendly Afghan state as unachievable, and an Indian-influenced and hostile government in Kabul as a real possibility. So a Taleban-control ed territory under Pakistani influence remains the Pakistani high command’s reserve position.
Before being too harsh on the Pakistani military over this, one should remember that it is the job of militaries to be paranoid, and that the US security establishment in its time has generated remarkable levels of concern over infinitely smal er potential threats than those faced by Pakistan. The sense of strategic disadvantage and embattlement has been with the Pakistani military from the start.
Partition left Pakistan with hardly any of the military industries of British India, with an acute shortage of officers (especial y in the more technical services) and with a largely eviscerated military infrastructure.
The institutional and human framework inherited by Pakistan, however, proved resilient and effective. This framework remains that created by the British. As the history of law, democracy, administration and education in Pakistan demonstrates, other British institutions in what is now Pakistan (and to a lesser extent India as wel ) failed to take, failed to work, or have been transformed in ways that their authors would scarcely have recognized. The British military system, on the other hand, was able to root itself effectively because it fused with ancient local military traditions rather than sweeping them away (as was the case with education and law).
By a curious paradox, the Indian revolt of 1857, the defeat of which dealt a shattering blow to Muslim power and civilization in South Asia, also laid the basis for the future Pakistani army. The mutiny of most of the soldiers from the traditional British recruiting grounds of Bihar and Awadh left the British extremely unwil ing to trust soldiers from these regions again.
By contrast, Muslim and Sikh soldiers from the recently conquered Punjab mostly remained ‘true to their salt’ – in the case of the Muslims, in part because the British had delivered them from the hated rule of the Sikhs. To this was added British racial prejudice, which saw the tal , fairskinned Punjabis and Pathans as ‘martial races’, providing military material far superior to the smal er and darker peoples of the rest of India. This was a strange belief, given that by far the most formidable Muslim opponents the British Raj ever faced, the armies of Tipu Sultan, were from South India – but it is a prejudice that is completely shared by the Punjabis themselves, Pakistani and Indian alike.
By the 1920s, Punjab, the NWFP and Nepal (i.e. the Gurkhas) were providing some 84 per cent of the soldiers of the British Indian army.
On the eve of the Second World War, almost 30 per cent of al soldiers were made up of Punjabi Muslims alone. These in turn were recruited chiefly from the Potwar (Potohar) area of north-western Punjab adjoining the NWFP, where the chief British military headquarters and depot at Rawalpindi was situated. The Jat, Rajput, Awan, Gakkhar and Guj ar tribes of this region continue to provide a majority (though a diminishing one) of Pakistani soldiers today.
Punjabi domination of the army (not to nearly the same extent of the air force and navy, but these are much smal er services) is a central element in complaints from the other provinces about Punjabi domination of Pakistan as a whole – an issue which wil be discussed further in Chapter 7 (on Punjab). This accusation is somewhat overstated, at least as far as the senior ranks are concerned. Of Pakistan’s four military rulers, only Zia-ul-Haq was a Punjabi.
