Facts and myths about military insubordination

Islamabad diary
It was the same army split into two which fell to the share of India and Pakistan. When they became separate forces their ethos, structure, training programmes, down to mess rules and etiquette was the same. Senior officers on both sides had been to the same institutions. They spoke the same language. They dressed the same. Their drinking habits were the same. Their messes looked alike.
So what happened? Why did the Pakistan Army take to coup-making as a full-time exercise? Why did the Indian army stay away from politics?
There were many reasons for the difference but none more important than the difference in political leadership. There were many outstanding political figures in India: Nehru, Patel, Azad, Ambedkar…one can go on and on. We had just Jinnah and then, at some distance, Liaquat. It wasn’t just that we didn’t frame a constitution on time and couldn’t hold elections when we should have. We wrong-footed ourselves on the appointment of the army chief, appointing Ayub and then letting him linger on forever. We even made him defence minister and made him sit in the cabinet where he got to see politicians not at their finest at close quarters.
That was Ayub, a man with ambitions of his own. If even an angel had been given his long tenure as army chief, it would have been tempted to seize power. No one forced the politicians of the time to grant Ayub his extension. Iskander Mirza was complicit in this decision…but the politicians of the time did not demur, and they soon paid the price of their folly.
Mian Mumtaz Daultana was one of the brightest politicians of his time. But he failed miserably to contain the anti-Ahmadiyya riots which broke out in Punjab in 1953 and the army had to be called in. Lt Gen Azam Khan imposed order in no time. The prestige of the army rose.
The event which really put Pakistan back and effectively derailed it for many years was the 1965 war. This was not a war imposed on us by India. We started off a train of events in Kashmir to which India reacted by crossing the international border in front of Lahore and Sialkot. And Field Marshal Ayub Khan – who had given himself this title perhaps for conquering Pakistan – had a mess on his hands, testifying again to that adage that it is easy to start a war, less easy to finish it.
But who was the driving force behind our botched adventure in Kashmir? The 12 Div commander, Maj Gen Akhtar Hussain Malik, was gung-ho about it but the man who really influenced the field marshal’s mind was a civilian, Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the brightest political star of his generation. We didn’t liberate Kashmir but the walls between India and Pakistan went up and militarism and heavy defence spending became permanent facts of life with us. Our national security state is less a throwback to the events of 1947 than to the 1965 war. Bhutto went on to make a political career for himself at the altar of anti-Indianism.
Gen Yahya messed up the aftermath of the 1970 elections. The forces and the dynamic unleashed by that seminal event he could not control. But in the messing up he got powerful aid from Bhutto. It was the Yahya-Bhutto combination which drove the Awami League on the path of all-out confrontation.
Gen Zia’s sinister moustache – see photos of the period and his moustache, and also the look in his eyes, have something sinister about them – dominate our remembrance of the events of 1977 which culminated in Zia’s seizure of power. But it was Bhutto’s mishandling of the elections which paved the way for that. What on earth motivated him to get elected unopposed from Larkana? And the four chief ministers followed suit, so even before the first vote was cast the election process had become tainted in some if not much of the public mind.
Surely, this is not to say that the army is a collection of lambs without ambition and ulterior motives. But why give the army a handle and the opportunity to meddle? Not always but usually, behind every Field Marshal Al-Sisi there is an incompetent and over-reaching President Mohamed Morsi. This has been our experience too: civilian incompetence playing up to military ambition.
Kargil was a colossal blunder, initiated without forethought and without permission from the civilian authority. Gen Musharraf should have been sacked then, and if had been sacked most of the corps commanders would have supported Nawaz Sharif. But at the first briefing on Kargil from the army, the prime minister reportedly liked the sandwiches very much and swallowed them with the fibs he was being told. When Nawaz Sharif tried to sack Musharraf six months later – in clumsy manner, incidentally – the latter had made his preparations.
Other countries have had long periods of dictatorship followed by democratic transitions: Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, Argentina, etc. They have handled those transitions intelligently, strengthening civilian institutions first and then curbing the power of the military. In Pakistan we seem to think that idiotic ministerial statements are enough of a substitute for civilian empowerment. And when half-cocked civilian initiatives invite a military backlash civilians are left floundering for cover.
This we see happening in the Geo affair. A quick government response would have pre-empted what quickly ballooned into a full-scale crisis, a standoff between government and army. Attempts now to defuse the crisis look like a page out of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy – and just because the government was too dumb to react fast in the first place, or it was acting smart by thinking it could profit from the affair.
There’s nothing much complicated about the doctrine or the theory. Intellectual inadequacy cannot confer institutional superiority. There is no quelling the army with bayonets because all the bayonets are with the army. In a country like ours politicians can gain the upper-hand vis-à-vis the military not by playing monkey games, as seems to be the fashion, but by knowing their Afghanistan and their Kashmir, strategic deterrence and the geography of Fata better than their military counterparts. They must be masters of their briefs if they are not to be spoon-fed by their generals.
When American and British defence ministers speak to their military commanders they are on the same wavelength, speaking the same intellectual language, discussing the same ideas. Sometimes they have violent disagreements with each other but these are played out behind closed doors. And politicians of all hues while they may disagree with the justice or injustice of a war – as in Iraq or Vietnam – always, without exception, they back their soldiers.
Ours is a strange situation. The army is caught in a war in which it has suffered heavy losses. But the government far from being out there in front is keeping a safe distance from the conflict as if coming close will taint it. Whatever the past, whatever the memories of October 1999, this is not the path of honour.
When the Americans were flying their drones we were bleating about violated sovereignty. Now that the drones have stopped has that sovereignty been restored to us? Are we free to go to Fata or do we need a Taliban visa?
So whose war is this, that of the nation or just the army’s? If the government really thinks it is just the army’s headache then the logical thing is to make peace with the Taliban at any price and cede Fata to them and save our energies for showpiece projects in Lahore and Islamabad. We seem to have already abandoned Fata in our minds. All that remains is to abandon it in fact.
Tailpiece: Some anonymous well-wisher has created a Twitter account in my name. It is a fake account. Some of the tweets are striking but they aren’t mine.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com