close
Thursday March 28, 2024

Two centres

By our correspondents
November 29, 2015
Capital suggestion
May 11, 2013: The PML-N bagged 14.8 million votes nearly 33 percent of the popular votes and 166 National Assembly seats. June 5, 2013: Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif became the only politician in Pakistan’s parliamentary history to take oath of the office of the prime minister for a third time.
In the National Assembly, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif received 244 votes followed by Makhdoom Amin Fahim 42 votes and Makhdoom Javed Hashmi 31 votes.
November 6, 2013: General (r) Musharraf was granted bail after more than seven months of house arrest.
November 17, 2013: The government of PM Nawaz Sharif announced that it “will move the court to try former president Pervez Musharraf under Article 6 – high treason – for subverting the constitution of Pakistan twice….” Under the constitution, the maximum penalty for treason is death.
November 29, 2013: General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani passed the baton of command to General Raheel Sharif at the Army Hockey Stadium.
June 15, 2014: The ISPR, under the command of Major-General Asim Saleem Bajwa, issued Press Release No. PR124-2014 stating that “on the directions of the Government, Armed forces of Pakistan have launched a comprehensive operation against foreign and local terrorists who are hiding in sanctuaries in North Waziristan Agency. The Operation has been named Zarb-e-Azb.”
August 14, 2014: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf began the Tsunami March and the Pakistan Awami Tehreek started its Inquilabi March.
Historical context: On May 26, 1989 PM Benazir Bhutto, wanting to see a loyalist as the head of ISI, replaced Lieutenant-General Hameed Gul, the-then DG-ISI, with Shamsur Rehman Kallu, a veteran intelligence officer and a retired general.
On September 9, 2008 CJP Abdul Hameed Dogar administered the oath to Asif Ali Zardari as the 12th president of Pakistan. On December 1, 2008 Bruce Riedel, Obama’s adviser on South Asia, disclosed that “Mr Zardari has also promised to get control over the ISI……”
There’s evidence that our elected leadership has had plans of politicising the military bureaucracy – and bring it in line with the politicised civil bureaucracy. There’s evidence that the military bureaucracy has always resisted – and reacted aggressively – to all such civilian adventures (the popular belief within Pakistan remains that a non-politicised military bureaucracy is in our national interest). More recently, there’s evidence that such civilian attempts followed by resistance – and reaction by the military bureaucracy – have historically ushered in an era of civil-military equilibrium.
Nash equilibrium, named after John Nash, the American Nobel laureate, is a “stable state of a system involving the interaction of different participants in which no participant can gain by a unilateral change of strategy if the strategies of the others remain unchanged.” Simply put, the civilian leadership has given away what the military wanted and now the two are in a state of Nash equilibrium – the one will not change its strategy unless the other does.
The current path towards the most recent Nash equilibrium has given birth to a hybrid form of governance wherein there’s limited civil-military cooperation and definite bipolarity (read: two centres of power).
Who said “assumptions are the termites of relationships?”
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com Twitter: @saleemfarrukh