COAS General Raheel Sharif’s call for across-the-board accountability to ensure enduing peace has come at a time when the political class was playing games over the mechanisms to probe the Panama Papers’ leaks that have brought the Nawaz Sharif government under great moral burden. Are we witnessing yet another manoeuvre in the name of accountability and a shift in strategy or a serious wakeup call to set the house in order?
Coming from a first-ever- victorious and popular COAS, who is not a Bonapartist and had emerged as the sole arbiter during the Imran-Qadri dharna, is no less than a bombshell for a prime minister struggling under public outrage against what is seen as the worst exposure of the ‘plunderers of national wealth’. The timing for his pious call is quite marvellous, even though it is beyond his constitutional constraints. Here, de facto moral superiority supersedes de jure limitations.
After the successful conclusion of the last leg of Zarb-e-Azb in the Shawal valley of North Waziristan, the COAS has vowed to go after the facilitators of terrorism across the country. That clearly means that a countywide cleanup operation must be accompanied by what he has now suggested “meaningful efforts” to “uproot corruption” – a glimpse of what we have seen in Karachi with the expedient complicity of the federal government.
In what appears to be the third public reprimand of the current civilian dispensation by the garrison, Gen Raheel’s statement carries three elements: a) linking success of (or shifting from) the war on terror to the war on corruption, he has said that “(the) ongoing war on terrorism cannot bring enduring peace and stability unless the menace of corruption is not uprooted”. Framing corruption as a national security threat, he has proposed: “therefore, across-the-board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan”. And becoming a pro-active stakeholder in this new war, he has vowed that the “armed forces will fully support every meaningful effort in that direction”.
Before jumping to the serious ramifications of the COAS’s call, it is necessary that the critical questions that are being raised on the contents of the statement are dispassionately analysed.
First, how can a COAS give such a statement – which is beyond his institutional mandate? The question is about more than being legalistic. Following the safe exit of former COAS Gen Musharraf – an escape from the legitimate judicial process – an obvious ‘crossing of limits’ by Gen Raheel, even undoubtedly for a good cause, indicates one of the basic causes behind all-round corruption – rule of law is for the powerless. And the powerful elite, be it the khaki or the mufti, is above the law.
Second, has our strategic focus now shifted from a war on terror to a war against corruption along with an auxiliary combing-up operation against the “facilitators of terrorism” internally? And are we back to the principal security threat from India stratagem and a friendly backyard in Afghanistan externally? The COAS had clearly indicated in his important speech at Gwadar that the principal security threat is from an eternal enemy India and its state and non-state actors – a clear reference to India’s RAW operations through its proxies in Pakistan and from the territories of Afghanistan and Iran. Therefore, the war against terrorism has to be concluded by eliminating hostile non-state actors and not taking it beyond that as was originally promised by the National Action Plan, which remains more or less unimplemented even by half.
Three, how could terrorism be a consequence of corruption and “enduring peace” be dependent on the latter’s “uprooting”? This is somehow flawed logic since both corruption and terrorism are the consequence of failed or failing states or authoritarian states that are averse to rule of law. The top 20 most corrupt countries are either failed states or authoritarian states and their common feature is the absence of rule of law or the prevalence of rule of the jungle for the powerful.
And the top 20 least corrupt countries are those where there are higher levels of transparency, public accountability, unrestricted freedoms, unencumbered human and civil rights, independent and powerful monitoring, regulatory and judicial institutions, apolitical civil and military bureaucracies, supremacy of rule of law and an undiluted democracy. A leaf could have been taken from President Obama’s perhaps apt diagnosis of Pakistan: a “terribly dysfunctional state”.
Four, how far is corruption feeding into terrorism and how does it become a threat to security, and whose security? Indeed, there are internal and external financers of terrorism and religious extremism who need to be nabbed and prosecuted as part of NAP. However, the bigger issue is that corruption is eating up and siphoning off our very limited national resources and, thus, it poses a threat to first human security and progress and second to military security as well.
Even though our defence expenditure as a percentage of GNP is higher than India’s – one of the highest military spenders in the world, which we can’t match both in the medium- and long-term – our extended security agendas require greater revenues than are being made available by crowding out spending on social sectors and development.
The high brass of the armed forces must feel quite frustrated when it finds that revenue losses are to the tune of Rs2000, or 7.3 percent of the GDP – due to tax evasion and a much greater pilferage of resources at every level and everywhere – while forgetting the exceptional privileges enjoyed by the sacred cows. It is unfortunate that the Islamic Republic has become the Republic of Kleptomaniacs. Our business class as a whole, with some exceptions, is not much different from the notorious robber barons and is not keen in entrepreneurship but rather on rent-seeking.
The landed aristocracy is rabidly parasitic, not ready to pay a penny in taxes while desiring all kinds of subsidies. The civil and military bureaucracy, being the most developed and powerful institutions, have either regularised their undue privileges or are usurping the national resources by hook or crook. The whole system of governance stinks of privilege, graft, pilferage, bribe and rent/commission.
The ramifications of the COAS’s statement are going to be dramatic, and it is going to make some difference. The defence minister has already concurred with the statement of the most powerful man. As the prime minister arrives back from London, the government may be more inclined to agree to a mechanism of investigation that is acceptable to the opposition. Most warranted are reforms in the whole system of governance – above any point-scoring.
Hence, the COAS’s call for “across-the-board accountability”, without any exception and through “meaningful efforts”, involving both accountability and systemic reforms, deserves to be taken seriously. It also needs to not again allow anyone to revert to a witch hunt of one section of politicians or the other. The Panama Papers leaks should be effectively investigated, and reforms be undertaken to stop current and future corruption. Most importantly, the war against terrorism remains a principal threat and cannot be won without defeating religious extremism – corruption or no corruption.
The writer is a senior journalist.
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