A non-virtuous civil-military symbiosis

As individuals go, Army Chief Raheel Sharif is an exceptional wartime general – the successes of the campaign against the TTP and its member organisations, as well as its many affiliates, is a testament to his acumen as a Pakistani warrior for the ages.

Yet often, one feels uncomfortable singling out one soldier in a fighting force of nearly a million, when we consider all arms of the military combined. Few things require teamwork and coordination like a war – and the fabled discipline of our armed forces certainly rests on the coherence and unity of our troops. So in praising the soon-to-retire army chief, what we are essentially doing is speaking about the entire institution. At least this is what conventional wisdom suggests.

Yet the same logic does not work as well in reverse. If we were to find aspects of the military’s conduct to be worthy of reflection, or even criticism, then where should the fulcrum of such criticism be? It certainly cannot be in the person of any individual officer of the armed forces – because identifying individual officers by name for criticism about institution-wide behaviour would suggest that individuals have the capacity and capability to shift the behaviour of entire institutions. This would hold true for weaker institutions, like our parliament. But does it also hold true for our armed forces? This is certainly an area of contentious debate.

The larger debate then is also an interesting one. Do the norms for analysing political parties or parliament or executive offices differ from the norms for analysing the performance of our armed forces? Should they? One solid argument may be that they should. Soldiers put their bodies in the line of fire as a matter of job description. Criticism of soldiers needs to ensure that it does not cross lines that would end up making the job of soldiering so contentious as to render it less appealing to do. In simpler terms, by invoking controversy around soldiering, we risk making the job harder than it already is. A country like Pakistan, surrounded by complex geopolitics in the past, in the present and for the indefinite future requires a soldiering culture that is unblemished by domestic controversy.

Of course, this logic is more than solid. To many Pakistanis, it will sound airtight. It is. But there is one critical condition. Soldiering can only be protected from the blemishes of ordinariness through the collective efforts of citizens at large, and soldiers themselves. Or put another way, we, ordinary citizens, owe our soldiers the respect and space to be able to offer their lives in the line of duty without the unnecessary burden of politics. Concurrently, soldiers owe themselves, each other and the citizenry at large a laser-focus on their job: soldiering. Any involvement in politics renders the citizen’s job impossible. Which then makes the soldier’s job more difficult.

Thus we require a virtuous symbiosis in which Pakistani soldiers are spared criticism of either individuals, or of the armed forces as an institution, in return for a thankful citizenry that is allowed to get on with the business of governing (poorly or well) without dragging the brave and gallant men and women in uniform.

Unfortunately, this virtuous symbiosis has never fully come to pass in our young and beautiful country. Instead, every few years, we are forced to contend with ugly scenes of domestic unrest in which the symbiosis between military and civilian institutions is anything but virtuous. Ugliness is a reality in every society and every country in the world. One look across the border at India is enough to convince us of this universal fact. However, most societies and countries in the world have figured out the outer limits of their ugliness. The behaviour of individuals and institutions – collectively – is thus framed within a set of core national goals that are not contested. The story of Pakistani statehood and nationhood thus continues – with our core national goals either not agreed, or repeatedly contested because of both internal and external factors.

This is not merely a theoretical or conceptual exercise. Pakistan has had three explicit military coups where the army governed the country for almost a decade, on average. Three of the country’s most historic prime ministers have been assassinated or hanged. Foreign policy has been dominated by fear, rather than by hope. And whilst many friends of the state, both individuals and countries, have become foes, few foes have ever been turned into friends. Also, Bangladesh.

In short, the inability to frame the outer perimeter of national consensus or national goals on which there is cross civil-military agreement is a source of insecurity. Indeed, extreme insecurity.

Let us dispense with unnecessary niceties about the current government. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was given the most glorious opportunity for national transformation ever afforded to any man or woman in May of 2013. His insistence on grooming his daughter for a leadership role has come at the expense of political parties, parliament, cabinet, and civil-military relations. The Panama Papers leaks do not name the prime minister of Pakistan. They may be a legal liability or not, but they represent a political liability only because of the monarchical instinct that PM Sharif seems intent on clinging to. Such obduracy in the absence of a younger brother with an incomparable track record of delivery would make sense. With Shahbaz Sharif toiling away, building one metro after another, it makes no sense at all.

Let us also dispense with niceties about the military’s role in non-military affairs and its outsized influence in shaping the national conversation in this country since the May 2013 general election. This incredible reach is one aspect of the reality. The campaigns against certain sections of the media are another. The cultivation of negative stereotypes about a part of the political class is another. We are now in the 21st     century, it is harder and harder to obfuscate where these things come from.

Perhaps most disconcerting of all is the tendency of power to suppress criticism and debate in this country of free men and women who tend to ‘step out of line’. Yet, nothing can change the reality that this is also the Pakistan of these men and women. One does not have to agree with or like the reporting or analysis of these men and women. But just consider what drives people in this country to keep making choices that are seen as fatal. Consider the kind of passion and conviction that allows people with pens and laptops to make those choices?

          Instead of celebrating the valour and decency of those that enable us to celebrate the freedoms within which this country births so many heroes of the pen, we end up lamenting the restrictions put by those very enablers to muzzle that freedom with? God. What an unmitigated disaster for the patriot with the faculties of a functioning mind.

PM Sharif may or may not survive the Panama Papers scandal, but the broken record of our civil-military disequilibrium will not cease to keep playing the same old song. Pakistan is trapped in an unhealthy and perpetual crisis of a civil-military symbiosis in which our national institutions cannot agree on a core script.

In the last year alone, Pakistan has had the largest window of strategic space available to it in a quarter century: dissension within the ranks of the Afghan national unity government, a flirtatious Russia and Iran – seemingly willing to overcome their addiction of India, and most of all, an organic and indigenous uprising against Indian brutality in Occupied Kashmir.

Our strategic response? Evicting Afghan refugees like Sharbat Gula, fiery speeches by groups like ASWJ, an inquiry commission into the story by Cyril Almeida and slideshow videos trying to paint researchers as treasonous fifth columnists. What a spectacle.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.