ARMY AND POLITICS'

Shuja Nawaz

Pakistan is a prisoner of its geography and history.

It is significant because of its strategic location:

• at the cusp of the Middle East. the Persian Gulf, South Asia
• at the door of Central Asia and China

Its proximity to India:

• shapes Pakistan’s foreign and defence policies
• informs its domestic debates on the other.

The presence of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems in India and Pakistan hands makes this an even more volatile region.

Pakistan’s political reins have been with the Army for more than 38 years since its independence.

The country is wracked by internal divisions between provinces and between the forces of modernism and militant and radical Islam.

These continuing wars have created political uncertainty and tumult, leading to the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.

The 2008 elections gave some hope, allowing the leading political parties, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N group) to return to power. And the Islamist alliance in the North West Frontier Province was trounced by the Pashtun secular, though quite feudal, Awami National Party.

At the heart of the political maelstrom is the Pakistan Army, probably the best organised group and a veritable political force unto itself, whose every action and hint creates reverberations in Pakistan’s polity.

Under its present Army Chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has sworn to take the Army back into the barracks, there are many doubters who see the politicians facing a huge challenge in running the country effectively after nine years of autocratic rule by President Pervez Musharraf.

They point to the gradual destruction or diminution of institutions: the judiciary, the constitution, the bureaucracy, and the legislature, and to the transmogrification of a parliamentary system of government into a presidential system by Musharraf.

Against this background, cynics point to past promises by other Army chiefs who promised to keep the Army out of politics but ultimately assumed power to fill what they considered to be a political vacuum.

The weight of history leans towards a continuing role of the Army in Pakistan’s polity, whether overt or behind the scenes. Whatever path it takes, the Army too faces daunting challenges, as it begins the fight against homegrown insurgencies. For it too has changed dramatically over the years.

Pakistan came into being in 1947 as the most populous Muslim nation on the planet but the debate over its national identity has not been conducted democratically nor concluded. It has also yet to craft a stable political system that establishes the supremacy of the civil over the military, as envisioned by its founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam.

Its political parties too have yet to root their thinking and actions in well-crafted mandates and manifestos or to allow democratic selection of their own leaders: most are run on familial or dynastic lines.

Without a powerful base of support in the country as a whole, they have not been able to provide the counterweight to the highly trained and disciplined Pakistan Army that is all too ready to step in when the politicians falter.

Although the Muslim way of life was a motive behind the call for Pakistan, its early political leadership did not give an Islamic blueprint for its political development or goals. The reason for this was that the movement for Pakistan was not an Islamic movement as much as it was a movement by Indian Muslims to seek greater social and economic opportunity for themselves.

Early Nod to Islam

The Pakistan Army, the largely Muslim rump of the British Indian Army, was also saddled at birth with this paradoxical identity: the symbols of Islam but the substance of a colonial force, quite distant from the body politic of the fledgling state. It adopted, for instance, the numbers 786 for 91the identification of its General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. In Islamic numerology, 786 represents the Arabic Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim: the invocation that Muslims intone at the start of any action or venture of note.

This numerical code was emblazoned on all gateposts and vehicles, as a reminder that this was the Army of a Muslim country. For its badge, it chose two crossed swords holding up an Islamic rising crescent and five- pointed star against a green background.

But the Islamic identity was in name only at that stage. The senior echelons of the Pakistan Army at its birth were still British officers who had opted to stay on and they were succeeded by their native clones: men who saw the Army as a unique institution, separate and apart from the rest of civil society and authority.

This was the dominant cultural ethos of the Army at the time. With time, this schism between the cantonment and the city pervaded the Army’s thought processes and seemed to guide, as well as bedevil, the military’s relationship with the civilian sector. The Army initially retained its largely moderate and secular nature.

Pakistan’s history is one of conflict between the underdeveloped political system and a well-organised army that grew in strength as a counterweight to a hostile India next door and in relation to the political system.

In the words of former Army Chief, General Jehangir Karamat:

‘Whenever there is a breakdown in … stability, as has happened frequently in Pakistan, the military translates its potential into the will to dominate, and we have military intervention followed by military rule.’

But, he adds, ‘as far as the track record of the military as rulers in the past is concerned, I am afraid it is not much better than the civilians’.

The most recent direct rule of General Pervez Musharraf supports this assessment. While it ushered in a period of false stability and ostensibly opened public discourse, it stunted political growth and badly damaged the ability of civil society to participate freely in the political process.

In many ways, Musharraf was a ’liberal autocrat’ who lost his liberal bearings.

Over time the Army gained the respect of Pakistan’s population for its spirited defence of the country’s borders against a powerful India, and continued to attract large numbers of youth to its ranks, but its dominance of the polity of Pakistan eventually produced public questioning of its role.

Through coups and largely unfettered access to state resources, the Army won the battle between authority, represented by the state’s various instruments of government, and coercive power, reflected in the Army’s military prowess, leaving the instruments of state weakened and unable to function even when the military returned to its barracks.

Power Brokers

The paradox of power that hobbled Pakistan’s slow political development was that as the Army grew in strength and size, it stunted the growth of the political system whose leaders either made no attempt to rebalance the relationship between the state and the centre of power, the Army, or worse, invited the Army to settle political differences amongst themselves.

Successive political leaders suborned and eviscerated the vaunted bureaucracy and managed to weaken the educational system, thus depriving the country of alternative governance mechanisms and an informed electorate.

The Army meanwhile learned over time to establish patron-client relationships with the bureaucracy and with Islamist parties, whom it used in its efforts to fight internal populist leaders in both East and West Pakistan and fuel the Kashmiri insurgency against Indian rule. The result: a persistent Praetorian state with military or quasi-military rule for over half its life after independence from the British.

Pakistan’s existence has been marked by attempts to build a nation but without first building the institutional foundations that are needed to allow a stable federal entity to evolve in a democratic and pluralistic setting.

Ethnic and regional strife, sectarian violence, and the persistent intrusion of foreign powers into the region in the pursuit of their global agendas, all have created the setting for uneven political and economic development.

The 1999 coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power resorted to legal legerdemain to avoid being classified as a martial law regime but effectively operated under a temporary legal dispensation that allowed it to operate beyond the ambit of the constitution of the country. The ‘second coup’, in November 2007, by Musharraf effectively allowed him to replace the judiciary wholesale, muzzle the media, and ‘win’ re-election to the Presidency but in the process he had to shed his uniform, opening the door to a return to civilian rule of sorts.