Today's Insurgency

Today, Pakistan is a partner of the West in the global war against militancy and terror.

Its Army is operating in a changed and highly charged domestic political environment.

Its 2 leading parties are:

1. The Pakistan Muslim League of Sharif
2. The PPP of Benazir Bhutto

These were largely excluded from the political process under Musharraf.

Only in late 2007 were their leaders allowed back from exile and re-enter Pakistani politics.

The assassination of Bhutto deprived the country of a political counterweight to Musharraf.

Pakistan’s Army is waging a largely futile war against Islamist terrorists within, as ‘Talibanization’.

The eastern front against India is relatively calmer.

But the western front bordering Afghanistan is awash with insurgent activity.

• It came from Afghanistan
• It is also homegrown, involving radical Islamists the Taliban want to:
  • fight the US in Afghanistan
  • put their stamp on the tribal areas of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan.

FATA is an ambiguous region between Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (now re-named Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or KP) and Afghanistan’s eastern border, the Durand Line.

‘Foreign’ elements aligned with al Qaeda operate in FATA.

The fear persists abroad that radical elements might use Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The Corporate Army

Many see the Pakistan Army as a corporate entity and political party, protecting its interests, sometimes even at the expense of national interests.

A recent study of ‘Milbus’ tags the military as ‘predatory’.

It assigns personal aggrandisement as the motive force behind the actions of senior serving and retired military officers.

Nature of the Army

Pakistanis proudly point to the fact that theirs is a volunteer army with a long historical tradition.

In many ways, it is often talked about in the same terms as the Army of its political ally and brother country, Turkey.

As author Stephen Kinzer states in his study of contemporary Turkey:

The sentiments in Pakistan today are similar to those in Turkey, whose army is often cited as a model for Pakistan’s Army.

Yet some see a closer resemblance to the Army of Indonesia under Presidents Sukarno and Suharto where the dual functions of the Army became entrenched.

Army officers:

• saw themselves as ‘saviours of the country’
• created a revolving door policy where military officers were given civilian jobs and then moved out to make room for new officers.

Ayesha Siddiqa estimates that the military’s business interests in Pakistan is $10 billion.

General Kayani early in his tenure realised the need for the Army to revert to its professional roots and began to distance himself from the former Chief, Musharraf.

But disengaging the Army from the economy and from commercial enterprises will take time.

The Wide Footprint

Pakistan today has an army of over 800,000, including over 550,000 regular army and the rest as paramilitary forces or reserves.

It is larger than the regular army of the United States.

It increased its force size even after losing half the country in 1971 with the independence of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan).

In the process, Pakistan’s security threat from India grew, forcing it to meet:

• India’s rapid military growth
• the appearance of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

In 2005, according to World Bank data, defence spending was around 3.4% compared with India’s 2.3%, among the highest burdens of military spending in the world.

As Pakistan develops and its economy grows, the opportunity cost of its defence-spending will rise dramatically.

Expenditures on education account for no more than 1.6% of GDP and on health for 0.5%.

The issue facing Pakistan and its military today is one that confronts many other developing countries.

Apart from crowding out other more useful investments, the relatively large size of the defence sector and its gradual expansion into other economic activities, as has been the case in Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia, for example, creates a host of ills associated with such enterprises: featherbedding or overemployment, heavy and often hidden subsidies, privileged access to scarce resources, and the creation of a powerful and new vested interest group in economic activities: the serving military and ex-servicemen.

There is no hard financial scrutiny or supervision of these enterprises or, more importantly, overall defence-spending. This distorts the allocation of scarce domestic resources and retards economic development.

Accompanying this economic domination of the political landscape, the Army has also strengthened its political status within the rubric of the state’s system of assigning seniority to different representatives of government.