The
Pakistani Army — Reloaded
By
Dr Ahmad Faruqui
Dansville,
CA
With single-minded
zeal, General Musharraf has re-invented the mission
of the Pakistani army. For half a century, it
was to acquire Kashmir. Given the disparity in
forces, the mission was carried out by “freedom
fighters.” But after 9/11, this tactic became
infeasible.
So Musharraf repositioned
the army to fight the terrorists. In return, Washington
gave him a carte blanche on democracy. Now, as
Hasan Askari-Rizvi noted recently, Musharraf is
focused on getting the economy moving again, even
if that means diffusing tensions with India. Like
Zia, he knows economic prosperity is the best
defense against domestic threats to military rule.
Zia, of course, had borrowed the idea from Ayub,
who made economic reform his first priority after
taking over as President on October 27, 1958.
Musharraf’s
strategy of reloading the military to fight al-Qaida
comes through clearly in how he reshuffled the
top brass on October 2. All general officers (besides
himself) that played a role in the Kargil conflict
and who were hawks on Kashmir are now out of service.
All those with pro-Taliban leanings and who supported
the “strategic depth” theory are out.
To use Stephen Cohen’s expression, he has
rented out the army to Washington.
A few days after
the coup of 1999, Brigadier Rashid Qureshi declared
with great emotion, “Others may have tried
to hang on to power, we will not. We will make
history.” In January 2000, General Musharraf
told a television interviewer, “I am not
going to perpetuate myself.” He said while
he could not give a certificate on it, he was
giving his word of honor.
In the strategic
culture of Pakistan, a man’s word is sacrosanct
and carries more weight than a paper certificate.
But if the man is the army chief who has seized
the reins of power, the calculus breaks down.
Thus, five years
after the coup, Musharraf is methodically perpetuating
himself. First, he gets the National Assembly
to pass the “Two Offices” bill. This
cloaks him with a veneer of parliamentary legitimacy
and gets him back in the good offices of the Commonwealth.
And second, he sends
home all those generals who helped bring him to
power on October 12, 1999. In that regard, he
is following a time-honored tradition. Does anyone
even remember General Chisti, the Corps Commander
in Rawalpindi, who brought Zia to power? How about
General Usmani who allowed Musharraf’s plane
to land at Karachi airport? Usmani was retired
prematurely on October 7, 2001, ostensibly for
his fundamentalist leanings. General Aziz, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee,
and General Yousuf, the Vice Chief of Army Staff,
both Nawaz Shariff appointees, have now joined
the Pantheon of Wannabe Army Chiefs. Lt. Gen.
Ahmed, who was Corps Commander, Rawalpindi at
the time of the coup, had the misfortune to be
in the US on 9/11. Musharraf retired him prematurely
on October 7, 2001, perhaps because he failed
to get the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden
to the US.
The first major
shuffle among the top brass was carried out on
the day that the US launched Operation Enduring
Freedom. In an internationally televised press
conference, Musharraf laughed off a question about
the real reasons for the changes. He said the
changes were routine.
The recent shuffle
is anything but routine. True, every three years,
general officers are retired but this rule does
not apply to Musharraf or Zia. General Hayat,
the Vice Chief of Army Staff, was recently the
target of a terrorist attack in Karachi because
of his close ties with Musharraf and the high
regard in which he is held in Washington. General
Haq, the JCSC Chairman, has been instrumental
in implementing Musharraf’s agenda at ISI.
Neither was involved in the Kargil War. The two
generals have been promoted over six senior officers
primarily because of their loyalty to the President
and secondarily because of their moderate political
views.
At the next tier,
the reshuffling has been carried out to achieve
ethnic balance. Zia had responded to a concern
that he favored Jullanduri generals by bringing
in a number of Urdu-speaking generals during his
second re-shuffle. Musharraf faced the charge
that he was favoring Urdu-speaking officers. Many
of the new generals belong to the Potohari group.
Three of them belong to Chakwal and others belong
to the areas around Attock, Abbotabad and Rawalpindi.
While talking to
the BBC’s Owen Bennett Jones on October
16, Shaukat Aziz maintained that he was a democratically
elected Prime Minister. He was confident that
Musharraf would not fire him one day, because
he had never once had a difference of opinion
with Musharraf. An exasperated Bennett Jones exclaimed,
“Come on, you don’t believe that Pakistan
is a democracy.”
Saying that the
war on terror would not have been possible without
Pakistani cooperation, Secretary of State Colin
Powell has stated that the US was “working
in close partnership with President Musharraf,
as we help him to move his country forward at
a pace that Pakistani people can absorb.”
Not much has changed since 1981, when Zia repositioned
Pakistan as a front-line state in Reagan’s
battle with the Evil Empire. Over the next eight
years, as Zia imposed his authoritarian regime
on Pakistan, the US simply looked the other way.
One can go back
further in time. President Ayub Khan’s rise
to power was the culmination of a process that
had begun in 1953, when as the army chief he had
repositioned the Pakistani army as a “bastion
of the free world in this region,” a bulwark
against the communist threat. US Secretary of
State, John Foster Dulles, assured Congress in
closed hearings in June 1953 that the Pakistanis
“are going to fight any communist invasion
with their bare fists if they have to.”
In September of that year, General Ayub promised
the US State Department, “Our army can be
your army if you want us.”
In return, the US
provided military aid to Pakistan. Washington
must have sensed that by strengthening Ayub’s
hand, it was opening the door for him to entrench
the military in the body politic of Pakistan.
But it looked the other way. When Ayub used American
weaponry to make war with India in September 1965,
Washington was very disappointed and slapped an
arms embargo that bitterly disappointed Ayub.
Zia’s honeymoon with Washington ended when
the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan.
Nor will the current
honeymoon between the Pakistani military and Washington
last forever. As the French say, “Plus ca
Change, Plus C'Est La Meme Chose (The More Things
Change, The More They Stay the Same)
