'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee?
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
“Strange all this Difference should be
‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee” — John Byron
The third of the four major Pakistani transitions slotted for 2014 is now complete. The new Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif, who, according to the Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR) press release, “hails from martial stock”, has replaced General (retired) Ashfaq Pervez Kayani. Barring three military dictators, General Kayani — a 1971 graduate of the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA), Kakul — was the longest serving army chief. As noted in this space last month, the panegyrics to General Kayani started right after his decision to hang up his boots. That the outgoing general did not make a coup d’état because he simply could not is submerged in the flood of paeans to him.
It was quickly forgotten that General Kayani had taken over as the 14th COAS from the then thoroughly detested dictator General Pervez Musharraf on November 28, 2007 at the height of a popular agitation against the latter. The movement to restore the judges sacked by General Musharraf was at its peak at the time. The late Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif — both barred from electoral politics at the time — had thrown their weight behind the movement, albeit in a qualified manner. Earlier that year, 52 people had been killed on May 12 when the Musharraf regime’s allies unleashed brute force in Karachi. That evening, the dictator celebrated the regime’s ‘triumph’ in a repulsive display, which further angered the already disgusted masses. Musharraf doffed his uniform the day after General Kayani was sworn in, was quickly abandoned by his political allies, and was history by mid-2008.
That Pakistan has never had two coup d’états back-to-back is not exactly a scientific principle but there just was no room for General Kayani to overtly take power in yet another coup. The international opprobrium for Musharraf’s — and the military’s — duplicitous games in Afghanistan could have easily turned on the Pakistani state had there been a putsch. The military officers, apparently under a directive, avoided frequenting civilian areas in their uniforms towards the end of the Musharraf era. The people were plain sick of the army’s reign then just as they had been with Generals Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Ziaul Haq’s rule. At the end of each one of its pervious stints in direct power, the army was forced to leave the political center-stage but not power. However, like the military takeover drills, the junta also seems to have perfected the manoeuvre to wield power from behind the scenes and it deployed it with great finesse during General Kayani’s tenure.
While he is being celebrated as the ‘thinking soldier’, the ‘soldier’s soldier’ and the great benefactor of democracy, the fact is that General Kayani kept the outgoing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) coalition at bay and away from national security and foreign policies as well as from trying, albeit clumsily, to assert civilian control over the military. General Kayani ostensibly shut down the ISI’s notorious political cell but, in practice, he let his ISI chief General Ahmed Shuja Pasha loose on the civilian government. In fact, General Pasha was the most high profile ISI director since General Hamid Gul and, like him, tried to undermine the PPP government directly as well as through propping up other political and religio-political forces.
The agenda was set from the street via military-allied politicians and jihadists in conglomerates like the so-called Defense of Pakistan Council. Together with pro-military television anchors and many in the Urdu press, the narrative dial was set to the hard right. These same scarecrows riled up anti-US sentiment that was used by the military as an excuse, especially with the international community, to not own the fight against terrorism. The civilian government, marred by its own governance issues and a perpetually pugilist Supreme Court (SC), was barely able to keep its head above water let alone try to wrestle back national security and foreign policies from the establishment.
Despite his sporadic speeches about terrorism being the biggest issue faced by Pakistan and its armed forces, and a much-trumpeted revision of military doctrine, General Kayani did remarkably little to roll back his institution’s reliance on India and Afghanistan-oriented jihadists. The discovery of Osama bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad and prior to that the jihadists’ attack on GHQ should have entailed serious introspection about terrorist sympathizers in the retired and active-duty military personnel. However, General Kayani, who trained in the US once, oversaw a pushback, anchored in rabid anti-Americanism, against accountability of his institution. Despite knowing the origins and evolution of the Taliban, many in the military still blame India for that morass too. Writing about a jihadist terrorist clique within the armed forces, which tried to kill him, General Musharraf notes in his book that “if there were terrorists or sympathizers in the air force at Quetta and Peshawar, why not at Chaklala?” One may add, why not the GHQ and why not at Abbottabad near the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA)? Whether General Kayani, who incidentally had supervised the inquiry into the attacks on General Musharraf, found the answer or even tried to look for them, we will never know.
General Raheel Sharif is Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s pick for COAS. Mr Sharif has selected a few chiefs before and will get to choose at least one more down the road. The prime minister knows that merely picking the ‘right’ army chief cannot fix the lopsided civil-military relationship. Robust governance, holding his ground firmly and avoiding unforced errors and political tripwires will go a long way towards this end. The change of guard in Rawalpindi does give the civilian leadership a brief window of opportunity to at least set the tone of foreign policy and national security goals but that will take much more vigor than the prime minister and his team have shown on these issues so far.
The new COAS, like his predecessor, is being celebrated as a thinking soldier, the architect of the Pakistan army’s counterterrorism doctrine and its answer to India’s Cold Start Doctrine. General Sharif’s impeccable professional credentials notwithstanding, there is little to suggest that the military establishment will behave any differently than like a monolith, which it always has.
When General Yahya Khan replaced General Ayub Khan, The Economist, London, cheekily titled its March 29, 1969 editorial ‘Tweedle Khan takes over’. It remains to be seen whether another change of guard, 44 years on, makes any material difference.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki)
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