Who is Tainting the Army’s Honor?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
The whole of Pakistan is agog and overly excited at Army Chief General Raheel Sharif’s cryptic statement of April 7. The general, visiting an SSG camp outfit at Tarbela reportedly said, in addressing the officers and Jawans of the commando group, that while the army respected the dignity of all institutions of State it was also conscious of preserving its own dignity and honor.
There was nothing earth-shaking in what the new military chief said. Almost everyone who preceded him at the top of the military command in Pakistan has said the same thing—on more occasions than one—but then had little compunction or remorse in toppling elected, democratic, governments as if there was nothing wrong with it. Their honor was sacrosanct to them but that of the civilians? Well, not really. Honor, they deemed, belonged only to them.
The worst and most brazen, example of a pompous military chief—with a bloated sense of his own importance—overthrowing an elected government—and that too on a flimsy and spurious, trumped-up excuse—was of the man who pulled the rug from under Nawaz Sharif in October, 1999.
Ironically, General Raheel felt the need to remind the nation of how sensitive he and his colleagues in the military brass were on the issue of army’s dignity and honor was while addressing an outfit of the same SSG that Musharraf belonged to. The former Bonaparte never tired of asserting his commando credentials, as if that gave him a divine license to flaunt himself at the pinnacle of absolute power in the country while still donned in his SSG commando uniform.
General Raheel’s remarks may have gone unnoticed, or at least not as closely evaluated as they are being now, if ISPR hadn’t issued a quick press release to accord nation-wide publicity and exposure to the military chief’s terse observation.
While ISPR may have had its own compulsion in according the chief’s comments the exposure they may or may not have merited, it has caused a stir among the pundits and the chattering classes of Pakistanis—both at home and in the global diaspora of overseas Pakistanis.
Those carrying a chip on their shoulders against the Nawaz govt. are attributing the general’s somewhat knee-jerk reaction to what the Railways Minister, Khwaja Saad Rafiq, said the day before about Musharraf. Saad Rafiq doesn’t, of course, have a reputation for calibrating his words, and he didn’t in this case. He fulminated against those crying their hearts out to let the beleaguered ex-commando off the hook of accountability before the law of the land. He may have been a bit too caustic and harsh in his choice of words but the thrust of his argument had nothing to be picked on, or remonstrated.
What Saad Rafiq said in his no-holds-barred denunciation of the Musharraf aficionados’ plea for mercy on their man—who, incidentally, showed no such mercy to the victims of his ire; one such quarry was none other than Nawaz Sharif who wasn’t allowed to come to Lahore, from exile in Saudi Arabia, when he wanted to be at the funeral of his father, Mian Mohammad Sharif—is that the ex-commando must face justice like any other impugned man. Saad Rafiq has, in fact, put his finger on what’s, no doubt, a sore point in the whole debate kicked off on whether Musharraf should face the consequences of his brazen assault on the ramparts of Pakistan’s constitution and law, or allowed to go Scott-free just because he once headed the army—and abused it to grab power.
The whole debate, ripped of its poetic articulation and sophistry, boils down to this one fundamental point: is Pakistan a country where law of the land applies to all, without distinction or discrimination of any kind, or is it a country with two sets of laws, one for the privileged and another for the down-trodden?
It doesn’t behove General Raheel to take umbrage to what Saad Rafiq said, irrespective of it that he should’ve said that in a more nuanced and softer tone with lesser element of bile.
If the military chief felt the need to be irked, his ire should have been directed toward Musharraf and the pack masquerading as his defence team.
From the moment the special court came into being to try Musharraf for his repeated assault at the edifice of rule of law in Pakistan, he and his team of legal sleuths have been at work, provocatively, to make it a direct fight between the civil establishment—including the judiciary, of course—and the military establishment, which it isn’t and should never be.
General Raheel, if at all he feels so worked up on the issue, should be training his guns at the former commando who, with his brazen antics and shenanigans has been dragging the military’s name and reputation into the dirt. What Raheel needs to understand, clearly and categorically, is that Musharraf’s trial doesn’t mean that the army or the military establishment is in the dock with him.
More than any other individual in the history of Pakistan, Musharraf is the one who has caused a mountain of embarrassment and disrepute to the honourable profession of soldiering. Is it not a fact that he, at the peak of his political power as Pakistan’s undisputed Bonaparte, had brought so much dishonour and indignity to the good name of the army that officers and Jawans couldn’t even take the risk of going out in public places in military uniform?
Musharraf may have been an ace commando, as his aficionados don’t tire of reminding the people of Pakistan, but he didn’t behave according to the code of conduct for officers of the Pakistan Army. It would serve General Raheel’s memory well to be reminded that Musharraf, after being forced out of the office of President of Pakistan, launched his own political party, the so-called All Pakistan Muslim League. So besotted was he with power, and its after-taste, that he thought all and sundry would flock to his banner to be led by his half-literate mind. Little wonder that the party never took off because the people of Pakistan had had enough of Musharraf and his foibles.
General Raheel Sharif and his disgruntled colleagues, if any, at the GHQ could have made life so much easier for themselves—and everybody else, too, in Pakistan—if they had come up with an ISPR press release on the day after the announcement of Musharraf’s impending trial. The press release should only have said, in plain language, that Musharraf’s trial didn’t concern them, or any Service of Pakistan, because his being a soldier was a thing of the past and what concerned the government and people of Pakistan was Musharraf, the politician and ex-soldier of fortune.
Time is still opportune for General Raheel to make the necessary amends. That plain and unlaced ISPR press release could still serve the purpose of a stitch-in-time. The people of Pakistan would still heave a sigh of relief and the trial of the dictator would proceed, as it should, according to the needs of the law.
However, the problem that looks increasingly perennial in the context of army’s gratuitous involvement in the governance of Pakistan is that generals want to sound and behave like politicians—a deplorable proclivity that somehow continually afflicts the military command in Pakistan.
Why should a soldier, trained to speak his mind straight and with as much economy of words as possible, deem it fit to issue vague and equivocal statements like politicians?
And why should the general have this sense that Saad Rafiq’s or anybody else’s statement or off-the-cuff comment compromises the dignity of the army or its leaders?
The Pakistanis have the highest regards for their professional and valiant soldiers. In fact, the Pakistan army and its leadership should consider themselves lucky for the overt adulation enjoyed by them in the esteem of a people influenced by their sense of religion that dictates them to place the Mujahid and the martyr on the highest pedestal.
But adulation shouldn’t induce a false and exaggerated sense of license. The Pakistan Amy is part and parcel of Pakistan. It isn’t apart from the rest of Pakistan. Likewise, it’s part of the overall establishment of Pakistan. It’s false to think of the army as The Establishment. No, it is not. It’s a part of The Establishment, which also includes the civilian set-up.
And since Pakistan is a democracy, the army has to be under the civil administration and control as common and a given thing in any normal democracy. Saad Rafiq made a valid point: no one, not even a general, is, or should be, above the law of Pakistan.
The sooner General Raheel and his colleagues understand this reality the better for them and the rest of Pakistan. They should stop behaving and sounding like the feudal barons of Punjab or Sindh or Baluchistan whose ‘honor’ is compromised at the drop of a hat. This is 21 st century Pakistan. Wake up, if you’re still living in another century, mentally. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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