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A grand passion misplaced
Islamabad diary
Friday, November 27, 2009
Ayaz Amir
Nation and army are one when it comes to national defence. Even when folly has been let loose and blunders committed -- and we have seen more than our share of both over the years -- the nation has tended to give the army the benefit of the doubt.
When soldiers lay down their lives for the country -- as so many of them have done in Swat and South Waziristan -- the nation mourns and honours their supreme sacrifice.
So should it always be. Every nation worthy of the name honours its men and women in uniform. But what should be an indissoluble link is undercut when the army, forsaking its real duty, strays into territory it has no business entering. When the army seizes political power and seeks to run the country -- as on four disastrous occasions in our trouble-prone history -- it forfeits public trust and becomes a target of popular anger.
Pervez Musharraf's seizure of power, with the help of a posse of compliant generals, was bad to begin with. But that original sin was compounded when the army was misused for political and administrative purposes: soldiers and officers put to reading electricity meters and checking water connections; a battalion/regiment earmarked to run the affairs of each of the 105/106 districts of Pakistan.
Generals happily performed the political duties that in the past lay in the domain of the deputy commissioner: vetting candidates for tehsil and district nazims in the local elections of 2001. Corps commanders willingly performed the role of cheerleaders in Musharraf's more comic than infamous referendum of 2002. The army-controlled intelligence agencies -- ISI and MI -- helped form the King's Party, the famous Q League, the same year, headed by Musharraf's principal Quislings and the country's leading experts in written-off bank loans, the Chaudhrys of Gujrat.
A fine army, one of the finest in our region, was thus brought low, increasingly attacked and disparaged by a people whose trust and respect it had to maintain for the sake of its morale and self-esteem.
It was first whispered about in Quetta that officers from the Infantry School and the Command and Staff College no longer felt comfortable visiting the city areas. Then the unthinkable happened: officers and even men avoiding to venture out in uniform in towns and cities of Punjab, the first redoubt of patriotism and the source and centre of all the myths regurgitated in the name of the ideology of Pakistan.
This indeed was the unthinkable and Musharraf was responsible for it. More than his crimes against the constitution, he deserves to be hauled up for his crimes against the army.
It was this army stuck between two stools -- its military and political duties -- which was expected to fight the Taliban. No wonder when Musharraf ill-advisedly and without preparation launched army units in North and South Waziristan the result was disaster and humiliation, and deals with the rebels concluded, for the most part, on rebel terms. Musharraf could not handle the Lal Masjid affair in Islamabad. He turned a blind eye to Maulana Fazlullah's FM radio station in Swat, the seed from which a full-blown insurgency was soon to grow.
From that low point in its fortunes the army's image has risen, almost phoenix-like, from midsummer onwards this year, when finally it initiated hostilities against Fazlullah's Taliban in Swat and later on took the fighting to South Waziristan. If it was Musharraf's command which brought humiliation to the army, it is the heroic performance and sacrifices of our brave officers and soldiers in recent battles which have restored the army's standing in the eyes of the people.
The army should embody the best in our national life. Things indeed should be such that looking up at the army we should be able to say, yes, this is how the rest of us should be. But it is only possible for the army to be such a role model if (1) it and its intelligence agencies -- which, sadly, have an exaggerated idea of their competence -- eschew once and for all the folly of political intervention; and (2) the army takes immediate steps to curb the culture of commercialism infecting some of its upper ranks.
Of political interference enough said. The culture of commercialism has been as destructive of the military spirit as successive army coups. Every army looks, or should, to the welfare of its troops. But in the form of Defence Housing Authorities in Karachi and Lahore, and now in Islamabad, we are seeing a passion for the acquisition and expansion of real estate which is not so much welfare as commercialism gone wild.
Which other country in the world has such defence housing authorities? Not the US, the UK, Germany, France, China, Russia or even India. A modest house for every officer on retirement is a desirable proposition, although I doubt if the Pentagon or the UK Defence Ministry are into this kind of thing. But multiple plots for senior officers, with commercial plots also thrown in, is not necessity but a school for scandal.
Under Musharraf this culture thrived, which was perhaps his way to keep his senior generals happy. But surely in the era of South Waziristan and the climate engendered by the great sacrifices rendered by our young officers and soldiers there is a need to rethink a tradition which is scarcely uplifting.
Defence housing authorities would have a justification -- nay, a pressing moral compulsion -- if they were meant primarily for those laying down their lives, or suffering grievous injury, in the call of duty. If every jawan and young officer martyred in South Waziristan and Swat were automatically entitled to a plot in a defence housing authority, who would be so callous or insensitive to object to it?
But this is not the case here. As anyone with even half a mind functioning knows only too well, defence housing authorities have done nothing so much as encourage a mindset of greed and grabbing, welfare the fig leaf behind which this tendency has grown.
But what's wrong with a housing society, you may ask? If private citizens can organise them -- civil servants, engineers, lawyers, judges et al -- why not the armed forces? Good question, except that the army is not satisfied with running a simple housing society. It has sought -- and in the case of the DHA Islamabad, seeks -- an act of parliament to cover its adventures in the real estate trade.
What it thus gets is special and privileged status, outside ordinary municipal jurisdiction, making an authority so entitled almost a law unto itself answerable, in effect, to no authority except General Headquarters. Looked at from any angle, this is a form of military expansion into the civilian realm. Which prompts the question: with the army controlling so much in Pakistan -- some visible to the eye, some not -- why does it seek to control more?
Karachi and Lahore are facts of life not easily to be tampered with, or disturbed, short of a social cataclysm of which the gods perched high on the Himalayas give us no sign. But DHA Islamabad is slightly different. Musharraf issued an ordinance in 2005 to create this Authority. Being who he was, he could do as he pleased. But the Defence Ministry is seeking parliamentary ratification of this ordinance, now before the Defence Committee (DC) of the National Assembly. Why should the National Assembly put its imprimatur on a dictator's handiwork?
If the DC were legislating for all housing societies it would be another matter. But conferring constitutional cover on what after all is a private housing colony comes up to no definition of parliamentary necessity. The DC has met once on this issue, giving for some hard-to-fathom reason an impression of unholy haste to see this ordinance through. Why? Malik Riaz's Bahria Town -- why does his name crop up in all real estate matters? -- is in partnership with DHA Islamabad. Let him and DHA fend for themselves.
There is another catch. DHA Islamabad seeks to appropriate some areas falling in Rawalpindi District. In this specific matter the National Assembly cannot oust provincial jurisdiction without the province concerned being consulted.
In any event, the National Assembly should be spared the embarrassment of giving statutory cover to a private arrangement, unless of course on seeing the name defence it chooses to be guided by the fiction that national security is involved or the defence of the Republic is at stake.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
A grand passion misplaced
Islamabad diary
Friday, November 27, 2009
Ayaz Amir
Nation and army are one when it comes to national defence. Even when folly has been let loose and blunders committed -- and we have seen more than our share of both over the years -- the nation has tended to give the army the benefit of the doubt.
When soldiers lay down their lives for the country -- as so many of them have done in Swat and South Waziristan -- the nation mourns and honours their supreme sacrifice.
So should it always be. Every nation worthy of the name honours its men and women in uniform. But what should be an indissoluble link is undercut when the army, forsaking its real duty, strays into territory it has no business entering. When the army seizes political power and seeks to run the country -- as on four disastrous occasions in our trouble-prone history -- it forfeits public trust and becomes a target of popular anger.
Pervez Musharraf's seizure of power, with the help of a posse of compliant generals, was bad to begin with. But that original sin was compounded when the army was misused for political and administrative purposes: soldiers and officers put to reading electricity meters and checking water connections; a battalion/regiment earmarked to run the affairs of each of the 105/106 districts of Pakistan.
Generals happily performed the political duties that in the past lay in the domain of the deputy commissioner: vetting candidates for tehsil and district nazims in the local elections of 2001. Corps commanders willingly performed the role of cheerleaders in Musharraf's more comic than infamous referendum of 2002. The army-controlled intelligence agencies -- ISI and MI -- helped form the King's Party, the famous Q League, the same year, headed by Musharraf's principal Quislings and the country's leading experts in written-off bank loans, the Chaudhrys of Gujrat.
A fine army, one of the finest in our region, was thus brought low, increasingly attacked and disparaged by a people whose trust and respect it had to maintain for the sake of its morale and self-esteem.
It was first whispered about in Quetta that officers from the Infantry School and the Command and Staff College no longer felt comfortable visiting the city areas. Then the unthinkable happened: officers and even men avoiding to venture out in uniform in towns and cities of Punjab, the first redoubt of patriotism and the source and centre of all the myths regurgitated in the name of the ideology of Pakistan.
This indeed was the unthinkable and Musharraf was responsible for it. More than his crimes against the constitution, he deserves to be hauled up for his crimes against the army.
It was this army stuck between two stools -- its military and political duties -- which was expected to fight the Taliban. No wonder when Musharraf ill-advisedly and without preparation launched army units in North and South Waziristan the result was disaster and humiliation, and deals with the rebels concluded, for the most part, on rebel terms. Musharraf could not handle the Lal Masjid affair in Islamabad. He turned a blind eye to Maulana Fazlullah's FM radio station in Swat, the seed from which a full-blown insurgency was soon to grow.
From that low point in its fortunes the army's image has risen, almost phoenix-like, from midsummer onwards this year, when finally it initiated hostilities against Fazlullah's Taliban in Swat and later on took the fighting to South Waziristan. If it was Musharraf's command which brought humiliation to the army, it is the heroic performance and sacrifices of our brave officers and soldiers in recent battles which have restored the army's standing in the eyes of the people.
The army should embody the best in our national life. Things indeed should be such that looking up at the army we should be able to say, yes, this is how the rest of us should be. But it is only possible for the army to be such a role model if (1) it and its intelligence agencies -- which, sadly, have an exaggerated idea of their competence -- eschew once and for all the folly of political intervention; and (2) the army takes immediate steps to curb the culture of commercialism infecting some of its upper ranks.
Of political interference enough said. The culture of commercialism has been as destructive of the military spirit as successive army coups. Every army looks, or should, to the welfare of its troops. But in the form of Defence Housing Authorities in Karachi and Lahore, and now in Islamabad, we are seeing a passion for the acquisition and expansion of real estate which is not so much welfare as commercialism gone wild.
Which other country in the world has such defence housing authorities? Not the US, the UK, Germany, France, China, Russia or even India. A modest house for every officer on retirement is a desirable proposition, although I doubt if the Pentagon or the UK Defence Ministry are into this kind of thing. But multiple plots for senior officers, with commercial plots also thrown in, is not necessity but a school for scandal.
Under Musharraf this culture thrived, which was perhaps his way to keep his senior generals happy. But surely in the era of South Waziristan and the climate engendered by the great sacrifices rendered by our young officers and soldiers there is a need to rethink a tradition which is scarcely uplifting.
Defence housing authorities would have a justification -- nay, a pressing moral compulsion -- if they were meant primarily for those laying down their lives, or suffering grievous injury, in the call of duty. If every jawan and young officer martyred in South Waziristan and Swat were automatically entitled to a plot in a defence housing authority, who would be so callous or insensitive to object to it?
But this is not the case here. As anyone with even half a mind functioning knows only too well, defence housing authorities have done nothing so much as encourage a mindset of greed and grabbing, welfare the fig leaf behind which this tendency has grown.
But what's wrong with a housing society, you may ask? If private citizens can organise them -- civil servants, engineers, lawyers, judges et al -- why not the armed forces? Good question, except that the army is not satisfied with running a simple housing society. It has sought -- and in the case of the DHA Islamabad, seeks -- an act of parliament to cover its adventures in the real estate trade.
What it thus gets is special and privileged status, outside ordinary municipal jurisdiction, making an authority so entitled almost a law unto itself answerable, in effect, to no authority except General Headquarters. Looked at from any angle, this is a form of military expansion into the civilian realm. Which prompts the question: with the army controlling so much in Pakistan -- some visible to the eye, some not -- why does it seek to control more?
Karachi and Lahore are facts of life not easily to be tampered with, or disturbed, short of a social cataclysm of which the gods perched high on the Himalayas give us no sign. But DHA Islamabad is slightly different. Musharraf issued an ordinance in 2005 to create this Authority. Being who he was, he could do as he pleased. But the Defence Ministry is seeking parliamentary ratification of this ordinance, now before the Defence Committee (DC) of the National Assembly. Why should the National Assembly put its imprimatur on a dictator's handiwork?
If the DC were legislating for all housing societies it would be another matter. But conferring constitutional cover on what after all is a private housing colony comes up to no definition of parliamentary necessity. The DC has met once on this issue, giving for some hard-to-fathom reason an impression of unholy haste to see this ordinance through. Why? Malik Riaz's Bahria Town -- why does his name crop up in all real estate matters? -- is in partnership with DHA Islamabad. Let him and DHA fend for themselves.
There is another catch. DHA Islamabad seeks to appropriate some areas falling in Rawalpindi District. In this specific matter the National Assembly cannot oust provincial jurisdiction without the province concerned being consulted.
In any event, the National Assembly should be spared the embarrassment of giving statutory cover to a private arrangement, unless of course on seeing the name defence it chooses to be guided by the fiction that national security is involved or the defence of the Republic is at stake.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
A grand passion misplaced
