Bangladesh Army's Advancing Business Interests

[eastwatch]

You dont even want to open your eyes against the problems of military running businesses! It can work in the context of any military. The govt can run the businesses.

You may be thinking if IA has no business, why then there should be a BA business? It is not that simple logic that you can stick around. Thing is our private sector and military businesses are successful, but govt sector businesses are almost all are in ruins. Think of Bangladesh Airlines. We do not see corruptions by the military, although some ignorant ones here come with hate posts against them. Since military has already accomplished successes in business, therefore, there is no reason to stop or suspend it. These businesses are contributing to our national development.

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

About Army running businesses and commercial endeavours, the Fauji Foundation is an ideal example how things can get sour.

CORNFLAKES, cinemas, bakeries, petrol stations, insurance companies and an airline—these are but a few of the business interests that Pakistan's generals, who have ruled the country for most of its history, have accrued. In a pioneering investigation, Ayesha Siddiqa, a tenacious Pakistani, estimates that the armed forces have gathered private assets worth $10 billion.

Ms Siddiqa defines military business as any capital appropriated by soldiers outside the defence budget. It includes five welfare foundations, two of them, the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust, being Pakistan's biggest conglomerates. These control thousands of companies, ostensibly to finance education and health care for military families. The foundations have a virtual monopoly on sectors including road-building and cement production; Ms Siddiqa estimates that they control one third of Pakistan's heavy manufacturing.

Senior officers cite army welfare as justification for this empire with the same monotony as they cite national security to justify their coups. Ms Siddiqa suggests that the economic interests of a greedy military elite, mostly recruited from just three districts of Punjab, in fact goes a long way to explaining both.

Pakistan's military businesses: Polished brass | The Economist

The armed forces in Pakistan emerged as the stabilizing force under whose command we’ve witnessed growth rates in large-scale manufacturing historically. It is the only institution capable of providing that need fiscal discipline, perhaps at the expense of social, democratic progress. The military is unlikely to let go of this privileged position and the political clout to influence economic decisions. This vested economic interest discourages the armed forces from allowing democratic institutions to flourish in an environment where the military finds it more beneficial to stay in power....

The amount allocated to economic and development assistance, including food aid, from 2001 to 2007 was US $3.1 billion while military assistance was US $7.9 billion.

Since 2001, the U.S. government gave more than US $11 billion to the military regime under Pervez Musharraf. Of the total $12.3 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2002, less than 27 percent went toward development and economic assistance. Recently, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the aid efforts in Pakistan had been haphazard and the policy for the last three decades had been ‘incoherent’.

Until 2009, information on US aid to Pakistan was either “hidden from the public or released in a form too aggregated to allow for effective public oversight”. $30 million were given to the Pakistani army to build roads, but there was no evidence that they had been built. This is evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the government and military.

A report for the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs by Ibrahim A (2009) confirms that US funds have discouraged democratization by giving the military a disincentive to submit to civilian control, increasing the latter’s independence from government, and ignoring evidence of profiteering. The report also points towards evidence of corruption within the Pakistani military. Despite the army’s known public record of corruption, no verification was undertaken between 2003 and 2006. According to Ibrahim, only 10 percent of the total funds were explicitly for development. By the end of 2007, the US was paying for roughly a quarter of Pakistan’s military budget.

Pakistan