An interesting article about Gen Kayani published in the News today.
Kayanis doctrine of rapprochement
S Iftikhar Murshed
Sunday, April 29, 2012
In most men where there is honour, in Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani there is a void. The honourable course for him would have been to resign after being convicted for contempt of court because he stands automatically disqualified from continuing in office. But he has no such intention and it is uncertain with what fateful consequences this may be fraught. Political chaos with deleterious implications for the faltering economy and national security seem likely.
Thursdays Supreme Court verdict has triggered reams of speculative analyses on what the future may bring. In the process a consequential pronouncement by Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has faded from public memory.
Kayanis remarks to the media on April 18 that Pakistan should spend less on defence and more on development has dealt a crippling body blow to the theory expounded by Norman F Dixon in his book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixons work, published in 1976, sparked animated debate and, since then, has continued to be extensively reviewed.
It presents examples of incompetence in British military history over the near hundred year period from the Crimean War to the Allied defeat at Anaheim and identifies reasons for this failing which, he affirms, are applicable to all the armies of the world. The first is a tendency to suppress unpalatable information that conflicts with preconceptions, the second is a fundamental conservatism and adherence to outmoded traditions, the third is the overestimation of ones own capabilities and a corresponding underestimation of enemy potential.
The three assumptions on which Dixon had based his thesis were belied by Gen Kayani. He came across as the ultimate realist when he told journalists that the Pakistan army understood very well that there should be a very good balance between defence and development. You cannot be spending on defence alone and forgetting about development. National security, he said, was inextricably linked to the wellbeing of the people.
There may not have been anything novel in this statement but, in the context of Pakistan, it was new thinking at its best. Never before in the countrys history has an army chief so emphatically stressed the primacy of self-sustaining economic growth as an indispensable prerequisite for national security and stability.
Kayanis apprehensions find fearful confirmation in Pakistans economic profile. External assistance on which the country is so heavily dependent has reduced to a trickle, the deplorable investment climate has sparked a flight of capital, power outages have resulted in the closure of industries and rendered thousands jobless, and skyrocketing inflation has made an estimated 90 million people food-insecure.
This is evident from the Planning Commissions biannual report on Change in Cost of Food Basket (July-December 2011) released last month. It shows that the prices of essential commodities such as wheat, sugar, pulses, vegetable oil and meat increased by a stunning 79 percent in the last four years. In 2007 the cost of this minimum food basket was Rs960 but by December 2011 it soared to Rs1,790.
The Kayani doctrine, therefore, envisages a comprehensive national security concept built around peaceful coexistence between Pakistan and India so that everybody can concentrate on the wellbeing of the people. Furthermore, never before has a Pakistani army chief declared so unambiguously that we would like to spend less on defence, definitely. This represents a radical departure from the previous concept under which India was considered the perpetual enemy and any change in this adversarial relationship was inconceivable.
The COAS acknowledged that the decades of enmity that had bedevilled the Pakistan-India equation would remain unless the outstanding disputes between the two countries were resolved through negotiations. This was reminiscent of President John F Kennedys appeal at the height of the Cold War: Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. But when he deviated from this norm the world was brought to the brink of a thermonuclear holocaust with the Cuban missile crisis.
In a nuclearised South Asia war is no longer an option but the tedious process of negotiating a settlement of Pakistan-India disputes has always been accident prone. The primary beneficiaries of tensions between the two countries are non-state actors in Pakistan. They thrive on chaos and it is strangely ironical that their objective of destabiliding the country is the same as that of hardliners in the Indian military and intelligence. To achieve this they have not only resorted to terrorist violence in the guise of religion but also to subtle propaganda aimed at maligning and isolating Pakistan.
Thus, in April last year when Maulana Shaukat Ahmed Shah, a moderate Kashmiri cleric and president of the Jamiat-e-Ahle Hadees, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Srinagar, the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) admitted that the assassins were from its own ranks, but then added: Earlier we thought the Indian army or its agencies killed Maulvi (Shaukat Ahmed Shah) to defame the movement and create misgivings. We had not even imagined that the murderers would turn out to be our own men...it is possible that this order, this message (to kill Maulana Shaukat) may have come from Pakistan.
The LeT statement implicating Islamabad in the assassination is similar to the kind of propaganda routinely churned out by Indian intelligence for portraying Pakistan as a state that sponsors terrorism. What should be clear is that none of the extremist parties, including the LeT, have any loyalty to the country. Furthermore, it has been established time and again that they all either have links with, or are sympathetic to, terrorist outfits.
Last month the government banned three religious groups that espouse violent extremism bringing the total number of such proscribed outfits to 38. Such measures are meaningless because the outlawed organizations resurface under a new name. Thus the LeT has emerged as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the venomously anti-Shia group Sipah-e-Sahaba has renamed itself Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat. Both are prominent members of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, which has vowed to attack the US, Russia, Nato forces in Afghanistan and India.
A Pakistan-India rapprochement inherent in the Kayani doctrine will be opposed tooth and nail by these groups. Just one example is the February 5, 2011, diatribe of Abdul Rehman Makki, the deputy leader of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, at a Kashmir Day rally in Lahore. He railed against any thaw in Pakistan-India relations and demanded that the government establish a ministry of jihad. The new ministry would be funded entirely by the Jamaat, which would also provide the first batch of a million trained soldiers.
The obstacles in the way of Pakistan-India normalisation are formidable. Gen Kayani has demonstrated uncommon statesmanship which unfortunately is wanting in the civilian leadership. His April 18 statement has taken Indian analysts by storm and one of the comments emanating from New Delhi was: The onus for creating an enabling environment for resolution of thorny issues between the two countries also lies squarely on Indian shoulders.
For a start, New Delhi should grow out of the habit of blaming Pakistan for every terrorist incident in India. There was a refreshing departure from this trend last year after the Mumbai, Pune and New Delhi bombings when the Indian home minister, P Chidambaram, told the BBC we can no longer point to cross-border terrorism as a source of terror attacks in India. Of the three attacks he was fairly certain that two were carried out by Indian modules or India-based modules.
For its part, Pakistan, which is currently led by a convicted prime minister, will have to rein in the extremist groups which thrive on Pakistan-India tensions. Even a single cross-border attack by non-state actors is enough to push the two countries towards confrontation, as has happened in the past.
The writer is the publisher of Criterion Quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@ gmail.com
Kayani