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Why Pakistan's generals still rule the roost
Shashank Joshi
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011 11.00 BST
Despite the Bin Laden raid and other humiliations, Pakistan's army seems as popular as ever. Reform will have to wait
where Osama bin Laden was killed. Photograph: Faisal Mahmood/Reuters
Pakistan's army is the Macavity of militaries. It remains the bafflement of Washington and an elusive puppeteer of the Pakistani polity. Even as its officers and soldiers die in large numbers at the hands of Islamist extremists, its traces can be found on nearly every jihadi enterprise in the beleaguered country. Recently a link was discovered between Osama bin Laden's courier and the establishment-backed Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group. And documents have now emerged that suggest two former Pakistani generals were involved in selling uranium enrichment technology to North Korea for millions of dollars.
As with the mystery cat, when you reach the scene of the crime the military's not there. The army has lost all its wars, but emerged stronger from almost every one, even seizing power outright after a failed invasion of Kargil in 1999.
Has this run come to an end? May was the cruellest month for the generals. It began with the US raid on Abbottabad and ended with a major attack on a Karachi airbase as well as the suspected murder of a journalist by the country's spy service, the ISI.
The New York Times alleged that the army chief, General Kayani, was "fighting to save his position in the face of seething anger from top generals and junior officers", and that "a colonels' coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question". The Washington Post quoted a US official as saying that Kayani was "fighting to survive".
Both articles made waves in Pakistan, but they were probably off the mark. First, anyone familiar with Pakistan's army would know that it is a rigidly hierarchical body. Unlike their Latin American and Middle Eastern counterparts, Pakistan's low- and middle-ranking offices have never launched a successful coup. All successful seizures of power have come from the uppermost ranks.
The 11 corps commanders, some of whom would be essential to any coup, appear satisfied with Kayani's defiance towards Washington. And although Islamist infiltration is a very real threat, it almost certainly does not affect the upper echelons. And Kayani unlike General Musharraf, the former president has never been the target of a known assassination attempt.
But there are more subtle reasons why a coup against the civilian government is unlikely. In the 1990s, the army became adept at playing squabbling political parties off one another. Today Nawaz Sharif, the formerly exiled leader of the conservative PML-N party, has attacked the army at just the moment when he could have co-operated with it to destabilise the government. "End your domination of foreign policy if you wish the criticism to end," was his welcome message.
The army also knows that the international conditions are no longer those of 1999, when Musharraf was embraced by outside powers eager to find a reliable ally for counterterrorism.
Now US exasperation with Pakistan has reached boiling point. Congressional leaders are tired of Pakistan's links to groups killing US soldiers in Afghanistan, such as the Haqqani network, or groups with an increasingly global reach, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. US aid already hangs by a slender thread a coup would sever it at an instant.
For all these reasons, the PPP-led government made a grievous error in backing the military in the aftermath of the travails last May. This was truly the best opportunity in decades to chip away at the institutional privileges of an army that has brought little but ruin to a large and proud country, and attempt necessary reforms including pushing the ISI under civilian control (as the government tried and failed to do in 2008), scrutinising defence budgets and the army's economic empire, and eventually reappropriating foreign and security policy.
It would be naive to think this is a simple matter of pushing hard enough. A new Pew poll reveals something that one might miss if reading the liberal Pakistani press: the army remains enormously popular. The Bin Laden raid pushed its favourability rating from 83% to a still remarkable 79% above the media, religious leaders, courts, police, national government and prime minister. Kayani himself enjoys a 52% rating, far above the prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani (37%), and the president, Asif Ali Zardari (a feeble 11%).
These are not the figures of a man teetering on the edge or an army on the brink of national humiliation. The extraordinary waves of "dissent, comment and dark humour against the grinding ISI state" produced after the events of May represent a narrow slice of Pakistani opinion.
The myriad suicide bombings, the cross-border terrorism, the weekly slaughter of poorly-paid policemen and frontier guards these are not the fault of a rogue institution's misguided priorities, but instead the US-India-Israel axis first, and the "bloody civvies" second.
In mid-June the ISPR the army's PR wing released a tirade against the "perceptual biases" of anti-army journalists. What is more remarkable is just how corrosive establishment propaganda has been, to the point at which the same Pew poll recorded 55% of Pakistanis deeming Bin Laden's death to be a bad thing, and nearly a quarter seeing "minor/no threat" from al-Qaida and the Taliban. Pakistan's population would be anti-American without any help from Rawalpindi, but the latter has fanned the flames.
There is no broad-based constituency for wholesale civil-military reform in Pakistan, let alone at a time when terrorist attacks occur at a steady rate of more than 150 a month and Kayani has so visibly pushed back against American demands. Nor will the army implode in Islamist fervour or convulse from a mid-level coup. Its pretensions to efficiency and integrity may be laughable, but its hierarchy is not.
But this is precisely why only a top-down effort by civilian elites can begin the process of civil-military rebalancing, without which Pakistan will remain buffeted by the whims and strategic delusions of its deep state.
Shashank Joshi
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011 11.00 BST
Despite the Bin Laden raid and other humiliations, Pakistan's army seems as popular as ever. Reform will have to wait
where Osama bin Laden was killed. Photograph: Faisal Mahmood/Reuters
Pakistan's army is the Macavity of militaries. It remains the bafflement of Washington and an elusive puppeteer of the Pakistani polity. Even as its officers and soldiers die in large numbers at the hands of Islamist extremists, its traces can be found on nearly every jihadi enterprise in the beleaguered country. Recently a link was discovered between Osama bin Laden's courier and the establishment-backed Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group. And documents have now emerged that suggest two former Pakistani generals were involved in selling uranium enrichment technology to North Korea for millions of dollars.
As with the mystery cat, when you reach the scene of the crime the military's not there. The army has lost all its wars, but emerged stronger from almost every one, even seizing power outright after a failed invasion of Kargil in 1999.
Has this run come to an end? May was the cruellest month for the generals. It began with the US raid on Abbottabad and ended with a major attack on a Karachi airbase as well as the suspected murder of a journalist by the country's spy service, the ISI.
The New York Times alleged that the army chief, General Kayani, was "fighting to save his position in the face of seething anger from top generals and junior officers", and that "a colonels' coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question". The Washington Post quoted a US official as saying that Kayani was "fighting to survive".
Both articles made waves in Pakistan, but they were probably off the mark. First, anyone familiar with Pakistan's army would know that it is a rigidly hierarchical body. Unlike their Latin American and Middle Eastern counterparts, Pakistan's low- and middle-ranking offices have never launched a successful coup. All successful seizures of power have come from the uppermost ranks.
The 11 corps commanders, some of whom would be essential to any coup, appear satisfied with Kayani's defiance towards Washington. And although Islamist infiltration is a very real threat, it almost certainly does not affect the upper echelons. And Kayani unlike General Musharraf, the former president has never been the target of a known assassination attempt.
But there are more subtle reasons why a coup against the civilian government is unlikely. In the 1990s, the army became adept at playing squabbling political parties off one another. Today Nawaz Sharif, the formerly exiled leader of the conservative PML-N party, has attacked the army at just the moment when he could have co-operated with it to destabilise the government. "End your domination of foreign policy if you wish the criticism to end," was his welcome message.
The army also knows that the international conditions are no longer those of 1999, when Musharraf was embraced by outside powers eager to find a reliable ally for counterterrorism.
Now US exasperation with Pakistan has reached boiling point. Congressional leaders are tired of Pakistan's links to groups killing US soldiers in Afghanistan, such as the Haqqani network, or groups with an increasingly global reach, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. US aid already hangs by a slender thread a coup would sever it at an instant.
For all these reasons, the PPP-led government made a grievous error in backing the military in the aftermath of the travails last May. This was truly the best opportunity in decades to chip away at the institutional privileges of an army that has brought little but ruin to a large and proud country, and attempt necessary reforms including pushing the ISI under civilian control (as the government tried and failed to do in 2008), scrutinising defence budgets and the army's economic empire, and eventually reappropriating foreign and security policy.
It would be naive to think this is a simple matter of pushing hard enough. A new Pew poll reveals something that one might miss if reading the liberal Pakistani press: the army remains enormously popular. The Bin Laden raid pushed its favourability rating from 83% to a still remarkable 79% above the media, religious leaders, courts, police, national government and prime minister. Kayani himself enjoys a 52% rating, far above the prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani (37%), and the president, Asif Ali Zardari (a feeble 11%).
These are not the figures of a man teetering on the edge or an army on the brink of national humiliation. The extraordinary waves of "dissent, comment and dark humour against the grinding ISI state" produced after the events of May represent a narrow slice of Pakistani opinion.
The myriad suicide bombings, the cross-border terrorism, the weekly slaughter of poorly-paid policemen and frontier guards these are not the fault of a rogue institution's misguided priorities, but instead the US-India-Israel axis first, and the "bloody civvies" second.
In mid-June the ISPR the army's PR wing released a tirade against the "perceptual biases" of anti-army journalists. What is more remarkable is just how corrosive establishment propaganda has been, to the point at which the same Pew poll recorded 55% of Pakistanis deeming Bin Laden's death to be a bad thing, and nearly a quarter seeing "minor/no threat" from al-Qaida and the Taliban. Pakistan's population would be anti-American without any help from Rawalpindi, but the latter has fanned the flames.
There is no broad-based constituency for wholesale civil-military reform in Pakistan, let alone at a time when terrorist attacks occur at a steady rate of more than 150 a month and Kayani has so visibly pushed back against American demands. Nor will the army implode in Islamist fervour or convulse from a mid-level coup. Its pretensions to efficiency and integrity may be laughable, but its hierarchy is not.
But this is precisely why only a top-down effort by civilian elites can begin the process of civil-military rebalancing, without which Pakistan will remain buffeted by the whims and strategic delusions of its deep state.
.Anyway if you read the article it's not that BAD ...
