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VIEW: Jihadism and the military in Pakistan — III —A R Siddiqi
More than the devotion to faith and ritual, what encouraged Zia in the loud proclamation of his faith and absolute commitment to Islam was the make believe elevation of the Soviet Afghan war to the status of jihad.
President Mohammad Ayub Khan, in his emotionally charged radio address to the nation, recited the kalma tayyaba to warn India that the kalma reciting Pakistani would not rest until the enemy’s guns were silenced.
Through the 17-day war in 1965, the entire country reverberated to the vociferous chants of jihad against Hindu India. Jihad and Islam were formalised almost as a military doctrine. So much of this jihad-dominated propaganda poured into the media, both print and electronic, that an inconclusive war turned into a final victory.
Frontline troops, lieutenants, colonels and lower ranks followed the five-time prayers code strictly. A number of field officers even refused to have their pictures taken, calling it un-Islamic.
For the field marshal and his army chief, General Musa, the reactive Islamic lore came as a godsend. The field marshal’s invocation of the kalma became the popular slogan ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia? Laillah illahla’ (what does Pakistan mean? There is only one God).
Comparisons with Badr and Uhud, led by the Prophet (PBUH) himself, were freely cited. Jihadism, post-1965, emerged as a powerful talisman and motivational force for senior commanders to motivate their men and young officers. General Musa’s post-war tours of the units, still in their battle locations, made a strange mix of the highest rhetoric for the Islamic Pakistan Army and the harshest references to India’s exemplary perfidy and rank cowardice.
General Musa retired in September 1966 to make way for General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan to assume the army’s command. He was not a mujahid, neither would he ever pretend to be one. The jihadi lore might have been a thing of the past. Yahya was a Dionysian type: three dry gin miniatures between 11 am and 12 pm and double whiskies from sunset to about midnight. Yahya would be at his desk for a couple of hours every day, every now and then he would be on his feet for official diplomatic functions.
His non-jihadi rule continued some three years and nine months before its fatal collapse on December 16, 1971.
His last address to the nation, on December 16, 1971, resounded of jihadi lore. He recited the kalma and asked his brave men to press on and destroy the enemy. Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant General Gul Hassan Khan took over on December 20, 1971. He was the first and last ever lieutenant general to have served as a commander in chief. He stayed in the saddle for barely three months, still wiping the beer foam off his trimmed moustache when President Bhutto dismissed him.
His successor, General Tikka Khan kept his Islam practically free from jihadism. He left all the high policies of the state for Prime Minister Bhutto to decide and spell out. For his personal debt of gratitude to the prime minister for elevating him to the top slot, General Tikka stayed away from politics and jihadi lore.
Tikka’s successor, General Mohammad Ziaul Haq, a strict Muslim and a mujahid, raised the jihadi lore from rhetorical to operational and doctrinal eminence.
He gave the army the triple motto of imaan (faith), taqwa (piety) and jihad. Thus, for the first time, the steel frame of military professionalism was tampered with quasi-jihadism.
Zia created a group of nazmin-e-salat vigilantes to make sure that the Muslims within their respective areas and jurisdictions offered their congregational prayers. He adopted the sherwani pajama ensemble as the standard national dress.
However, he would not touch his armoured corps uniform as the one enduring legacy of the colonial era. He wore his own gorgeous armoured corps uniform, complete with the chain mail, the whistle and the aiguillette with full miniature medals. Ziaul Haq’s tenure was thus a baffling amalgam of colonial attire and jihadi faith and spirit.
More than the devotion to faith and ritual, what encouraged Zia in the loud proclamation of his faith and absolute commitment to Islam was the make believe elevation of the Soviet Afghan war to the status of jihad. Zia’s motivated and US-funded international brigade in Afghanistan emerged as the apogee of jihadism. To the sitting American President, Ronald Reagan, the mujahideen were the “moral equivalents of the founding fathers”.
Interestingly, and no less significantly, the radical fringe of the mujahideen comprising Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Muhammad Younus Khalis and Abdur Rauf Sayyaf, etc, had been the major beneficiaries of US arms and dollars funnelled through the ISI. Thus, while the US’s military tactics worked, its grand strategy could not have been more flawed — its wreckage is still all over the place.
Benazir came and let her interior minister, General Naseerullah Babar, raise the Taliban brigade as Pakistan’s strategic reserve. The Taliban and the jihadis were two sides of the same coin. Babar called them “my children”.
In due course, the Taliban emerged as the backbone of the jihadis. The army adopted them as its progeny. A succession of ISI generals, Hamid Gul, Javed Nasir, Akhtar Abdul Rahman and others, patronised and used them to suit their strategic designs.
Musharraf called them “my strategic reserve”, for him to release whenever he pleased. Jihadism in the military, mainly the army, has been a force to reckon with, and its presence cannot be denied. Two major generals, Tajammul Hussain Malik (1980) and Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi and Brigadier Mustansir Billah, were held up, court-martialled and dismissed from service for their abortive jihadi coup.
The post-9/11 US invasion of Afghanistan and the devastating bombardment of Tora Bora, ironically code-named Operation Enduring Freedom, brought Pakistan forcibly into the ensuing war on terror. Pakistan now owns the war, facing a long chain of consequences, largely unintended.
The war on terror continues unabated with the militants (all Muslims) on one side and the Pakistani military on the other, caught in a sort of a tribal/fraternal blood feud. Besides devastating the land of the Pathans across both the settled and the tribal areas, it has created an enormous lashkar of suicide bombers.
It is time for Pakistan to realise and accept its limitations as a military power according to its own resource base — both material and ideological. As for a peaceful diplomatic solution of the Kashmir issue, we must forego the option of war. Above all, we must rein in the jihadi outfits waging their proxy jihad from their safe havens in Pakistan. Islam remains the be-all and end-all of our spiritual and every day life — not as a source of militant jihadism but as a religion of peace.
As for the army, the sooner it discards the jihadi slogans and symbols the better off it would it be as a first class professional fighting force.
The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army
More than the devotion to faith and ritual, what encouraged Zia in the loud proclamation of his faith and absolute commitment to Islam was the make believe elevation of the Soviet Afghan war to the status of jihad.
President Mohammad Ayub Khan, in his emotionally charged radio address to the nation, recited the kalma tayyaba to warn India that the kalma reciting Pakistani would not rest until the enemy’s guns were silenced.
Through the 17-day war in 1965, the entire country reverberated to the vociferous chants of jihad against Hindu India. Jihad and Islam were formalised almost as a military doctrine. So much of this jihad-dominated propaganda poured into the media, both print and electronic, that an inconclusive war turned into a final victory.
Frontline troops, lieutenants, colonels and lower ranks followed the five-time prayers code strictly. A number of field officers even refused to have their pictures taken, calling it un-Islamic.
For the field marshal and his army chief, General Musa, the reactive Islamic lore came as a godsend. The field marshal’s invocation of the kalma became the popular slogan ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia? Laillah illahla’ (what does Pakistan mean? There is only one God).
Comparisons with Badr and Uhud, led by the Prophet (PBUH) himself, were freely cited. Jihadism, post-1965, emerged as a powerful talisman and motivational force for senior commanders to motivate their men and young officers. General Musa’s post-war tours of the units, still in their battle locations, made a strange mix of the highest rhetoric for the Islamic Pakistan Army and the harshest references to India’s exemplary perfidy and rank cowardice.
General Musa retired in September 1966 to make way for General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan to assume the army’s command. He was not a mujahid, neither would he ever pretend to be one. The jihadi lore might have been a thing of the past. Yahya was a Dionysian type: three dry gin miniatures between 11 am and 12 pm and double whiskies from sunset to about midnight. Yahya would be at his desk for a couple of hours every day, every now and then he would be on his feet for official diplomatic functions.
His non-jihadi rule continued some three years and nine months before its fatal collapse on December 16, 1971.
His last address to the nation, on December 16, 1971, resounded of jihadi lore. He recited the kalma and asked his brave men to press on and destroy the enemy. Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant General Gul Hassan Khan took over on December 20, 1971. He was the first and last ever lieutenant general to have served as a commander in chief. He stayed in the saddle for barely three months, still wiping the beer foam off his trimmed moustache when President Bhutto dismissed him.
His successor, General Tikka Khan kept his Islam practically free from jihadism. He left all the high policies of the state for Prime Minister Bhutto to decide and spell out. For his personal debt of gratitude to the prime minister for elevating him to the top slot, General Tikka stayed away from politics and jihadi lore.
Tikka’s successor, General Mohammad Ziaul Haq, a strict Muslim and a mujahid, raised the jihadi lore from rhetorical to operational and doctrinal eminence.
He gave the army the triple motto of imaan (faith), taqwa (piety) and jihad. Thus, for the first time, the steel frame of military professionalism was tampered with quasi-jihadism.
Zia created a group of nazmin-e-salat vigilantes to make sure that the Muslims within their respective areas and jurisdictions offered their congregational prayers. He adopted the sherwani pajama ensemble as the standard national dress.
However, he would not touch his armoured corps uniform as the one enduring legacy of the colonial era. He wore his own gorgeous armoured corps uniform, complete with the chain mail, the whistle and the aiguillette with full miniature medals. Ziaul Haq’s tenure was thus a baffling amalgam of colonial attire and jihadi faith and spirit.
More than the devotion to faith and ritual, what encouraged Zia in the loud proclamation of his faith and absolute commitment to Islam was the make believe elevation of the Soviet Afghan war to the status of jihad. Zia’s motivated and US-funded international brigade in Afghanistan emerged as the apogee of jihadism. To the sitting American President, Ronald Reagan, the mujahideen were the “moral equivalents of the founding fathers”.
Interestingly, and no less significantly, the radical fringe of the mujahideen comprising Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Muhammad Younus Khalis and Abdur Rauf Sayyaf, etc, had been the major beneficiaries of US arms and dollars funnelled through the ISI. Thus, while the US’s military tactics worked, its grand strategy could not have been more flawed — its wreckage is still all over the place.
Benazir came and let her interior minister, General Naseerullah Babar, raise the Taliban brigade as Pakistan’s strategic reserve. The Taliban and the jihadis were two sides of the same coin. Babar called them “my children”.
In due course, the Taliban emerged as the backbone of the jihadis. The army adopted them as its progeny. A succession of ISI generals, Hamid Gul, Javed Nasir, Akhtar Abdul Rahman and others, patronised and used them to suit their strategic designs.
Musharraf called them “my strategic reserve”, for him to release whenever he pleased. Jihadism in the military, mainly the army, has been a force to reckon with, and its presence cannot be denied. Two major generals, Tajammul Hussain Malik (1980) and Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi and Brigadier Mustansir Billah, were held up, court-martialled and dismissed from service for their abortive jihadi coup.
The post-9/11 US invasion of Afghanistan and the devastating bombardment of Tora Bora, ironically code-named Operation Enduring Freedom, brought Pakistan forcibly into the ensuing war on terror. Pakistan now owns the war, facing a long chain of consequences, largely unintended.
The war on terror continues unabated with the militants (all Muslims) on one side and the Pakistani military on the other, caught in a sort of a tribal/fraternal blood feud. Besides devastating the land of the Pathans across both the settled and the tribal areas, it has created an enormous lashkar of suicide bombers.
It is time for Pakistan to realise and accept its limitations as a military power according to its own resource base — both material and ideological. As for a peaceful diplomatic solution of the Kashmir issue, we must forego the option of war. Above all, we must rein in the jihadi outfits waging their proxy jihad from their safe havens in Pakistan. Islam remains the be-all and end-all of our spiritual and every day life — not as a source of militant jihadism but as a religion of peace.
As for the army, the sooner it discards the jihadi slogans and symbols the better off it would it be as a first class professional fighting force.
The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army
