Critical role of Pakistan's generals put to the test
Monday, February 18, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
What could be the main casualty of the current Pakistan elections is the integrity and role of the Pakistan Army.
In the bloody partition of British India in 1947, the chaos of the newly created Pakistan was unimaginable, dramatically worse than its severed Siamese twin. The new India state not only had its overwhelming size – although with both the east and the west “wings” of the new Muslim state then intact even if divided by hundreds of miles of the new India, Pakistan was by far the largest Muslim majority nation in the emerging postcolonial world.
But India had vast physical and emotional assets of the old united India. If nothing more there were those unique and monumental buildings of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens and the relics, ironically, of the Muslim subcontinental empire, in the new India capital New Delhi. The capital had been artificially and grandly created by the British Empire when they moved it from teeming but uncontrollable Calcutta, finally, in 1931.
In the then Pakistan capital of Karachi, I remember as late as a visit in the late-1950s gazing out over shacks and “temporary” dwellings of Muslim refugees surrounding the mausoleum of Mohammed Zinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, the leading figure in the creation of the truncated Islamic state.. They seemingly stretched as far as the eye could see.
When Jinnah died quickly after the founding of the state, and his right hand and successor, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, was assasinated in 1951, more than ever the disproportiontely large Pakistani contingent of the vaunted British Indian Army with its glorious record in World War II, became the essential national institution. It has remained that through the volatile 60 years of Pakistan’s existence. Even though its intervention repeatedly – Pakistan has lived more under military or military-directed rule than civilian – has often been seen inside and outside Pakistan as antidemocratic.
In more than one conversation in a mess with the walls often covered with the regimental regalia of old British Indian Army campaigns, many in the very same troubled tribal areas and Aghanistan of today, over a whisky, I have heard officers sneer at “the mullahs”. As much as the high profile of Pakistan women, relatively, in the professions and more recently in politics, this contempt for Muslim religioisty, especially in its more radical forms, has been a hallmark of the Pakistani ethos. It characterized as much as anything the strange dichotomy in which Jinnah, for example, a secularist, had chosen to build a state of many bitterly divided ethnicities based only on the concept that they were all Muslim and could not thrive in the new majority Hindu state independence was to give the subcontinent.
It is curious that just now as Pakistan’s – and its army’s – dedication to the old idea of a modern civil society, with or without a reformed Islam, the same sort of test is taking place in its fellow Mulsim-majority state, Turkey. It is no accident, as they say, that President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who spent a part of his adoescence in Turkey, has told intimates over the years that he models his own political credo on what was Turkish westernization. But, beseiged as he is now on both sides by supposedly reformist civilian politicians and Islamofascists, he might have looked over his shoulder at the Turkish scene. There, increasinlgy currents of Turkish ultranationalism and Islam seem to be converging, at least for the moment.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is just now recovering from a demonstration of that phenomenon by the visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish politician, who heads a party with “Islamic roots”, gathered Turkish ethnic residents from all over Western Europe at a public meeting to urge them not to assimilate. For foreigners, if not for Erdogan and some of his new found ultranationalist friends, that is incompatible with European modernization.
Meanwhile, the Turkish army, which like their Pakistani comrades in arms, have seen their role as the guardians of militant modernization [read Westernization] are stymied. They dare not – at least for the moment – intervene as they have in the past with military rule to set the country back on a more militant secular path against an overwhelmingly popular Justice and Development Party [AKP] which only last year won a huge new electoral endorsement. Erdogan has just thrown down the gauntlet to them by revising the constitution to permit women to go partially veiled with a symbolic headscarf to universities. The AKP President Abudllah Gul’s wife already notoriously wears it to public gatherings boycotted by the military. Furthermore, if what had been seen as the denouement of Turkish modernization, admission to the European Union, would finally be torpedoed with such a military intervention – not that opposition by both Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had not already seemed, at least temporarily, to have doomed it.
Unlike the Turkish military which has had frequent and programmatic razzia to root out any zealous religiously suspect officers, there is believed to have been some penetration of the Pakistani military by Islamicists. That was believed to have occurred as the old British Indian army apolitical, secularized traditions faded and new generations of officers and noncoms were recruited. It was perhaps spurred by the anti-Soviet war conducted by the U.S. largely through its Pakistani ally against Moscow’s occupation of neighboring Afghanistan. The Pakistanis share many ties with the Afghans, most of all with the Pushtoon tribes along the arbitrary frontier demarked by the British in the 19th century. During the war all stops were pulled out in mobilizing Muslim sentiments against the Soviets, even to recruiting foreign fighters – including, of course, the infamous Osama Bin Lad3n.
Whatever “Islamization” took place in the military built on the bitterness with which the Pakistanis believe they were abandoned by Washington after the victory in Afghanistan and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1990. Islamabad saw this as a result of Washington’s attempt to curry favor and a new relationship with the Soviet’s former ally, India, Pakistan’s enemy in three and a half wars since independence and with whom it continued to have the bitter struggle over Kashmir, the province strategically located in the Himalayas bordering Central Asia and China. And that, of course, despite denials on both the Indian and American side, was seen in Islamabad as an effort to bolster India’s off and on confrontation with the Chinese along the Hiamalayan divide which had exploded in the short but decisive 1964 Indo-Chinese war. The Pakistanis never ceasingly, despite the post-9/11 reaffirmation of U.S.-Pakistani ties in the war on the Islamic terrorists, remind anyone within earshot of the fidelity of their Chinese allies since the Communists came to power there in 1949. And the transfer of missile and perhaps swap of nuclear technology between Beijing and Islamabad has been an important ingredient of the contiuning arms race between the two subcontinental powers.
Estimates on the eve of the poll for the new Pakistan parliament indicated the Islamicist parties, some “moderate” if corrupt to their more radical manifestations, will drop back from levels in the 2002 elections. That appears as much a function of the fracturing of the religious political groupings into traditional tribal and ethnic divisions as any lowering of fervor among their adherents. In fact, as the daily headlines suggest, the Al Qaida and neo-Taliban conspirators are dramatizing their embattled but significant role in the tribal frontier areas with sorties of suicide bombers into Pakistani urban centers.
Anti-Musharraf feeling, some of it among Islamicist-inclined retired military, has already been publicized. And there is always a suspicion that such groups have infiltrated the military, at least at lower echelons. The reluctance, decried semi-publicly by American military, and more stridently in Britain, of Musharraf to proceed more aggresively against the radical elements esconced in the tribal border areas is probably not only a product of what for the Pakistanis have been heavy casualties in warfare for which they are not trained. It also is probably a function of concern at the highest levels of the Pakistani military at just how much penetration the Islamicists have made in their ranks, allied through tribal and ethnic allegiances as well as religious orientation, and the unpopularity of attacking these pockets of fanaticism. If the Pakistani elections – or their aftermath – turned violent and chaotic, the extent of any such penetration might well be tested.