Pakistan Army in line of fire, again

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With the subtitle “A Woman’s Experience on the Frontline of the War on Terror”, Carey Schofield, the author of Inside The Pakistan Army, thanks former President Pervez Musharraf and Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as well as

many other officers and soldiers for all the support and encouragement given to her during the few years that she spent researching for this book. However, her verdict on the Pakistan Army on the very first page of the book’s first chapter, titled “The Question of the Pakistan Army”, is bound to have caused much regret to the former and current chiefs of this Army mentioned and many others, all the more so because this book was released in India in July 2011, barely two months after Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces in Abbottabad.
If the exposures about the duplicity of the Army/Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) by Wikileaks was the first major blow, Bin Laden’s killing was the second, denting the image and credibility of the Army. To add to the woes of Gen. Kayani’s men, journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad exposed the Army-terror nexus in his book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11, which earned him the wrath of militants and culminating in his brutal assassination. Schofield’s book is likely to smear salt on sore wounds.
And what Schofield has written on the first page is that the Army has never been entirely trusted by the West, as its role in the “war against terror has been seen to be as ambiguous as it has been central” and mentions some questions which observers in India, US, Afghanistan etc have dwelt on: “Has the Army’s notorious ISI continued to support its long-term allies amongst the Taliban, with or without the tacit consent of the head of state? Have elements in the Army siphoned off American aid to support the very forces it was supposed to suppress? How strenuous or even sincere has the Army ever been in its attempts to round up Taliban fighters fleeing Nato forces across its borders? To what extent has every element in the military machine been under the control of the head of the state?”
The Pakistan Army has been dogged by these questions. Despite the protests of successive Army Chiefs, Western officials have continued to brief journalists about the double dealing of Pakistan’s armed forces and the intelligence directorates.
Scofield’s conclusions about the Army are reinforced by Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer, journalist and bestselling author who worked briefly with the Pakistani military and intelligence leadership in the mid-1990s. An excerpt from his military report, which “nobody in Washington cared” about, read: “Your tax dollars are being used to help kill and maim our soldiers, Marines and Navy corpsmen fighting in Afghanistan. Over the past 10 years, we’ve given the Pakistanis — primarily their military — over $20 billion in aid. What did we get in return? Our Pakistani allies hid and protected Osama bin Laden; they increased their support to the Afghan Taliban and its partner, the Haqqani network, they sponsored repeated terrorist attacks against India, they provided safe havens on Pakistani soil for terrorists from a “rainbow coalition” of extremist organisations, and all the while they purposely whipped up anti-American hatred among the country’s 180 million Muslims. Your tax dollars at work.” Pakistan’s first dictator, General Ayub Khan, justified his bloodless coup in 1958 by citing that, given the years of chaos and corruption, the Army promised a “sound, solid and strong nation”.
He began by delivering growth and increased prosperity, helped by considerable economic assistance from the USA and Great Britain following two beneficial defence treaties. In 1961, he initiated the process of creating a new capital from Karachi, which was too far away from Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, to the new city of Islamabad, just 10 miles away. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan’s rabidly anti-Indian foreign minister, encouraged him to adopt an aggressive policy. Following moves by the US to supply arms to India during its 1962 war with China, Bhutto also instigated a change in foreign policy, which until then had been almost entirely pro-Western/US, by building diplomatic ties with China to strengthen Pakistan’s position. In 1963, this policy shift culminated in the Sino-Pakistan Agreement, by which China ceded approximately 750 square miles of land to Pakistan, which acknowledged the sovereignty of China over large parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The pact is still not recognised by India, which disputes the legality of negotiating sovereignty over the disputed lands.
India is the ever-present threat that Pakistan Army officers and men are indoctrinated to perceive. They are conditioned to speculate endlessly on Indian intentions and capabilities, of how it opposed partition, and, as Pakistanis constantly recall, “snatch Kashmir against the will of the people”. In the 1965 war over Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian Army reached the outskirts of Lahore. In 1971, India supported Bengali separatists (which Schofield does not mention) following political suppression by West Pakistan government and large-scale oppression by Pakistan’s Punjabi-dominated Army, contributing to the breakup of the country. Quite apart from its military aggression, Pakistanis point out the Indian national anthem itself refers possessively to Sindh in its second line.
In its early years the armed forces’ officer cadre comprised mainly sons of landed families and successful professionals, with almost all prominent families having someone in the Army.
General Zia-ul-Haq’s planned Islamisation of the Army changed that trend, resulting in young men consciously following the Islamic religious regimen and also the less affluent backgrounds entering Pakistan’s Military Academy. Having lost out to India in three conventional wars since 1947 — the third of which severed off erstwhile East Pakistan — this Islamisation was part of Gen. Zia’s larger plan of launching a much cheaper form of proxy war by export of terrorism to India.
Schofield makes a factual error by stating that President Pervez Musharraf awarded the Sitara-e-Pakistan posthumously in 1994 to William Brown for raising Pakistan’s flag in Gilgit in 1947 — considered an act of high treason against his own King Emperor. Mr Musharraf was neither the Army Chief nor President in 1994. He was a lieutenant-general heading military operations.
Barring this error, the author, despite heaping praise on the Army based obviously on official briefings, has written about its inner politics and intrigues and quoted senior officers who criticised the Army for the lack of professionalism which has plagued it ever since it got transformed from being a part of an undivided Indian Army to the Army of the newly-formed Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
One of them states “recurrent confrontation and collusion with politicians has blackened the Army’s reputation and had, arguably, hampered its military effectiveness” and that interventions of elected governments “distracted the Army from its real job and damaged its image domestically. Civilian resentment at the scale of resources devoured by the military was disturbing to younger officers and to soldiers.”
For all those concerned with Pakistan, this book is a “must read”.
Anil Bhat, a retired Army officer, is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi