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Pakistan: Army within army

B. Raman

Instead of riding the horse, the General finds himself caught in the arms of an octopus. Elements in the army, the religious parties and the nuclear scientific community have joined hands in frustrating any attempt of Gen. Musharraf to sign the CTBT, con trol the madrasas, disarm the jihadists and pressure the Taliban to moderate its activities.

WHEN Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power and proclaimed himself the Chief Executive of the state, many sections of the country's elite hailed him as the saviour. Today, they call him sarcastically ``Gen. Retreat''.

They had hoped he would assume effective control of the horse of the state and make it, at least trot, if not gallop, towards a bright future. Instead, he has been riding a buckling horse. Every hesitant step forward has been accompanied by a step backwa rd under pressure from one or the other of the five most important components of the Pakistani society -- the Punjabi feudals, the bazaris, the Islamic fundamentalists, the narco and other smugglers, and the armed forces.

Among the steps announced or promised by him and subsequently withdrawn or diluted under such pressure are:

A To emulate the Turkish model of a modern and secular Islamic state.

A To impose tax on agriculture.

A To put down tax evasion by enforcing the rules for the documentation of property and income, as a prelude to the imposition of general sales tax on retailers. This is one of the conditionalities of the IMF.

A To put an end to the smuggling to the West of heroin and into Pakistan of consumer articles imported ostensibly for supply to Afghanistan under the transit trade agreement, but actually sold in Pakistan.

A To stop military training by ex-servicemen in the Islamic madrasas (religious schools) for using the trained cadres in the so-called Islamic jihad all over the world.

A To bring the madrasas under effective state control so that they are used only for the intended purpose of teaching the Holy Koran to the youth.

A To end frivolous or vindictive investigations and prosecutions under the blasphemy laws.

A To visit Kandahar and persuade the Taliban to moderate its policies and co-operate with the US in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. This was one of the promises made to the US.

A To reduce defence expenditure. Another IMF conditionality. Gen. Musharraf has sought to do it by transferring some expenditure items such as pension payments from the defence to other budgets.

A To sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

To understand why, instead of riding the horse, the General finds himself caught in the tentacles of an octopus, one has to focus on certain aspects of the Pakistani society and state.

The Punjabis constitute 48.2 per cent of Pakistan's population followed by the Pakhtuns (13.1 per cent), the Sindhis (11.8 per cent), the Seraikis (southern Punjabis -- 9.8 per cent), the Mohajirs (7.6 per cent), the Baluchis (4.2 per cent) and others (5 .3 per cent).

Seventy per cent of the officers and other ranks in the armed forces are Punjabis and Seraikis, 28 per cent Pakhtuns and only two per cent come from the remaining ethnic groups. The majority of the Punjabi officers come from Punjab, the bastion of feudal ism. Their sympathies are naturally with the opposition of their relatives and friends to the imposition of a tax on agriculture. They had in the past prevented Pakhtun and Punjabi dictators and politicians from imposing the tax, and they are not going t o now allow a Mohajir General (Musharraf) to do so now.

The bazari-fundamentalist-smuggler nexus has always been strong in Pakistan.The bazaris and the smugglers have the financial power to pay the street elements for using them against rulers unsympathetic to their demands; and the fundamentalists, though la cking in electoral support being able to win only about three per cent of the votes in elections, have the street power for use against the rulers with the help of the money from the bazaris.

It was the agitation of the bazaris and the religious parties respectively over Mr. Nawaz Sharif's succumbing to the IMF conditionalities and his alleged collaboration with the US against the Taliban and Osama and his failure to enforce the Shariat, that facilitated the take over by Gen. Musharraf without any popular protest.

The fear of the three elements once again combining together -- this time, against him -- is an important reason for the pusillanimity of the so-called ``no nonsense General'', as he is often projected by the military's media relations experts.

The armed forces are the most pampered segment of the Pakistani state, consuming about six per cent of GDP -- including overt and covert defence expenditure -- as against around five per cent in 1991-92. During the same period, the development expenditur e came down from 7.5 per cent of GDP to three per cent. The state spends twice as much (salaries, pensions, medicare, training and equipment costs, and so on) on the armed forces personnel -- serving and retired -- and their relatives, who constitute les s than 10 per cent of the population, as it does on the remaining 90 per cent, who have nothing to do with the armed forces.

That is why the Pakistanis refer to their Corps Commanders as Crore Commanders. However, it also happens to be still the only functional segment of the state, the civil bureaucracy, including the police, having been rendered dysfunctional by successive p olitical rulers and military dictators. This should partly explain the power wielded by the military.

Before 1977, the motivating factors used in the military training institutions were patriotism and their pride in themselves as loyal Pakistanis. The young officers passing out looked upon the army as that of the state.

Zia-ul-Haq, a devout Deobandi, changed this and introduced the additional motivating factors of their faith in Islam and their pride in themselves as true Muslims. Those passing out after 1977, started looking upon themselves not only as soldiers of the state, but also of Islam. This feeling was further strengthened by Zia and his US supporters to motivate them to fight against the so-called Soviet Satans in Afghanistan.

Zia allowed the Islamic parties to use serving and ex-servicemen for training their cadres in their madrasas and equipped them with US-supplied arms and ammunition for using them against the Soviet troops. To further strengthen the religious motivation, he inducted religious teachers in large numbers into the Education Department and recognised the certificates issued by the madrasas as equivalent to university degrees for recruitment to government service.

The result was the increasing Islamisation of the middle- and lower-ranks of the military and the coming into being of a parallel armed force, consisting of the military-trained and equipped madrasa cadres, not under the control of the state. The Islamis ed soldiers and officers, who constitute an army within the army, often join hands with the parallel armed force of the religious parties and frustrate the attempts of any ruler to rein in the madrasas and their irrational products.

The irrationality is not just confined to the armed forces. It is spreading to Pakistan's nuclear and space scientific community. Many of the younger scientists had their early education in the madrasas before they moved over to the universities or went abroad for higher education. A. Q. Khan, the self-proclaimed father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, though educated in Europe before 1977, has been fraternising with the scientists of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya.

All these elements in the army, the religious parties and the nuclear scientific community have joined hands in frustrating any attempt of Gen. Musharraf to sign the CTBT, control the madrasas, disarm the jihadists and pressure the Taliban to moderate it s activities.

Under Zia, Gen. Musharraf himself played a role in this Islamisation and in the induction of Osama into the Afghan theatre and later, as the Director-General of Military Operations under Mrs. Benazir Bhutto during her second tenure as the Prime Minister, he distinguished himself as one of the godfathers of the Taliban. Having reared it, he now finds it difficult to control it.

Even if he wants to prevent the Talibanisation of Pakistan, the army within the army led by the likes of Lt. Gen. Mohammad Aziz, his Chief of the General Staff, and Lt. Gen. Muzaffar Usmani, Commanding Officer of the 5 Corps at Karachi, would not let him . Since it is this army within the army, which captured power before his plane landed in Karachi and paved the way for his take-over as the Chief Executive, he cannot be dismissive of their views.

The Pakistan armed forces still have many senior officers who are concerned over this army within the army, and this is particularly so in the Air Force and the Navy, where the religious influence is not high. It is to them that Mr. Sharif has been indir ectly appealing by raising the issue of how Gen. Musharraf kept not only his Prime Minister, but also many of his colleagues in the dark about his Kargil misadventure, undertaken at the instigation of this army within the army.

(The author is former Additional Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India.)