Pakistan Army’s “Mosaic of Ideas”

In the few lines I wrote on General Gul Hasan (DJ, March 2000), I had made a brief reference to the need for a study of the lives of those men who have left their imprint, for better or worse, on the composite personality of the Pakistan Army as an institution. The purpose, I indicated, should be not biography as an end in itself but as an analytical tool to arrive at that “mosaic of ideas” which have shaped the growth of the Pakistan Army over the years and the decades, making it what it is today and indicating the possibilities of what it may evolve into tomorrow.

A history of ideas is not easy to grasp in isolation from the men who set them into motion. Some ideas survive and gain strength while others fall by the way, not always on the basis of their intrinsic merit and not infrequently because of the quantum of authority that their originators wield. This is particularly true of an organisation like the army in which “role models” appear from within a pre-fixed command structure. In the short run there is no scope for “natural selection” and command may enforce what leadership would eschew. In the long run, however, systemic selection places at the top a band of men who set the tone and tenor of the army as a corporate body. This band of pace-setters appears in three tiers: at the combat level (battalion, regiment, brigade), at the level of operational strategy (division, corps) and finally the army level (the Chief aided by his principal staff officers). An army operates well when there is an even spread of appropriate competence at all three levels. Some partial compensation is possible, one level covering the flaws in another, but any serious deficiency in one will cripple the performance of the organisation as a whole.

The general perception, both within the Army and among informed observers outside, is that we are not too poor at the tactical combat level but there are several weaknesses at the strategic level (both operational and national). The finger is pointed at our higher command. It needs to be taken seriously and critically examined for sustained corrective action. The establishment of the National Defence College with its two-tier course, the brainchild of Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, has been an important step forward. Over a period of time the ideas generated here will spread and make their impact not only on operational matters within the army but also on the overall outlook and conduct of the army as a national institution.

In our peculiar circumstances as a developing country, the Armed Forces have a vital role to play in the promotion of national solidarity. As an aspect of civil-military collaboration geared to the socio-economic development of the people, it has yet to find a conceptually clear niche in our mosaic of ideas. What has taken place so far has been ad-hoc, sporadic, an immediate response to immediate compulsions, not a pattern consciously woven in pursuit of a grand design. A very useful study on the subject was recently carried out by the Islamabad office of the Independent Bureau of Humanitarian Issues. With events within Pakistan racing ahead of the study, the report (“Role of the Armed Forces in the Socio-Economic Development of Developing Countries: Case Study Pakistan”, September 1999) remains unpublished. It deserves to be dug out and examined carefully for critical changes in the current orientation of the Armed Forces and the tasks that might be undertaken within the limits of constitutional propriety. Without further elaboration and stated in a single sentence, the report calls for a systematic and vigorous engagement of the armed forces for the socio-economic development of the people: the internal (national) counterpart of the external (international) tasks undertaken by Armed Forces worldwide for the enforcement, preservation and promotion of peace, socio-economic recovery and reconstruction, prompt support for humanitarian causes, stout resistance against human and environmental degradation. Of course, there are caveats. The report does not ignore them and indicates what can be done despite the odds. So much, by way of a brief digression, on what our mosaic of ideas might include for the Armed Forces as an important national institution with potential beyond its primary role of defence against external aggression.

As for the immediate theme of our present discourse, viz. a fair understanding of the pattern that emerges within the Army by way of a historical aggregate, we may examine the personality, conduct and legacy of its leading figures over the past fifty years. This calls for research covering the individual trails and examining how they have criss-crossed or inter-acted to establish the prevailing pattern. While research scholars undertake this onerous task, those who write articles and anecdotes (based on their personal association with these men of consequence) need not hold back. Even if they cannot write history, they can provide some of the stuff that history is made of. It is in this modest role that I should like to write a few lines on some of the prominent personalities who have left their mark on the composite tone and tenor of the Pakistan Army. Happily or otherwise, subordinates are not required to write complete ACRs on their superiors but their stray observations truthfully reported may lead to some startling insights even for the professional historian seeking to piece together the chips in our prevailing mosaic of ideas.

Take Ayub Khan, for example, our first native Commander-in-Chief. My first close-quarter brush with the Field Marshal came when I was a spanking new Captain and he as yet only a four-star general. At the time (late 1958), I was in HQ 14 Division (Dhaka) posted as secretary to the Board of Governors for East Pakistan’s first cadet college at Faujdarhat. The Board met infrequently and the governors were ardent believers in the art of minimum governance as the best form of governance. It was, I suspect, more a matter of convenience than conviction but it suited the Chairman of the Board (Major General Umrao Khan, GOC 14 Division) who in turn weighed me up for three months and then left everything to me. Umrao Khan was a splendid character and I shall have much to say about him later. Between the two of us, we got the Cadet College going in a matter of two years (mid-1956 to mid-1958), all the way from the selection of the site (Faujdarhat on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, some 16 miles from Chittagong), to the acquisition of land (156 acres), the drawing up of construction plans (Gammon Pakistan, and Omarsons), construction itself (Omarsons), the manufacture of school furniture (Burma teak, if you please), the drawing up of a syllabus, the procurement of text books and laboratory equipment, sports goods and materials for extra - curricular activities, the selection of staff and students etc.

We were in the thick of it all, when General Umrao Khan dropped his first bombshell: “Oye Bangali, I am going to call the Headmaster (meaning the Field Marshal-to-be) to perform the opening ceremony of the first class in operation. Two months from now, OK?” I protested vehemently: “You can’t, by God you can’t; so help me God, you won’t! “I went on to explain that there was no parallel between the conduct of a hasty night attack and the establishment of an educational institution, construction work was not yet complete, there was noise and litter all around, the lawns had yet to come up: “You can’t study either Keats or Rumi in the midst of all this muck and noise!” The sturdy peasant in Umrao Khan resorted to his native dialect to mock at my English and my starry-eyed, star-studded public school ideas. The wily general stroked his close-clipped grey hair and asked me to note that the tropical sun had nothing to do with it: “I am calling the Headmaster and he is coming, that’s that. I can do nothing about it, but you can and you will!“ There were several stormy sessions and every time I walked out in a frenzy. The general remained in command and unmoved, except periodically to stroke his gray hair.

Finally, the Field Marshal came, Umrao Khan’s “Headmaster”: tall, handsome and stately as he stood there by the model listening to my briefing. For the most part he remained silent, gradually opening up as we moved out to climb a nearby hillock (site of the Principal’s house) for a bird’s-eye view of the campus taking shape across a spread of some 156 acres. General Umrao had pushed me forward to walk alongside the Field Marshal, while he himself (with Education Minister Zahiruddin, and Khalil Omar of Omarsons) remained in the immediate rear. As we walked up the steps cut into a side of the hill, the Field Marshal asked whom we were getting as the principal. Just the question I was waiting for and I replied excitedly: “Mr. Catchpole, Sir, Mr. Hugh Catchpole! I have persuaded him to come and he will.” The Field Marshal went red in the face, crimson red: “Catchpole,Catchpole, Catchpole. I am fed up with this RIMC, RIMC all the time. Can’t you people think of someone other than that 3rd class Roman Urdu teacher? I thought you would know better...” With General Umrao tugging at my bush-shirt from behind, I refused to step back till I had dropped my last brick: “Yes Sir, it is precisely because I know better that we are getting Mr. Catchpole!” General Umrao came forward to explain that the matter was by no means finalized. Then onward, the proceedings were a complete fiasco. On the hilltop Khalil Omar took over the rest of the briefing, the Field Marshal listened in stony silence, refused to have the cup of tea we had arranged for him (tea and biscuits only) and strode away in anger as General Umrao stroked his gray hair and Minister Zahiruddin was lost in a world of his own. As the Field Marshal sped away in his limousine, I brought forth the smartest salute that the Military Academy had prepared me for. Here ends Episode 1

My second opportunity for a feel of the Field Marshal at close range came a few months before the 1965 War. I was a Major, Adjutant of my regiment (11th Cavalry, FF) at a place called Mandiala Waraich. The clouds of war were on the horizon and the Field Marshal landed at Pasrur for a pep-talk to the officers of 6 Armoured Division. I remember nothing of the talk now. All that remains is the sight of the Supreme Commander seated on a high chair placed on a pedestal of sorts, General Musa (C-in-C) in attendance and a bevy of lesser brass cowering around like frightened courtiers at some Imperial Court. Two NCOs rushed forward to dust the specks off the Field Marshal’s boots and so many of our glittering brass looked on as if to confirm that the job was well done. It was a disturbing sight. No, I said to myself, no: This is no Robert E. Lee, nor these his devoted commanders in combat. As I brood today over the legacy of Ayub Khan and the stains in our “mosaic of ideas”, I feel angry and sad.

During the Ayub era we were junior officers intent on becoming good soldiers, absorbed in our individual and collective training, reading about men like Wavell, Rommel and Robert E. Lee. There were so many courses to attend at home and abroad (thanks to Ayub Khan’s window to the West), so many exercises to hone our professional skills. We grew in our cocoon, cultivating a code and a set of concerns far from the madding crowd. It kept us away from politics but it also isolated us from the people, leading us over the decades to a kind of alienation that we now find difficult to understand. This is the dilemma of all professional armies, particularly in a developing country. Maybe, we need to redefine the concept of the profession itself, establish a more meaningful nexus between military and civil activity in our prioritized pursuit of national goals. For a long while, it seems to me, the Army’s “mosaic of ideas” must include a rich tapestry of activity for socio-economic recovery and reconstruction on a nation-wide scale. It will spare the Army the pains of its narcissism, its pursuit of excellence in isolation, the hollowness of its professional onanism in times of peace. For the Army it would be a big step forward from virtual reality to reality itself.

Did Ayub Khan’s legacy to the Army include a strong streak of servility in our senior commanders? I have seen the menace grow. So many of us started off with a sturdy idealism. It served us well up to the rank of Major, even Lieutenant Colonel. Time for lipstick on the collar, and the stars grew dim. There was little left to steer by and our pursuit of a career replaced our pursuit of the profession. Servility and sycophancy came in handy, as did competence in extra-curricular activities (we can do without naming them). Some of us fell by the way for very good reasons and some of us continued to rise for no reason at all till they entered the long night of the generals. Not all generals are tainted and not all young Turks are without blemish, but a dirty general is certainly a sorrier spectacle than a dirty major. The greater their number in either category, the worse for both. I have known the power of silence in the expression of a competent commander’s anger or disapproval, but the silence of a subordinate in the face of irrational or insolent might is supine surrender, not wisdom. No organisation can prosper where false gods preside. As I grow older, however, my anger mounts more against the mindless, spineless subordinate. Down with the ‘PUJARI’, before we raise the cry of down with the ‘BUTH’! Where and what would the ‘BUTH’ be but for the PUJARIS? Before he smashed the idols, the Prophet changed the mind-set of the idolaters.

There were not many idolaters among the “RIMC boys”, some of whom were in the Armed Forces that came to the share of Pakistan in 1947 and a few others who joined later. There were several in some positions of authority when Ayub Khan took over as Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army. Ayub Khan, I suspect, did not like them. It was at best a love-hate relationship, the traces of which I first discovered during that memorable encounter on the shores of the Bay of Bengal (Cadet College Faiydarhat, 1958). In the Air Force, men like Asghar Khan and Nur Khan rose to the top. In the Army, Gul Hasan and Sahabzada Yaqub Khan may not be forgotten. There were others less exalted but not inconsequential in the context of our “mosaic of ideas”. In the background looms the father-figure of Mr. Hugh Catchpole - “that 3rd class Roman Urdu teacher”, in Ayub Khan’s jealous and uncharitable words. On these men (and some more) I shall write a few lines, bit by bit as I stroll down memory lane, and leave it to the future historian to make some sense of it all. The schoolboy in me cannot resist a quotation here, General Umrao Khan’s quizzical store notwithstanding:

“Age shall not wither them,

Nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun

And in the morning,

We shall remember them.”

Back to Ayub Khan and his legacy. Did Ayub Khan’s personal penchant for politics set a precedent for other “adventurers” to follow? Ignoring his own tendencies, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto popularized the notion of Bonapartism in the army. Ayub Khan certainly broke the ice and what was taboo failed to acquire the status of a doctrine. But you cannot lay the “sin” of one man at the door of an entire institution. In the context of world history, Ayub Khan’s was no “original sin”. The Pakistan Army remains a professional and apolitical organisation bound by the will of its Chief. The Chief decides, the Army obeys - without murmur, almost mechanically. That is how professional armies operate the world over. Within Pakistan, the Pakistan Army retains its institutional integrity. Had it been otherwise, factions within the army vying for power, it would have disintegrated long ago and we would have had the spectacle of our fractious politicians each with his own warlord. What would then have ensued is not the kind of coups that we have had but bloody, vicious, internecine civil war leading to the destruction of the state. This is not to condone the coups that have taken place (already too many), but to de-link the coup-makers from the institution for a historical enquiry into their individual motivations and their performance while in power. I do not see coup-making in Pakistan as a military tradition handed over from Chief to Chief but as unique occurrences revolving round individuals (Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and now Pervez Musharraf). If there is a common historical sub-stratum, it is the repeated failure of our political leadership - their wanton and wayward ways leading to our periodic descent into chaos. This is for the professional historian to examine. As a lay chronicler, however, I do find the present case particularly interesting in the context of how an institution may operate when its Centre of Gravity is in mid-air, several thousand feet above mean sea-level!

Back to Ayub Khan. From the perspective of the Army, Ayub was the originator of the concept of hyphenated command. The Ayub-Musa duo was transformed in due course into the Yahya-Hameed and the Zia-Arif combination. The ego-alter ego pattern was sometimes YIN and sometimes YANG, sometimes UMBRA-PENUMBRA, at times simply hocus pocus. Gul Hasan’s “Memoirs” make a passing a reference to it and it makes for no pleasant reading. Be that as it may, I see the Ayub era spanning all the way to the very edge of the disaster in East Pakistan. The Army was never prepared for the end game and it lost there much of the honour that it had earlier bestowed on itself.

These things do not happen in a day, and along the way there are several questions to be raised. Did Ayub Khan see it coming? If he did, he blinked or simply closed his eyes. He saw us through the 1965 War, if war one may call it. What lessons did we learn, except for some text-book review and revision of our military doctrine; some changes in our organisation, equipment and training; a further inflation of our military and national ego? It was another classic case of preparing for the last war, much wrestling with how we may have fought it better, military history (“history”, also as an American colloqualism) taking the place of military reality. Very little of it had anything to do with the war to come (1971) and when it came we were either babes in the wood or bandits, with some honourable exceptions as a saving grace. A few “tigers” less and we may have made far better soldiers. Add to the lot some shrill cries of JIHAD and we have an unholy brew. What all this does to our “mosaic of ideas” I can only stare at. It makes no sense to me and it will bring peace to none till we can collectively cleanse and bury our past.

These last few lines have exhausted my ability to write any more, for the while at least. I have yet to plod through the curtain on Yahya Khan, the rise and fall of the messiah, the long reign of another general from nowhere. The canvas is vast, although there is some consolation in the limited that we seek: an understanding of the “mosaic of ideas” which dominate the mind and heart of the Pakistan Army. If I do not get lost along the way, I’ll be glad to get to men like Shaukat Riza and Agha Ali Ibrahim Akram, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan of course, some others who will stir when memory beckons. At the end of the day I may make a hash of it all. Never mind, the professional historian will follow and I will have done what I can within the radius of my competence. The sun, I know, does not mock at the feebleness of the candle.