Pakistan Army’s Mosaic of Ideas
(PART VII: Conclusion)

Columnist Col (Retd) ABDUL QAYYUM talks about the ideas that have shaped the growth of the Pakistan Army.

The goal or purpose of the series of short essays preceding this concluding piece has been to arrive at a portrait of the mind of the Pakistan Army: the principal ideas which have shaped its growth over the years and made it today what it is. The enquiry is not restricted to the realm of the intellect alone. It spills over into other aspects of the Army’s composite personality: its basic temper and temperament, its varying moods and style, its guiding principles within the organisation, its perception of itself as a national institution and its approach to national affairs beyond the confines of the exclusively military.

The methodology I chose for myself relies on personal and institutional memory accumulated over the years of my association with the Army: in uniform (1950-73), as a civilian teacher at the Command and Staff College (1974-77) and finally as a detached but not too distant observer (1978 onward). I have been conscious all along of the limitations of this particular approach to enquiry, above all because it gathers the perceptions of one man only. And yet, I have persisted in it because this is the raw material that history is made of and several others undertaking a similar venture will make the task of the historian so much the easier. Without the raw material, there is no way of getting to the finished product.

The historian may wind his way systematically through a few conveniently demarcated periods:-

The Early Years (1947-49), when the raggle-taggle army of a nation born into adversity struggled to acquire an identity and a character of its own. Its necessary but premature involvement in the Kashmir conflict left a lasting imprint on its subsequent growth. Childhood traumas, post-natal at that, are not easily forgotten.

The Ayub Era (1950-69), the formative years across the threshold of adolescence when the Pakistan Army came into its own, scarred once again by the inconclusive war of 1965. As I see it, this too was a premature engagement, strategically ill-advised and operationally poorly conducted. The Army survived by the skin of its teeth and popular emotion focussed on some instances of exceptional gallantry in combat. The Army itself ignored the flaws in its conduct of the “war”, chose instead to improve its efficiency in the conduct of “battles”. Some gains were certainly made but not at the level most required. The flaws showed up again, fatally in 1971, when half the country was lost and 40,000 POWs marched into Indian jails. Some historians may be inclined to see the Ayub era as extending to the very edge of the disasters in East Pakistan, with Yahya Khan only nominally mentioned. That would leave two wars to Ayub Khan’s credit: one poorly conducted (1965), the other ominously foretold and later miserably bungled (1971).

But for the wars and their twisted impact on the healthy growth of the Army, Ayub Khan’s contribution was seminal. In spite of his personal intervention in politics, he kept the Army away from any institutional involvement in the wider affairs of the state. It remained “professional”, focussed on its internal concerns of weapons, equipment, organisation and training. The momentum of British rule and Ayub’s “window to the West” helped the Pakistan Army to acquire a substantial measure of institutional integrity, organisational cohesion, morale, espirit-de-corps, the bounce characteristic of a modern and forward-looking army. The “modernisation” swallowed up much of the limited resources of a poor country. While the army grew in strength and stature, the country as a whole receded into progressive impoverishment. It was a dangerous trend but not yet a writing on the wall because of the hope generated in those years of economic development and progress. Everyone was happy to have a strong army, the army most of all, and there was enough in our geopolitical environment to sustain the illusion of national security through such heavy reliance on military means alone. Within the Army, its “forward-looking” stance remained confined to the pursuit of excellence within its conventional mould: more firepower, more mobility, more of the classical requirements of a classical war. No one foresaw the kind of war we would run into in 1971 and the horrendous consequences of hurling a conventional army into an unconventional war. The art of war includes the art of avoiding a war when the available instruments of war do not match the operational environment.

The Yahya Regime (1969-71), which some would see as the tail-end of the Ayub era, marks the lowest point in the history of the Pakistan Army as we know it today. The political history of the period is tortuous and need not be recounted here, but the broad observation remains that the 1971 war in East Pakistan was not just Yahya Khan’s folly. At the bar of history we, as a nation, remain guilty of criminal stupidity. This is a war that should never have been fought. And yet, had Yahya Khan unilaterally decided to grant East Pakistan its independence, he would have been lynched in the streets of what remains of Pakistan today. Yahya Khan was no saint waiting for martyrdom, no De Gaulle either, and he hurled the army into a death foretold but neither heard nor foreseen.

The army went in as ordered and came out soiled as never before. The military collapse was serious, very serious but the moral turpitude in the conduct of it all was even more so. The Army’s misguided instinct for institutional survival shied away from the sordid. It took to the way of the ostrich in its reappraisal of itself, both as warrior and defender of the faith. I am not sure if any reappraisal of any consequence was even set into motion because I shed my uniform soon after and was no longer privy to the inner workings of the military mind. As an external observer, all I could see then and all I see now is that the entire episode was allowed to drift (“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”) till it sank into the bottom of the deep. There it lies in the lowest layers of the collective unconscious and there it will continue to rankle till it is exorcised. The Pakistan Army will never know how many of its present ills and aberrations spring from that single episode consigned to the basement of its mind. This is true, of course, of the nation a whole but here our focus is on the army.

The Somnolent Years (1972-77), which began with a flash of legitimate self-assertion under General Gul Hasan (our last Commander-in-Chief) and then quickly receded into something of a stupor under General Tikka Khan (our first Chief of the Army Staff). General Tikka was a good soldier of the old school. He raised none of the questions that should have been raised at this period of grave psychological ferment. In East Pakistan he did what was expected of him by his superiors, and later in Balochistan he followed through with consequences less apparent. Much of his time in office was taken up by the physical reclamation and rehabilitation of our POWs in East Pakistan who returned after some two years in India. He remained engaged in what in the army we call “interior economy”. He kept at it, doing his daily duty with devotion from day to day, one day at a time, till his tenure expired. The activity put the mind to sleep and these were our somnolent years - good therapy for the while, but not in the long run.

At a talk at the Staff College when I was still in uniform (1973), General Tikka Khan observed that the really bright ones in the army seldom rise to the top. He said they think too much and pointed to the many Swords of Honour that lie in the dust. The cream, he said, rises from the middle of the pail, not the top. He was right, of course, except for those who insisted that it should rise from the bottom. Never having worked on a dairy farm, I remain a little confused. General Tikka Khan went on to suggest that the Military Academy should review its system of assessment of cadets and come up with results in tune with reality. This is a very important thought in the context of our “mosaic of ideas” and its resolution, one way or the other, will have a profound impact on the future course of the Army’s composite personality, its institutional behaviour, its collective character and conduct.

Many of the POWs who came home via India turned to the Quran for solace during captivity and after. They found what they sought, and they did not find what they did not seek: a vibrant grasp of the spirit of Islam for a fundamental reorientation of their mind-set, honest and vigorous thought preceding deliberate action. They took a quantum jump from the abstract solace they found to a passionate observance of the concrete rituals of Islam. In due course it bestowed on them a sense of righteous indignation, a summary rejection of “Yahya Khan and the whole shoot”. That the whole shoot included Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went unnoticed by the saviour, who remained busy “picking up the pieces” elsewhere. The mood spread, within the army and beyond, even as the saviour was riding the crest of his wave. The coming of Zia-ul-Haq was no bizarre accident of history, even if aided by the slip of the saviour. It was an accident waiting to happen, an accident in pursuit of a historical trend.

The Zia-ul-Haq Era (1977-88), which marks the Army’s “shot at Islam” as a way out of the aftermath of 1971, came in dangling its motto of “Iman, Taqwa, Jehad fi-Sabilillah” under the very nose of the saviour whose vision of a new Pakistan had little to do with any of these concepts. His study of world history lost sight of Marshall Hodgson’s observation (in the “Venture of Islam”, 3 volumes, 1968) that Islamicate armies (Hodgson warns us against the indiscriminate use of the term “Muslim” and “Islamic”), humiliated and returning home to lick their wounds, invariably fall back on the faith that they can never fully disown. The Pakistan Army’s own return to Islam had this broad characteristic but it led to no deep and lasting transformation of the military mind and character, because the intellectual content of the effort was low and the emotional content high. It was a fairly widespread endeavour of many individuals but it never quite acquired the status of a movement for want of an adequate collective organisation, planned, systematic and sustained progress. The measures initiated by Zia-ul-Haq within the army (e.g. the appointment of better qualified Khatibs in unit and formation mosques, the establishment of a Directorate of Religious Instruction at GHQ and the occasional publication of a superficial hand-out) did not add up to the kind of “innere Fuhrung” which transformed the WEHRMACHT into the BUNDESWEHR after the cataclysm of World War II. Over a period of time, the Pakistan Army settled for our subcontinental version of Islam with such external adornments as QIRAT NAAT competitions, HAJ delegations, MILAD gatherings, the ritual of Quranic recitations at public functions, SHABINA congregations etc. The inner transformation fell far behind the external trappings till much of the substance of Islam was smothered under the weight of this pious display. As for JIHAD, the primary concern of the army, all we got to was a shrill and empty slogan, oblivious of the fact that the quality of any JIHAD is directly proportional to the quality of Islam in the daily lives of those waging it. At a talk at the National Defence College last year (1999), I raised several issues germane to the Army’s  perception and prosecution of a JIHAD (copy of the talk at Annen ‘A’). Over a decade after Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation, the response was one of disappointment and confusion, some dismay and some rejection of several very clear and basic principles. The centre-piece in the Army’s mosaic of ideas is hazy, overladen with many misconceptions which stem from the mis-match between a ‘national’ Army and a ‘Muslim’ army, the “Islamicate’ credentials of the former notwithstanding.

The Army’s shot at Islam under Zia-ul-Haq missed its goal even more because of the corruption he spread in the higher hierarchy of the Armed Forces. The rot in the fish starts in the head and the rot spreads. An army is nothing if it is not spartan. Land, limos, plots and palaces do not make for any army, let alone a Muslim one. The Army’s newly found love of material comfort and splendour has destroyed its moral fibre, distorting its original character and complexion in more ways than we can count. Zia-ul-Haq will be remembered more for his “nativisation” of the Army than its Islamisation. The Army is no longer the elite organisation that it used to be, now close to coming at par with the rest. That it is still not as bad can be of no consolation. The fall of the elite is a sadder spectacle than the further fall of the already fallen.

The Faceless Years (1988-99), faceless because under Generals Mirza Aslam Beg, Abdul Waheed Kakar and Jehangir Karamat, the Army was simply marking time, making an effort to be professional within its conventional mould, adding little (for better or for worse) to the prevailing mosaic of ideas. General Aslam Beg is credited with several initiatives within the army but what catches the eye of the external observer is his opaque activism in political affairs. He was the most  “political” of all our generals (Zia-ul-Haq excluded and Ayub Khan beyond the scope of a legitimate comparison). I do not have the expertise to examine his exploits, except to observe that “Exercise ZARB-I-MOMIN” was not all that was there was to him. General Waheed Kakar was a simple soul, with a clear concern for our national security (including the preservation of the independence and the ambiguity of our nuclear policy) and a valiant attempt to keep the Army out of politics. His intervention such at was remains, in my estimate, the high-water mark of an a -political Army Chief being as non-political as he possibly can be in our peculiar circumstances. He staved off a wider and uglier intervention. General Jehangir Karamat went to the other extreme, refusing to lift a finger when the Supreme Court was stormed and emboldening Nawaz Sharif in the series of misadventures which finally dragged Pervez Musharraf into the fray. No Army Chief can remain clinically clean in our political whirlpool at the top and such personal cleanliness as Jehangir Karamat retained was of little use to the Army he left behind.

The Musharraf Era (1999 onward), and era it may well be if the morning is any indication of the day to come. The day will run into several years, exactly how many depending on the readiness and the capacity of the people to wait for his endeavour to bear fruit, the honesty and the realism of our educated elite who clamour for an early return to electoral democracy within the parameters of our existing Constitution, the perception of external powers who control our economic survival; above all, the performance and the stamina of the Musharraf regime to overcome the skepticism (or worse) of its detractors. The seven-point Agenda, reasonable in itself, calls for a long haul, a veritable transformation of our style of governance which will take many decades to take root, let alone bear fruit. Two conflicting perceptions impinge on the issue: (1) a desire to “finish the job” with assurance of no reversal; (2) the wisdom to set a few strong trends into motion with reasonable hope of their continuation. Even the second is not without its caveats. The kind of fundamental changes being introduced (e.g. devolution of power and responsibility to the district level) will result in chaos if subsequent political regimes do not follow through with the experiment. Much of what the Musharraf regime does will be experimental and the results will remain inconclusive till they are put to the test over a period, a substantial period of time. General Musharraf is anxious to bring in basic changes and not rest at the cosmetic, because he wishes to eliminate the possibility of another descent into chaos followed by another military intervention. The fear is genuine, the remedy remains debatable.

Which way it will all go, no one really knows. Regardless, however, of whether the Musharraf regime comes out with egg on its face or some measure of satisfaction over having set into motion a durable process of national reconstruction, the impact will be profound on the Army’s future status, orientation, role, tone and tenor. Hopefully, the Army will come out of its present experience with its honour unsullied and pave the way for a new pattern of civil-military collaboration, within the limits of constitutional propriety, as indicated in the IBHI Report referred to in Part I of this series of articles.

While the historian undertakes an in-depth review and analysis of the Pakistan Army’s mosaic of ideas as it emerges from his study of the various stages of its evolution, I venture to present below some of the major conclusions that stand out in my mind. I believe they merit consideration by our political and bureaucratic leadership and, within the Army, those in the higher hierarchy who shape its destiny. My conclusions, following the memories and the reflections etched before and now stated as briefly as I can, are:-

The Pakistan Army is a national institution: non-parochial, non-sectarian, non-partisan, apolitical in spite of its frequent intervention in civil affairs. It is a professional army and faces the dilemma peculiar to professional armies in many developing countries. Its pursuit of excellence within the organisation (weapons, equipment, training and organisation) swallows up a vast chunk of a poor country’s already strained resources and widens the mis-match between its own internal state and the decay all around. The partial sense of security that it creates, particularly in our unhappy geopolitical environment, cannot arrest the alienation it spreads elsewhere, the envy it arouses in the daily observations of the people, the questions that never cease in our attempt to reconcile the need for security with other equally preponderant needs (food, shelter, education, health, employment, essential services). In this sector of its mosaic of ideas the Pakistan Army needs to come up with a redefinition of its “professionalism”, ploughing its resources back to the people in a nation-wide effort at socio-economic regeneration. The old concept of a conventional army restricted to its conventional mould, preoccupied with its classical preparations for a classical war, is no longer relevant to the dire circumstances of our day. The new definition needs to be crafted with care and precision, absorbing the shock of General Shaukat Riza’s pronouncement (metaphorically intended) that an army which takes to growing turnips (GONGLU) is no longer an army. The definition cannot be a simple either/or affair but a sane mix of the two, within constitutional limits and obligations clearly stipulated. Some important thoughts on the subject appear in the IBHI Report (Islamabad, 1999) mentioned more than once in this series of articles.

- Contrary to the perception of its detractors, the Pakistan Army is not a coup-making army, owner of a tradition handed down from Chief to Chief as a compulsive urge to intervene on the slightest pretext. The common historical sub-stratum has been the repeated failure of our political leadership, their wanton and wayward ways leading to our periodic descent into chaos. The military interventions, which came in with a fair measure of popular acclaim, are certainly indicative of exaggerated expectations of the army. That those expectations continue to be repeated are equally indicative of the people’s gut rejection of the cliche of the learned: that the only cure for a bad democracy is more democracy. This is not to condone the coups that have taken place but merely to observe why we oscillate between civil and military regimes. The only way out may be a new pattern of civil-military collaboration which draws both into a common endeavour and spares each a judgement on the other. Bad governance is bad governance, civil or military, and the blame is better shared than tossed around. Together, the impulse to succeed should be the stronger without this element of fatal friction. Our civil and military leadership need to think about this — together, not separately.

- The single most important factor in setting the course of the Pakistan Army as a conventional military force has been the conflict in Kashmir. It started with a raggle-taggle expeditionary force seeking a quick military solution of the problem. The venture failed. Since then, the pattern has been a war by proxy inside Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK) and a perpetual vigil along what has now come to be called the Line of Control (LoC). The vigil invariably spilled over into tactical skirmishes involving regular troops without a coherent pattern of war. The 1965 War, an engagement designed to alter the status quo in Kashmir, failed to achieve its limited objective and sucked Pakistan instead into a war along its international frontier elsewhere. It was a premature and inconclusive engagement culminating in a relapse into the status quo ante in Kashmir. A state of no war-no peace continues, with periodic skirmishes (of which the Kargil episode was the latest and most serious, with Siachin still simmering). What does all this mean for Pakistan? Ayub Khan’s old strategy of “continuing to lean on Kashmir” till India gives way must seek modalities other than the preponderantly military which hurts Pakistan far more than it hurts India in economic terms. No war can be waged without the requisite economic means and to stumble into war without that pre-requisite is to invite disaster. Valour may win battles, it cannot win wars. Pakistan’s “Kashmir Policy”, then, must shift its Schwerpunkt decisively in favour of a massive effort to improve the economic and social well-being of the people in Pakistan as a whole, and in Azad Kashmir. Successfully conducted over a period of time, this internal consolidation should set up a differential in our favour (vis-a-vis India) and unleash the more durable forces (geography, history, ethnicity, religion, even politics and diplomacy) to come into concerted operation. This is going to be a long haul, and will call for much patience, tenacity and faith — in much the same way as China has waited for Taiwan or Berlin waited for the wall to come down. There is no short-cut to Kashmir. Pakistan and the Pakistan Army need to redesign and rearrange the pieces in this bleeding sector of its mosaic of ideas. If the haemorrhage continues, Pakistan’s attempt to gain Kashmir may end in Pakistan’s losing itself.

- 1965 marks, as I see it, the first great watershed in the course of the Pakistan Army. It then ran into a cataract leading to the great fall in 1971. The intervening years marked a struggle to regain its balance and original elan as a fighting force, but no one gave much thought to the kind of war that it may or can engage in, and the kind of war that it cannot and, therefore, must not engage in. The urge to remain professional continued in its cocoon of classical concerns (weapons, equipment, organisation and training), with little attention paid to operational strategy and even less to the conduct of war at the national level. Political parleys having failed to find a political solution to a political problem, the stage was set for full-scale civil war in East Pakistan. The mood on both sides was belligerent and the government’s decision to counter force with force escalated swiftly into using the last instrument of force available to it. Only a few foresaw the disastrous consequences of hurling a conventional army into an unconventional war, but the die was cast and the dice thrown. The civil war sapped the spirit of the army, destroyed its moral fibre, denuded and disoriented its material resources in that distant theatre of operations. Following the Indian invasion, the conventional war ran its dismal course. Tactics could not regain what strategy had lost at both the national and the military level. The Pakistan Army made a huge mess of it all not merely because it fought badly but, more importantly, because it was the kind of war that it should never have entered in the first place. War is grim business, not a game of cricket or football. In war there are no consolation prizes for the vanquished. How the Pakistan Army copes with these unhappy thoughts and what it does to cast its - mosaic of ideas in a new mould will determine not only its future perception of itself but also the nation’s perception of it as an asset to be used with wisdom, not flung indiscriminately into grandiose ventures beyond its resources and competence.

- If the Pakistan Army is not to fight a war for a long time to come, while still retaining its  capability to successfully conduct a defensive battle limited in time, space and the quantum of force to be applied, it should be possible to substantially reduce its present size, alter its composition and redesignate its tasks. The strategic objective should be to hold war at bay, to deter aggression, to retain the capability of a tactical battle which will render the overall cost of physical aggression unacceptable to the enemy. This can be done as part of a national security policy which promotes socio-economic solidarity within the country and harnesses its foreign policy resources to further its national goals and objectives. These are not new ideas but they do need to be translated into specific modalities. They call for a revision of our force goals and force capability commensurate with our resources, not a threat perception exaggerated by our self-created insecurities. Our immediate and medium-range objectives with regard to Kashmir need to undergo a radical change along lines already suggested: not to seek an immediate resolution of the problem by the use of force but to create long-term conditions which will tilt the scales in favour of a just and irresistible change commensurate with the natural aspirations of the people of Kashmir. So long as our Kashmir policy resists this rational reorientation, our threat perception will remain distorted and provoke a wider war beyond our resources and capability. The course being recommended is not an abdication of our cause in Kashmir but a plea for a long-term tenacity through the redeployment of resources and a decisive change for the better in other critical sectors of national security. In our peculiar circumstances, the army needs to take the initiative in securing this national reorientation as a strategic imperative based on realism and good sense.

-Within the organisation, the Pakistan Army must retrieve its commitment to a spartan way of life. This is a professional requirement in peace by way of preparation for the rigours of war, both physically and mentally. It cannot afford to be softened by material comforts or distracted by commercial pursuits. As it is, the Army is better fed, better clothed, better housed and provided with amenities way beyond the reach of vast sectors of the population. The least it can do is not to be ostentatious in its lifestyle, not to grab at things beyond the strictly functional. Decent barracks in the lines and modest apartments as homes are all it needs to meet its housing requirements. Flagstaff houses, villas and mansions are an abomination. They arouse envy, breed resentment, lead to alienation and active hostility. From jawan to general, all a soldier needs is a combat dress and a working dress, not a plethora of ceremonial dresses. For officers, life in the mess needs to accentuate comradeship and camradarie, cut out all pomp and pageantry, scrupulously avoid everything that smacks of a shallow and insensitive elite. Within the organisation, there is some serious levelling to be done all the way from star-studded limousines and car parks to the innumerable other perks and privileges associated with those in the higher rungs of the hierarchy. In the public eye, the image of the army has fallen from a lean and austere custodian of our freedom to that of a bloated parasite. Take so simple and important an issue as gallantry awards. Gallantry in combat is a soldier’s professional obligation, not an optional achievement for the acquisition of land, plots and property. The basic needs of widows, orphans and the disabled need to be looked after, but for those who return home with life, limb and honour fit for further service even the moral recognition should be superfluous. If the army cannot base its elitism on the spirit of service and sacrifice, even its functional well-being will come to be looked upon as a wanton waste of public money.

- One of the saddest trends to emerge from the Army’s mosaic of ideas is the steady degeneration of professionalism into a crass careerism, particularly in the officer corps. I made a reference to it in my reminiscences of the Staff College (in this series, Part III). The focus of the individual officer has shifted from self-improvement to self-advancement, with eyes fixed on rising in rank from one Promotion Board to the next. This fierce competition with others has fallen to the level of a rat race introducing a variety of distortions in the work ethic of a large number of officers. Since the goal is to rise as high as one can regardless of personal competence measured in terms of potential and performance, extra-professional considerations and extra-curricular achievements enter the arena, servility and sycophancy win over stout professional dissent, and there is a gradual accumulation of incompetence in the upper rungs of the army’s hierarchy. The roots of the problem lie in the basic orientation of the officer corps and the work ethic it imbibes at the Military Academy. At a talk to the cadets several years ago (reproduced at Annex ‘B’), I urged a wholesale revision of our prevailing understanding of competition as an incentive to progress. The urge to excel needs to be directed inward, an endless striving toward self-improvement and self-actualisation to the outermost limit of one’s potential, not a perpetual comparison with others as a measure of one’s own performance. Individual effort will lead to neither individual nor collective excellence if that effort strays into smugness or despair through comparison with others. This is a fundamental element in the life-orientation of the officer corps, indeed the army itself as a corporate body. Violated or neglected, it will pave the way for an array of ills; observed with alertness and vigour, it will bestow on the army what it needs most:  men at their best.

-Because waging a war is so comprehensive an activity, every army tends to grow into a miniature state with its own corps of leaders, planners, administrators; doctors, engineers, educationists, communication experts; everything from cook, cobbler and carpenter (NCsE, NCsU) to musician and scientist, nurse and para-medic, driver and mechanic, scholar and primary school teacher — all welded into a disciplined force trained to operate in unison. Operational imperatives forge an army into a more or less self-contained organisation with a ready reservoir of material and manpower resources set aside for defence against external aggression. In peace, some of these resources may be deployed in aid to civil power to combat natural calamities and a variety of other emergencies, a traditional task performed by all armies the world over. In Pakistan, because of the weak structure of the State and its civil institutions, the Pakistan Army was immediately engaged in coping with the massive influx of refugees in 1947. Then onward, the Army has been repeatedly called upon to fight floods, droughts, epidemics, locusts, wild boar, earthquakes and other emergencies including grave civil disorder, anti-smuggling operations and the transportation of essential goods. In recent years, the Army has been involved in unearthing “ghost schools”, conducting national elections and a long-delayed national census, running WAPDA, revamping the railways, dredging canals, over-seeing the drive against narcotics, creating a national data-base, putting in place a permanent system of public accountability and a hopefully temporary network of military “monitoring cells”. This cascade of activities has reached its climax with the Musharraf regime’s plan for the devolution of power and responsibility to the district level. This is a measure not restricted to good governance and sound administration only. Its impact on the overall political structure will be profound, hopefully for the better, but the question will always remain whether such a legacy is to be bestowed by a military regime or worked out patiently by successive elected governments operating under the Constitution. Politics is not the army’s cup of tea and it would do well to rein in its “we can do it” syndrome in this particular sector, popular disenchantment with our political leaders notwithstanding. Unto the blacksmith his profession, unto the carpenter his.

- Apart from politics, which should be anathema to any professional army, the Pakistan Army’s spiralling involvement in civil affairs in other sectors, so often at the behest of successive civilian governments, does not bode well for either the army or the civil society at large. The temptation to draw on military resources for a quick-fix of problems as they arise serve only to weaken civil institutions, retard their growth, increase their apathy and lead to a steady erosion of their own responsibility. For the army itself, repeated interventions “in aid to civil power” breed a kind of ascendancy which runs counter to the basic notion of civil supremacy. Prolonged civilian misrule invites wholesale military intervention. Short coups achieve little except a periodic disruption of the political process. Long coups, whether of the Ayub or Zia-ul-Haq kind, sacrifice the long-term growth of civil society at the altar of the immediate needs of good administration. Long or short, or even medium-term as the Musharraf regime promises to be, there is no such thing as a coup to end all future coups. As a community, we have acquired the habit of coups and the vicious cycle will not be broken until a new pattern of civil-military collaboration emerges to halt this fatal oscillation between chaotic civil rule and sterile military intervention. A way out, valid for Pakistan as for so many other developing countries, has been clearly outlined in the IBHI Report (September, 1999) mentioned earlier. The latest military intervention (October, 2000), a combined product of civil ineptitude and military impatience, could have been avoided. Good governance and national security are interlinked, and neither can be ensured without the kind of civil-military interaction which nourishes both.

-At this point in time (October, 2000), when the Army is wholly immersed in cleaning up the national mess, Part II of the HAMOODUR RAHMAN COMMISSION report has found its way into the press and on the internet, thanks to Indian enterprize with more than a touch of malice and less of a longing for the whole truth. It says nothing that many in the Army do not already know or suspect, but over 30 long years nothing has been done to call the guilty to account and rectify the wrongs. Sordid deeds cannot be washed away without timely and appropriate action. Shoved into the basement of our minds in an attempt to forget, they continue to fester and the putrefaction spreads. The Army is no longer perceived as an instrument clean enough to cleanse the rest of a depraved society, whatever the truth in its claim as the only institution of the state still intact. The only sane course open to the present military regime is to come out clean, publish the HRC report in its entirety, accept its own share of the blame and put its own house in order even as it strives to put the nation back on the rails. The Pakistan Army will fail in its present task if it cannot exorcise those ghosts of the past; it will go down with the rest of the state as “the last of the Mohicans”. What exactly can be done so late in the day is difficult to prescribe but one thing is clear: we cannot wish away the past in the name of getting on with the present. If we must meander for a while, we must. No new beginning can be made without clearing the debris of the past. No new mind-set will emerge without a clean break from the concealment, subterfuge and arrogant righteousness of the past. The Army cannot abandon the task it has undertaken for now, but it can combine humility with firm resolve to come out clean before October 2002. Old soldiers will continue to pray for the Army that nourished them but, in the end, the Army will get what it deserves, of honour or shame, from a people whose response has changed over the years from adulation to scepticism and mistrust.

Without the industry and stamina of the scholar, I have grown a little weary trying to reduce to writing some of my major observations and conclusions on the mind, mood and character of the Pakistan Army. The portrait is not as lucid as I would have liked to be. Many pieces of the mosaic still lie scattered and there are gaps to be filled. But then, what would the scholar do if I had done it all ? Eventually, every portrait in the external world will still be a weak reflection of what is so vivid in the mind. There are limits to articulation and I remain content with what I could.

Two things stand out very clearly. The Pakistan Army is no saint with a halo, no knight in shining armours, such as popular adulation had once made it out to be. Equally, the Pakistan Army is no monster on the loose out to destroy democracy, such as our latter day liberals and democrats would have us believe. This may seem obvious to some but it escapes the perception of those who stand at both extremes of the great divide. In a society as polarised as ours, the truth will be hard to come by without stretching out our hand across the fence. Eventually, the fence must come down with every citizen, civil and military, doing his bit to pull ourselves out of the mire.