Mohammed Hanif - Pakistan’s General Problem
It might have taken
Pakistanis 34 years to reach this consensus but we finally agree that General
Zia’s domestic and foreign policies didn’t do us any good. It brought us
automatic weapons, heroin and sectarianism; it also made fortunes for those who
dealt in these commodities. And it turned Pakistan into an international jihadi tourist
resort.
And yet, somehow,
without ever publicly owning up to it, the Army has continued Zia’s mission.
What is the last thing you say to your best
general when ordering him into a do-or-die mission? A prayer maybe, if you are
religiously inclined. A short lecture, underlining the importance of the
mission, if you want to keep it businesslike. Or maybe you’ll wish him good
luck accompanied by a clicking of the heels and a final salute.
On the night of 5 July
1977 as Operation Fair Play, meant to topple Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s elected
government, was about to commence, then Army Chief General Zia ul Haq took
aside his right-hand man and Corps Commander of 10th Corps Lieutenant General
Faiz Ali Chishti and whispered to him: “Murshid, marwa na daina.” (Guru,
don’t get us killed.)
General Zia was
indulging in two of his favourite pastimes: spreading his paranoia amongst
those around him and sucking up to a junior officer he needed to do his dirty
work. General Zia had a talent for that; he could make his juniors feel as if
they were indispensable to the running of this world. And he could make his
seniors feel like proper gods, as Bhutto found out to his cost.
General Faiz Ali
Chishti’s troops didn’t face any resistance that night; not a single shot was
fired, and like all military coups in Pakistan, this was also dubbed a
‘bloodless coup’. There was a lot of bloodshed, though, in the following
years—in military-managed dungeons, as pro-democracy students were butchered at
Thori gate in interior Sindh, hundreds of shoppers were blown up in Karachi’s
Bohri Bazar, in Rawalpindi people didn’t even have to leave their houses to get
killed as the Army’s ammunition depot blew up raining missiles on a whole city,
and finally at Basti Laal Kamal near Bahawalpur, where a plane exploded killing
General Zia and most of the Pakistan Army’s high command. General Faiz Ali
Chishti had nothing to do with this, of course. General Zia had managed to
force his murshid into retirement soon after coming to power.
Chishti had started to take that term of endearment—murshid—a bit too
seriously and dictators can’t stand anyone who thinks of himself as a
kingmaker.
Thirty-four years on, Pakistan is
a society divided at many levels. There are those who insist on tracing our
history to a certain September day in 2001, and there are those who insist that
this country came into being the day the first Muslim landed on the
Subcontinent. There are laptop jihadis, liberal fascist and fair-weather
revolutionaries. There are Balochi freedom fighters up in the mountains and
bullet-riddled bodies of young political activists in obscure Baloch towns.
And, of course, there are the members of civil society with a permanent glow
around their faces from all the candle-light vigils. All these factions may not
agree on anything but there is consensus on one point: General Zia’s coup was a
bad idea. When was the last time anyone heard Nawaz Sharif or any of Zia’s
numerous protégés thump their chest and say, yes, we need another Zia? When did
you see a Pakistan military commander who stood on Zia’s grave and vowed to
continue his mission?
It might have taken
Pakistanis 34 years to reach this consensus but we finally agree that General
Zia’s domestic and foreign policies didn’t do us any good. It brought us
automatic weapons, heroin and sectarianism; it also made fortunes for those who
dealt in these commodities. And it turned Pakistan into an international jihadi tourist
resort.
And yet, somehow,
without ever publicly owning up to it, the Army has continued Zia’s mission.
Successive Army commanders, despite their access to vast libraries and regular
strategic reviews, have never actually acknowledged that the multinational,
multicultural jihadi project they started during the Zia era was a mistake.
Late Dr Eqbal Ahmed, the Pakistani teacher and activist, once said that the
Pakistan Army is brilliant at collecting information but its ability to analyse
this information is non-existent.
Looking back at the
Zia years, the Pakistan Army seems like one of those mythical monsters that
chops off its own head but then grows an identical one and continues on the
only course it knows. In 1999, two days
after the Pakistan Army embarked on its Kargil misadventure, Lieutenant General
Mahmud Ahmed gave a ‘crisp and to the point’ briefing to a group of senior Army
and Air Force officers. Air Commodore Kaiser Tufail, who attended the meeting,
later wrote that they were told that it was nothing more than a defensive
manoeuvre and the Indian Air Force will not get involved at any stage. “Come
October, we shall walk into Siachen—to mop up the dead bodies of hundreds of
Indians left hungry, out in the cold,” General Mahmud told the meeting.
“Perhaps it was the incredulousness of the whole thing that led Air Commodore
Abid Rao to famously quip, ‘After this operation, it’s going to be either a
Court Martial or Martial Law!’ as we walked out of the briefing room,” Air
Commodore Tufail recalled in an essay.
If Rao Abid even
contemplated a court martial, he probably lacked leadership qualities because
there was only one way out of this mess—a humiliating military defeat, a
world-class diplomatic disaster, followed by yet another martial law. The man
who should have faced court martial for Kargil appointed himself Pakistan’s
President for the next decade.
General Mahmud went on
to command ISI, Rao Abid retired as air vice marshal, both went on to find
lucrative work in the Army’s vast welfare empire, and Kargil was forgotten as
if it was a game of dare between two juveniles who were now beyond caring about
who had actually started the game. Nobody remembers that a lot of blood was
shed on this pointless Kargil mission. The battles were fierce and some of the
men and officers fought so valiantly that two were awarded Pakistan’s highest
military honour, Nishan-e-Haidar. There were hundreds of others whose names
never made it to any awards list, whose families consoled themselves by saying
that their loved ones had been martyred while defending our nation’s borders against
our enemy. Nobody pointed out the basic fact that there was no enemy on those
mountains before some delusional generals decided
that they would like to mop up hundreds of Indian soldiers after starving them
to death.
The architect of this
mission, the daring General Pervez Musharraf, who didn’t bother to consult his
colleagues before ordering his soldiers to their slaughter, doesn’t even have
the wits to face a sessions court judge in Pakistan, let alone a court martial.
The only people he feels comfortable with are his Facebook friends and that too
from the safety of his London apartment. During the whole episode, the nation
was told that it wasn’t the regular army that was fighting in Kargil; it was
the mujahideen. But those who received their loved ones’
flag-draped coffins had sent their sons and brothers to serve in a professional
army, not a freelance lashkar.
The Pakistan Army’s
biggest folly has been that under Zia it started outsourcing its basic
job—soldiering—to these freelance militants. By blurring the line between a
professional soldier—who, at least in theory, is always required to obey his
officer, who in turn is governed by a set of laws—and a mujahid,
who can pick and choose his cause and his commander depending on his mood, the
Pakistan Army has caused immense confusion in its own ranks. Our soldiers are
taught to shout Allah-o-Akbar when mocking an attack. In real life, they are
ambushed by enemies who shout Allah-o-Akbar even louder. Can we blame them if
they dither in their response? When the Pakistan Navy’s main aviation base in
Karachi, PNS Mehran, was attacked, Navy Chief Admiral Nauman Bashir told us
that the attackers were ‘very well trained’. We weren’t sure if he was giving
us a lazy excuse or admiring the creation of his institution. When naval
officials told journalists that the attackers were ‘as good as our own
commandoes’ were they giving themselves a backhanded compliment?
In the wake of the
attacks on PNS Mehran in Karachi, some TV channels have pulled out an old war
anthem sung by late Madam Noor Jehan and have started to play it in the
backdrop of images of young, hopeful faces of slain officers and men. Written
by the legendary teacher and poet Sufi Tabassum, the anthem carries a clear and
stark warning: Aiay puttar hatantay nahin wickday, na labhdi phir
bazaar kuray (You can’t buy these brave sons from shops, don’t go
looking for them in bazaars).
While Sindhis and
Balochis have mostly composed songs of rebellion, Punjabi popular culture has
often lionised its karnails and jarnails and even an odd dholsipahi. The
Pakistan Army, throughout its history, has refused to take advice from
politicians as well as thinking professionals from its own ranks. It has never
listened to historians and sometimes ignored even the esteemed religious
scholars it frequently uses to whip up public sentiments for its dirty wars.
But the biggest strategic mistake it has made is that it has not even taken
advice from the late Madam Noor Jehan, one of the Army’s most ardent fans in
Pakistan’s history. You can probably ignore Dr Eqbal Ahmed’s advice and survive
in this country but you ignore Madam at your own peril.
Since the Pakistan
Army’s high command is dominated by Punjabi-speaking generals, it’s difficult
to fathom what it is about this advice that they didn’t understand. Any which
way you translate it, the message is loud and clear. And lyrical: soldiers are
not to be bought and sold like a commodity. “Na awaian takran maar
kuray” (That search is futile, like butting your head against a brick
wall), Noor Jehan goes on to rhapsodise.
For decades, the Army
has not only shopped for these private puttars in the bazaars,
it also set up factories to manufacture them. It raised whole armies of them.
When you raise Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish Mohammed, Sipahe Sahaba, Sipahe Mohammed,
Lashker Jhangvi, Al- Badar Mujahideen, others encouraged by the thriving market
place will go ahead and start outfits like Anjuman Tahuffuze Khatame Nabuwat
and Anjuman Tahuffuze Namoos-e-Aiyasha. It’s not just Kashmir and Afghanistan
and Chechnya they will want to liberate, they will also go back in time and
seek revenge for a perceived slur that may or may not have been cast by someone
more than 1,300 years ago in a country far far away.
As if the Army’s
sprawling shopping mall of private puttars in Pakistan wasn’t
enough, it actively encouraged import and export of these commodities, even
branched out into providing rest and recreation facilities for the ones who
wanted a break. The outsourcing of Pakistan’s military strategy has reached a
point where mujahids have their own mujahids to do
their job, and inevitably at the end of the supply chain are those faceless and
poor teenagers with explosives strapped to their torsos regularly marched out
to blow up other poor kids.
Two days before the
Americans killed Osama bin Laden and took away his bullet-riddled body, General
Kiyani addressed Army cadets at Kakul. After declaring a victory of sorts over
the militants, he gave our nation a stark choice. And before the nation could
even begin to weigh its pros and cons, he went ahead and decided for them: we
shall never bargain our honour for prosperity. As things stand, most people in
Pakistan have neither honour nor prosperity and will easily settle for their
little world not blowing up every day.
The question people
really want to ask General Kiyani is that if he and his Army officer colleagues
can have both honour and prosperity, why can’t we the people
have a tiny bit of both? The Army and its
advocates in the media often worry about Pakistan’s image, as if we are not
suffering from a long-term serious illness but a seasonal bout of acne that
just needs better skin care. The Pakistan Army, over the years, has cultivated
this image of 180 million people with nuclear devices strapped to their
collective body threatening to take the world down with it. We may not be able
to take the world down with us; the world might defang us or try to calm us
down by appealing to our imagined Sufi side. But the fact remains that Pakistan
as a nation is paying the price for our generals’ insistence on acting, in Asma
Jahangir’s frank but accurate description, like duffers.
And demanding medals
and golf resorts for being such duffers consistently for such a long time. What people really
want to do at this point is put an arm around our military commanders’
shoulders, take them aside and whisper in their ears: “Murshid, marwa na
daina.”
Mohammed Hanif is
the author of A Case of
Exploding Mangoes (2008), his first novel, a satire on the death of
General Zia ul Haq
