Daily Times

“Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large. We have no aggressive designs against anyone. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world” — Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s address on August 15, 1947.

I had noted last week that the recent events in Turkey indicate that any military’s control over the domestic and foreign affairs of a nation-state is unsustainable and discordant with the new geopolitical realities. There is nothing new about this. The single-party communist and non-communist governments, military juntas in Latin America, the Ba’athist regimes or the mom and pop dictatorships a la Ferdinand and Emelia Marcos all had one thing in common — the national security state paradigm was central to their domestic policies.

The foreign policy of these regimes was by and large reflective of their domestic policies. Leon Trotsky had aptly noted: “Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals.” In case of these assorted dictatorships, their militaries played the pivotal role in carrying out these policies and held sway either as an institution or sharing power with the ruling individual, clique or party.

Before the echo of Quaid-e-Azam’s above quoted words — spoken at the inauguration of the Pakistan Broadcasting Service — could fade, the signs of what was to become Pakistan’s lot started manifesting themselves. The events starting with the October 1947 tribal incursion into Kashmir from the Pakistani side, which eventually snowballed into a war between the two new countries, also set the stage for the national security state paradigm becoming the sheet-anchor of Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies. In this case, Trotsky’s adage was turned on its head.

The involvement of the military in achieving the nascent Pakistan’s immediate foreign policy objectives when the democratic institutions of the country were in an embryonic form set the stage for its larger-than-life role in the affairs of the new state. In due course, the military enterprise displaced and/or co-opted both the civilian bureaucracy and the politicians. Three martial laws were merely an outward manifestation of this chokehold that the military has continuously exercised over Pakistan’s polity.

The establishment’s subsequent misadventures in Kashmir actually created a situation where the domestic policy continued to be crafted to suit the means and ends of the foreign policy agenda. The state’s patronage of the Islamist groups and religio-political parties was used to support this jingoism and the symbiotic relationship peaked under General Ziaul Haq with the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. To raise such jihadist cadres, the Pakistani state moved from the primordial secularism of Quaid-e-Azam to the obscurantist and Arabised Islamisation of Pakistan under Zia. The proxy warfare that started in Kashmir in 1947 remains the bedrock of Pakistan’s defence strategy. The quest for so-called strategic depth in Afghanistan is also a manifestation of this phenomenon. Ironically, a conventional military has been betting on an unconventional war strategy that relies on the presumed but untested success of guerrilla warfare in the event it is run over in a war.

The initial call to the holy war in Kashmir was rather generic but the next decades saw the full-fledged use of highly indoctrinated jihadist proxies inducted into Kashmir, especially after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. All pretences to the Kashmiris’ right of self-determination were jettisoned along the way. Organisations like the JKLF — supported initially by the Pakistani state — were abandoned in favour of Islamist proxies, when they started moving away from the Pakistani position to demand a “Kashmir for Kashmiris”, i.e. independence from both India and Pakistan.

The admixture of military jingoism and jihadism unleashed a massive radicalisation of Pakistani society that eventually culminated in the rise of several domestic militant Islamist outfits with ties to similar international groups. But the most dangerous outcome of the decades of indoctrination is a mutant urban middle class that grew up on a steady diet of the concocted stories of victories and revisionist history in the Pakistan Studies textbooks. Quaid-e-Azam’s nationalism — itself not without a modicum of communalism — was eventually replaced by full-fledged Pakistani chauvinism. Any desire for ‘peace within and peace without’ was replaced by faith in mutually assured destruction through nukes. The grandeur of delusions perhaps could not be more grandiose and delusional.

The 19th-century US Senator Stephen Decatur’s words, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong,” seems to have become the national creed, replacing the Quaid’s desire “to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large”. In contrast to Turkey’s “zero problem” foreign policy aimed at harmonious relations with its neighbouring, regional and international states, Pakistan’s foreign policy became a zero-sum paradigm vis-à-vis its neighbours.

However, the hyper-nationalists, especially in the intelligentsia, are losing sight of the fact that all aforementioned dictatorial regimes had one more thing in common — a transition from authoritarianism to democracy that set in motion the processes that eventually saw civilian supremacy established over the military. The transitions to democracy may have had various different routes and means, ranging from the implosion of regimes like the USSR or through protests and mass movements, but one common denominator was the role of civil society and scholars as the guiding force as well as the watchdogs of this civilian oversight.

Whether it is establishing the constitutional parameters for robust defence ministries or exercising control over the military through making it accountable via transparency in budgeting, planning and procurement processes, it is ultimately the opinion leaders who have to ask the hard questions of both the military and the politicians. But before one can objectively ask such questions, one has to get past Decatur’s delusional belief in his country’s certitude. And how aptly had Senator Carl Schurz responded to Decatur: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

While we are holding seminars on de-radicalisation, it may not be a bad idea to hold one to discuss how we got here. Senator Schurz’s remark was an instant reality-check; perhaps that could be the theme of a frank dialogue.

(Concluded)

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki