Daily Times

The 139th Corps Commanders Conference (held at the GHQ on June 9, 2011), like many other such conferences in the past 6-7 years, reiterated the resolve of the armed forces, particularly the army, to fight religious militancy. It placed all the security agencies on the same footing when it comes to fighting the menace. This is hardly news. We have all grown accustomed to such proclamations yet the reality of who seems to be doing better in this war becomes evident every day. But that is hardly what irked me on reading the statement released by the ISPR at the end of the conference (available at www.ispr.gov.pk ). It states: “The participants noted with regret that despite briefing the joint session of parliament and deferring the ultimate findings to the Commission appointed by the government, some quarters, because of their perceptual biases, were trying to deliberately run down the armed forces and army in particular.” It continues: “This is an effort to drive a wedge between the army, different organs of the state and more seriously, the people of Pakistan whose support the army has always considered vital for its operations against terrorists. COAS noted that in order to confront the present challenges, it is critical to stand united as a nation. Any effort to create divisions between important institutions of the country is not in our national interest. The participants agreed that all of us should take cognizance of this unfortunate trend and put an end to it.”

It is these words that are worrisome. The armed forces, particularly the army, are being maligned by certain quarters and an attempt is afoot to drive a wedge between the army and the public! What is more, this “unfortunate trend” must be put to an end.

If you live in Karachi or Lahore maybe now you all desire either to move to one of the many ‘phases’ of Defence Housing Authorities or the Cantonment (“Cantt”). And not necessarily to flaunt your wealth but simply because in your hearts and sound minds you all understand that these areas come with better amenities and services. The unseemly sight of clogged drains and overflowing gutters are not part of daily life there. Neither are street corners littered with garbage because the municipal trucks have not come to collect it. The streets are well lined with trees, there are parks with well-manicured lawns, and the roads are wider — brimming with traffic, yes, but that seems to move ever so smoothly. These are the “privileges” of living in military cantonments/DHA in cities like Sialkot, Lahore, Karachi (in some parts of DHA and Cantt.), Peshawar, Quetta and, perhaps, even Gujranwala and Multan. And it exists at the cost of the vast majority of areas that exist outside these “blessed” communities. One must add that these “privileges” are really just the basic amenities that all citizens must have access to. I live in Lahore Cantt myself and I understand the desire of all those who want to move there, and rightly so, because enjoying these amenities must not be a question of privilege but of right.

How has this skewed provision of these basic amenities come to pass? It is so because the military’s hunger for resources to reward and award its own personnel has been sated by draining more and more out of the rest of society. And yes, it is not its own men that it rewards — the ruling classes are just as much to be blamed for not standing up to a military robbing its own people of their wealth. They have not opposed it because they stand to gain by this very arrangement by winning lucrative defence, civil and military infrastructure and other such contracts that the military doles out to them every now and then. Like hungry dogs they grab the bone thrown at them in midair and wag their tails on landing. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? I may ask, then, from my honourable corps commanders, led by the venerable COAS, that would all of this not be enough to drive a wedge and put a gulf between the military and the people? Is all this the work of some mysterious quarters or of some very real institutions and the state that owns them?

I would have made sense of this had the differences between the privileges enjoyed by the personnel of the armed forces and the necessities sought after by the common civilians ended here. Personnel of the armed forces have access to one of the best (and better equipped) hospitals in the country, their children have schools that have both teachers and furniture, and the officers and their families have access to leisure clubs by default. Why am I bothered by all this? Because all that has been built and provided by public money. It is us civilians who toil and face the vagaries of life that are thrust upon us not by God but by the state and its institutions. And we survive and pay our taxes that end up subsidising the rich and the privileged lifestyle of our armed forces. The universities built by public money are public institutions. Access to these is not restricted by hurdles like high annual fees — because (some wealthy, and majority of the middle class) citizens have already paid taxes to provide for these facilities in the first place. The educational institutions run by the military have all been built by public money but the public neither has any control over them nor any access to them the same way they have access to public universities.

But then the military’s wrongdoings just do not end at a skewed distribution of resources. For the past decade and the half we have suffered at the hands of religious militants — Frankenstein’s monsters — that were trained by the military for its external ambitions. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Sipah-e-Sahaba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al Badar Mujahideen, Laskhar-e-Jhangvi, the Taliban, then the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other such groups all bear the same common mark: they have been (or continue to be) nurtured and supported by the military. Now the military conveniently tells us that these outfits have gone ‘rogue’ and must be countered. They created the problem in the first place and then turned around to tell us that they know exactly how to fix it, provided we support them! But then the complaints from us civilians cannot and will not end there. Because the military does not stop there in undermining the very state and its citizens that it attempts to protect. Balochistan is burning not because of the work of some mysterious quarters but because of the actions of our armed forces. I shall not go into those details; others have done a much better job of analysing Balochistan than I ever can.

One may then ask our esteemed COAS and his corps commanders that is all this not enough to drive a wedge between the public and its armed forces? Why would anyone even bother to think about creating a gulf between the state and its people when they know that the military is doing such a wonderful job of it itself?

The writer is studying towards his doctorate in Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He can be reached at fahdali@gmail.com