Here’s to rank stupidity

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
The Masque of Pandora, Prometheus warns Epimetheus against having Pandora as a guest thus: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”
When Dr Ayesha Siddiqa called Thursday noon to inform me that the governemnt (read the military) had banned the launch of her book, “Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy,” I immediately congratulated her. What could be better for Ayesha and the book than to have a bumbling, panicky government, adept at blundering and even more adroit at reinforcing the original folly, ban it.
The formula works simply. In my mailbox have already reached two stories, one by AP the other by Reuters, detailing this new scandal. AFP shall follow suit and by the time I finish writing this, the story will be out in full force; the world will have picked it up, and the Pakistani military will end up, notwithstanding the ban order, with its pants around its ankles and its backside to the sun. So help them God!
Ayesha went ahead with the launch at a private venue, her book will now sell ten times over and she will be famous three times over. If I were her, I would break a bottle of champagne to celebrate the organisational stupidity of the military and the madness that sets in just before one presses the self-destruct button.
Here’s my question: Why? Who is advising General Pervez Musharraf, presuming the order has flowed down from him? Or, is it that the National Crisis Management Cell, run by a brigadier, decided to rise up and defend the honour of the military by banning the launch of the book?
On Wednesday, General Musharraf spoke to officers in Jhelum cantonment. He said that people, especially the media, should revere national institutions, such as the armed forces. He also said, and I must admit this one really got my goat, that he had granted freedom of expression to the media. Granted! Does the General think he is conducting a unit darbar? If he does, as it seems, then he is very very wrong. Freedom is never granted; it is earned; quite often, as we have seen happen in this country, it has to be wrested from rulers who are loath to let go of power.
As for respecting national institutions, the first requirement is the sanctity of the social contract which constructs a state. Does General Musharraf even know the theories of the state, the formation of institutions and what it is that sustains them and allows them to function efficiently? Would he be interested in enrolling in a course to know what he is talking about, indeed what he is not talking about?
No state can function without a military, as it cannot without other, equally vital institutions. So, military is a public good. No one can be against public good, least of all the people who constitute the public. But the very fact that General Musharraf has had to stress the “sanctity” of national institutions means something has drastically gone wrong with the balance. How has that happened, and who might be responsible for it? Does he want to know the answer in earnest?
It relates to political agency. The problem, as Peter Feaver has identified in his application of the concept to civil-military relations, constitutes two stages: in the first stage, the decision-making authority is delegated from the individual to the collective; in the second from the collective (people’s representatives) to different institutions, in this case the military, the body of professionals entrusted to safeguard the state and its citizens. The representatives, the civilian government, are thus the principal in this relationship and the military, the agent.
Interventionist militaries flout this principal-agent framework when they oust the principal, subvert the constitution and begin to rule directly or through the kind of hybrid system currently in place. That is when, and where, trouble starts. It shines light, as in Pakistan’s case, on a structural flaw.
Notice what General Musharraf said in Jhelum: The armed forces are in the barracks and claims to the contrary are unfortunate. This follows his 2002-3 epigram: if you want to keep the army out, bring it in.
The problem is that while the army is in the barracks, the General is up there in his second skin and has self-elevated himself as president on the basis of being the army chief; not just that, he refuses to shed uniform and is prepared to take extra-constitutional measures to ensure the longevity of his rule. The only way to really return the army to the barracks is to have the General doff his uniform and don full civvies.
Even so, and this is where the trouble goes much deeper, the army would retain its primary role, such is the level of its penetration in the body politic. This is why Ayesha’s book is so important; for precisely this reason, it hits the military where it really hurts. Let me give a brief overview of it.
“Military Inc.,” is a two-pronged work. It theorises about civil-military relations and the reasons for military interventions and it takes a good, solid look at milbus (military in business). On the theory side, Ayesha has done extensive literature review before expanding on Hamza Alavi’s thesis of the overdeveloped post-colonial state. Her contention is that over the years, the military has become a class unto itself. From this she postulates that by becoming an independent class, the military now co-habits with other dominant classes and has lost its character as an arbiter. This is problematic because the horizontal or linear divide between the civil and military spheres ceases to be and in its place we now have a crosscutting divide between the ruling elite and the dis-empowered masses.
Her argument therefore is that the elites have historically, and more currently, used the military for their political purposes and there is a symbiotic relationship between military force and political power which makes it problematic to correct the structural flaw of authoritarian politics. (The two paragraphs are from my TFT article, “Musharraf’s binding constraint”; March 23-29, 2007.)
Whether or not one agrees with Ayesha’s theoretical construct which is intriguing and puts the principal contradiction between the ruling elites and the masses rather than between the military and civil-political society is a matter of debate. Neither is the military interested in it. What has got the military to sit up and take notice is evidence, empirically and extensively presented, that it runs an over US$10 billion business empire.
Is the ‘sacred’ national institution predating? What if the story of this greed, corruption and rent-seeking gets out? Let’s ban the book launch. Well, just in case the military hasn’t noticed, the story has gotten out, its muzzle-velocity only increased exponentially by the ban. The over hundred people, who braved the heat and cramped conditions to attend the launch at Lead Pakistan, included the entire domestic and international media!!
Once you have Pandora as the guest, there’s no going back.

Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk