Daily Times

Can Pakistan survive as a Garrison or a National Security state? The question encapsulates a painful reminder of our entire historical voyage as an independent state. Before expatiating on the anatomy and sociology of a Garrison State it is appropriate to get acquainted with the nature and definition of the Garrison State.

According to Harold Lasswell, a Garrison State is characterised as a state that accords primacy to threats and in which the experts on violence i.e the soldiers and generals constitute the most powerful societal group. The ruling elite become militarised due to compulsions of security and wield great influence to guide the minds of masses which prevents the utilisation of state resources for non military purposes. Amos Perlmutter explains the concept of praetorian state as akin to a Garrison State where military frequently intervenes in politics with professional officers becoming a ruling elite perpetually dominating the national politics.

Perlmutter categorises the praetorian state in two categories i.e ‘ruler type’ and ‘arbitrator type’. In the former category the military rules continuously while in the latter the direct military rule is punctuated with democratic interregnums where the politicians are ceded political authority under the critical glare of the military. A Garrison State is quintessentially a National Security State but the big difference from the Garrison State is that in a National Security State the civilians do most of the decision making. Israel and USA are classic examples of National Security States where the political decision making is dominated by security concerns but the civilians do not allow the military to dominate the decision making process.

While the world has seen national security states like USA, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan leveraging advantages of economic globalisation and political liberalism for national development, the Garrison states like North Korea have relegated development to the single minded pursuit of military power at the cost of development.

Pakistan probably presents the case of a Garrison State that is rapidly trying to chart a democratic course, but in the process has only managed to develop a hybrid democracy. A hybrid democracy in Pakistani context is a polity where the political control of the state has been ceded to the government but the military retains significant control over foreign policy and national security.

The hybrid structure of governance that has emerged out of our historical evolution as a state is a political anachronism in this age of democracy and political liberalism. What has led to that model of governance? The reason lies in our perpetual civil-military imbalance that was inherited initially as a historical bequest and then aggravated due to weak political leadership that failed to measure up to the challenges of state building and national integration.

The early departure of political titans of the struggle for independence like Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan further widened Pakistan’s political-bureaucratic divide. It was thus a matter of time that the most organised and powerful component of the non-elected power matrix of the country i.e military entered the political fracas in collusion with the bureaucracy.

The civil-military imbalance according to Muhammad Has an Askari can be explained through four factors. Firstly, the social dynamics of both pre-independence and post-independence period show a disproportionate influence of military in polity. The British Indian Army C in C used to sit in the legislature as well as Viceroy’s Executive Council. He was therefore nominally subordinate but actually a co-equal of the British Viceroy.

The politicians — barring a brief populist interregnum of Bhutto incumbency — have abjectly failed to connect with the masses. They keep pandering to elitist interests rooted in an economic milieu drawing rents from geopolitics

The British civil administration relied a lot on the army for pacification of a truculent population, a tradition carried forward after Independence Day by the British-groomed bureaucrats who shared power with the military right from the start. The second factor was the internal dynamics of the military as an institution. Its organisational efficiency, insular attitude, corporate interests, and institutional thinking which was initially secular and later religious, engendered a messiah complex that led towards an over-active role and inevitable political interventions.

The third factor was the international environment where the interests of international powers especially in the Cold War era fostered a client-protégé relationship between US led Western bloc and a security starved Pakistan.

Pakistan’s strategic position has set a ‘Geo-strategic curse upon it much like the ‘resource Curse’ inflicted by the geography upon African nations like Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Libya. Due to its geo-strategic significance, the dominant global powers entered into strategic alignments with Pakistan based on a transactional relationship. Pakistani political and military elite thus was incentivised to go the easy route of a rentier economy instead of a developmental economy. The external alignments based on external threats privilege the most organised and influential institution ie military in a country. This factor has helped military attain salience in national politics at the cost of weak civilian institutions.

The fourth factor is the civil-military interaction that fosters a superiority complex within the military when they behold the weaknesses of civilian institutions and leaders during routine interactions. Pakistan Army was slowly sucked into the civilian governance on the invitation of conniving bureaucrats like Ghulam Muhammad and Iskander Mirza both of whom invited Ayub Khan to be part of the country’s political process. Ayub Khan was inducted initially into the cabinet as a serving Lieutenant General and subsequently invited by Ghulam Muhammad to impose Martial Law, an offer he spurned. He, however, supported Iskander Mirza when he abrogated the 1956 constitution and imposed Martial Law. The Martial Law of 1958 was therefore a joint civil military effort.

From 1958 onwards, Pakistan’s journey towards a Garrison State status was smoothened due to civilian incapacity to mount a political challenge. The failure of civilian leadership and institutions can be ascribed to their failure to wean the population away from a geopolitical orientation fostered due to the geo-strategic curse of the country.

The politicians, barring a brief populist interregnum of Bhutto incumbency, abjectly failed to connect with the masses pandering more to elitist interests rooted in an economic milieu drawing rents from geopolitics. Samuel Huntington has proposed two classic approaches to civil military relations. In the first approach called ‘Objective Control’ the civilians grant complete professional autonomy to the military in return for complete dissociation of the military from the politics.

The positive aspect of this approach is professional focus and depoliticisation of the military while the negative aspect is the insularity from democratic process and weak civilian oversight. Second approach called “Subjective Control” allows involvement of military in political affairs while allowing civilians to interfere in the military’s professional domain. In the second approach the politicians civilianise the military so as to bring it closer to democratic norms, removing the insularity of the institution for the benefit of a better civil military equation.

Which is a better system for a country like Pakistan that has largely experimented with the ‘Subjective Control’ model sans the desired civilian oversight? The democratic deficit and weak political leadership that has abdicated national security and foreign policies practically to the military has resulted in a hybrid model of governance that has stunted civilian decision making institutions.

Pakistan’s Global Competitiveness Index at 122 out of 138 and Human Development Index at 147 out of 188 speak for a dire need for transformation of the state towards a ‘Development State’ instead of a Garrison State. Civilian institutions such as legislative oversight committees, Cabinet Committee on National Security, National Security Council, must be made effective with a balanced representation of civilian and military experts. Cross training and deputations among military and civilian departments need to civilianise the military and militarise the civilians, remaining well within their institutional parameters.

An effective Defence Minister like the US Secretary of Defence and a strong Chief of Defence Staff, that should command three services, could harness the disparate orientation of three services and Strategic Planning Division into a single direction is de rigueur.  An enlightened military deferential to civilian control with above reforms is the idea whose time has come and we can ignore it at our own peril.

The writer is a PhD Scholar at NUST;rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, September 5th 2017.