In a special issue of Herald, Rifaat Hussain analysed the results of a survey of 7,000 Pakistanis and noted that “70 years after its creation, Pakistan remains a garrison state in which people are looking more and more toward the armed forces for fulfilling their security needs. Pakistan’s security dilemmas are huge and almost intractable. The only way out of them is to promote peace within and without.”
Coincidentally, 15 years ago, I had come to the same conclusions. On reviewing my book, Stephen Cohen of Brookings had noted that, “it should be read carefully to understand how this important state might best negotiate its multiple security dilemmas.” Brian Cloughley observed that “the future of the sub-continent depends on human development, not that of weapons and warfare.”
However, none of my recommendations were implemented. The foreign and defence policies remained Indo-centric, and the search for strategic depth in Afghanistan persisted. Military spending kept on rising. The race in conventional arms with India was upgraded to include a race in nuclear arms, further exacerbating the economic situation at home.
Amidst this depressing environment, in May 2012 the US invaded Pakistani airspace and killed the world’s most wanted terrorist just a mile away from the army’s academy. Two years later, the government’s commission of inquiry into the Abbottabad debacle, headed by Justice Javed Iqbal and including Ambassador Ashraf Jehangir Qazi and Lt-Gen Nadeem Ahmed, concluded: “We have no national security policy, because we have no national economic, population, educational, health, social, environmental, or any nation-building policies. They exist in declaratory and normative terms and hundreds of unread documents. But not in reality.”
It quoted from my book: “National security does not reside solely in the military’s combat effectiveness but in a complementary set of five dimensions that include four non-military dimensions and one military dimension. The non-military dimensions are political leadership, social cohesion, economic vitality, and strong foreign policy. One cannot rely on hard military assets to prevail in a strategic conflict; the ‘soft assets,’ the four non-military dimensions, may, in fact, be the decisive ones.”
Military Review, the US army magazine, said that the soft path means cutting back military spending and focusing instead on domestic priorities to get the economic and political landscape in order.
Parameters, the journal of the US Army War College, concurred with my point that Pakistan’s permanent confrontation with its much bigger sibling had led to the emergence of a military-dominated polity in Pakistan. It agreed that Pakistan needed to create an integrated model for national security that emphasised military and non-military deterrents.
Writing in Asia-Pacific Political Studies Review, Ian Talbot agreed that Pakistan had historically maintained armed forces far “beyond its own resource capabilities.” An “offence defence” strategy has not only resulted in disastrous episodes of adventurism but also exacerbated structural weaknesses in the Pakistan economy arising from low savings and tax base. He drew attention to my call for greater transparency in defence expenditures.
Maritza Cricorian in The International Spectator discussed my proposal to implement a five-stage solution to the conflict in Kashmir. Arpit Rajain of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi noted that the book’s “analysis of the wars is unlike any military history writing” and it “pinpoints the errors of judgment and locates the causes of failures in higher direction of the war, inter-services rivalry and lack of coordination.”
Karamatullah Ghori reviewed the book and said that the book challenged “the stereotyped belief that the Pakistan army is the ultimate insurance, after God, for the country’s survival.”
He noted that after the secession of East Pakistan, there had been a “phenomenal rise of Pakistan’s military complex. From a level of 300,000 in uniform, it has gone past 600,000 in a quarter century. This strength is 50 per cent higher than the total British India army in 1947. By the same token, the military expenditure has grown by leaps and bounds.”
“Such spending has had a debilitating impact on vital national services like health and education. No ‘defender’ or ‘redeemer’ of Pakistan has had the good sense to arrest, much less reverse, the precipitate slide of the country’s social indices.”
Ghori said that “a bloated army or hefty defence outlays do not, necessarily, ensure national security and a smaller but well-trained armed force can be a more effective instrument of national defence.”
Pakistan can stay in a state of permanent conflict with India, training and arming militants and distinguishing between the good and bad Taliban, or it can get on the road to prosperity by accepting the sage counsel offered by the Abbottabad Commission
Chanakya Sen wrote in Asia Times said that, “small cabals have acquired disproportionate organisational and collusive power during successive military regimes. The landed oligarchy, the bureaucracy and the jihadis are the main beneficiaries of Pakistan’s political economy of defence. They have acquired their fortunes ‘through policies exacerbating inter-class and inter-regional inequalities.’
I had stated that Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir was the main legitimating potion of its ruling class and the hawks in its security establishment. This obsession had misbegotten four costly wars and countless acts of subversion that proved fruitless.
Pakistan’s military planners had projected India as “a pushover adversary that is cowardly because the Hindu has no stomach for a fight”. They have raised very high expectations about the superiority of Pakistan’s armed forces, illusions repeatedly shattered by defeats. Often, Islamabad has “completely misunderstood Indian intentions and capabilities” and jumped the gun with hubris and folly.
Khaled Ahmed in a review noted that, “the book is spot-on about the collective self-deception in Pakistan about ‘allied’ cooperation. Pakistan factors extra-regional help against India into its war strategy, but this help never arrives. If ‘help’ never arrives, why is the Pakistani strategic mantra so firmly based on it?”
Ayesha Siddiqa in a piece noted that, “the military desperately needs reforms to cater to the real security needs of the country. The argument is indeed valid since the manner in which the country’s armed forces are being run today means lesser security at a higher cost.”
My call for a paradigm shift in national security encountered two main objections: I had ignored “domestic political compulsions” and had “too readily assumed that rational political choices would be followed.”
Now, 70 years on, Pakistan has come to a fork in the road. It can stay in a state of permanent conflict with India, training and arming militant groups, distinguishing good and bad Taliban, and arming itself with the latest weaponry.
Or it can get on the road to prosperity by accepting the sage counsel offered by the Abbottabad Commission. The choice is not that hard.
The writer’s book, Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan, was published by Ashgate in the UK
Published in Daily Times, July 4th 2018.