The Army and Democracy

Military Politics in Pakistan

Aqil Shah

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780674728936
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674419773
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, only once has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government. In sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation has been ruled by its military for over three decades. Even when they were not directly in control of the government, the armed forces maintained a firm grip on national politics. How the military became Pakistan's foremost power elite and what its unchecked authority means for the future of this nuclear-armed nation are among the crucial questions Aqil Shah takes up in The Army and Democracy.

Pakistan's and India's armies inherited their organization, training, and doctrines from their British predecessor, along with an ethic that regarded politics as outside the military domain. But Pakistan's weak national solidarity, exacerbated by a mentality that saw war with India looming around every corner, empowered the military to take national security and ultimately government into its own hands. As the military's habit of disrupting the natural course of politics gained strength over time, it arrested the development of democratic institutions.

Based on archival materials, internal military documents, and over 100 interviews with politicians, civil servants, and Pakistani officers, including four service chiefs and three heads of the clandestine Inter-Services Intelligence, The Army and Democracy provides insight into the military's contentious relationship with Pakistan's civilian government. Shah identifies steps for reforming Pakistan's armed forces and reducing its interference in politics, and sees lessons for fragile democracies striving to bring the military under civilian control.

1

WAGING WAR, BUILDING A NATION

The military’s political ascendance became a distinguishing feature of civilian politics in Pakistan within the first decade after independence. Thus any interpretation of the military’s repeated and relentless interventions must reckon with that foundational juncture, “during which the state [institutional] structure was cast into an enduring, even rigid, mold.”¹

Pakistan was not originally destined for military intervention in politics. At independence, the Pakistani military was little more than a rump of the British Indian Army (BIA). Consumed by the process of organizational rebuilding in the wake of the BIA’s partition into the two armies of India and Pakistan, the relatively young and inexperienced members of the officer corps were hardly in a position to mount a collective challenge to the nationalist leadership. In fact, almost the entire high command was British, and there was only one Pakistani army officer of the rank of two-star major general.²

Because of the political and constitutional nature of the nationalist struggle for independence, the Pakistani military—unlike the armies of Turkey and, later, Algeria and Indonesia—had not participated in a war of liberation. In Morris Janowitz’s terms, it was an “ex-colonial” army, not a “national liberation army” or a “post-liberation army.”³ In fact, the historical tradition from which the Pakistani (and Indian) armies emerged was not one of military government but of colonial rule, which “implanted a strong sense of self-restraint on the military.”⁴ Hence there was no precedent or prior legitimacy for the fusion of political and military spheres of the state that the military could use for expansion into politics. Nor was military politicization the result of a “highly articulated and well disseminated” national security doctrine, or what Alfred Stepan calls new professionalism, that accorded the military a permanent role in national development and governance, like those adopted by Cold War–era militaries in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and even Indonesia under Suharto.⁵

Most Pakistani officers who had joined the BIA before independence had been trained at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and, after its inauguration in 1932, at the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun, where military education and subsequently professional training stressed military-technical subjects, such as drill, fortifications, military history, and geography.⁶ Informal socialization in army messes among senior and junior officers discouraged political discussion. After independence, military training institutions, such as the premier Command and Staff College in Quetta for midlevel officers, inherited strictly military professional curricula and training regimens from the British, initially taught under the supervision of British officers. In fact, as W. F. Gutteridge described them, “The armies of India and Pakistan were essentially British in pattern. The officers were united by their ability to speak English, by their contact with associated British regiments, and by the successful adoption of the regimental tradition and the life of the officers’ mess with its in-built codes of behavior.”⁷

Furthermore, the British colonial tradition of civil-military relations, inherited by both Pakistan and India, was based on “separate spheres of civil and military influence.”⁸ This division of labor was amply reflected in the organization of the colonial state in India: a civilian viceroy as the boss of the military commander in chief. During the chaotic partition of India in 1947, the Indian officers and enlisted ranks of the BIA stayed more or less loyal to the departing colonial authorities except for a few localized mutinies (for example, the naval mutiny of 1946). In fact, the soldiers’ code explicitly forbade participation in politics. Indian and Pakistani officers inherited a “belief that civilized politics required civilian control and parliamentary processes. Furthermore, under the Raj, Indian officers learned the prudence of having no political views.”⁹

This apolitical professional ethos was inherited by the two armies and was transmitted to a new generation of officers in both states.¹⁰ But within a few years of independence, the Pakistani army had developed a political orientation, unlike its Indian counterpart. A 1952 report by a Burmese military mission scouting the region for possible models of professional military organization provides telling evidence of this early divergence.

In India, the Burmese soldiers encountered archaic rules of military conduct: “The Indian Army is steeped in red tape, strict adherence to very finely delineated spheres of responsibility and influence, hoary and innumerable traditions, fossilized customs and rules of conduct and a monumental amount of paper work.” In Pakistan, they found a radically different breed of soldiers: “The amateurism and politicized orientation of the Pakistan Army” contained “a kind of virility and enthusiasm making up for a lack of experience and material.… It cannot give spectacular results but if you put enough material into it, making up for whatever intangible factors it lacks, then one has an impression that it cannot fail you.”¹¹

As early as March 1951, a group of Pakistani army officers, led by the then chief of general staff, Major General Akbar Khan, was arrested on charges of plotting to overthrow the government of the first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan (1947–1951). In 1953–1954, support from army headquarters was crucial to the autocratic coup carried out by the civilian governor general, Ghulam Mohammad (1951–1955). And in 1958, the military finally executed a successful coup d’état and seized the reins of government. Why did Pakistani officers who shared a tradition of apolitical professionalism with their Indian counterparts break it so soon after independence? Why did they develop a political orientation and supplant civilian authorities?

The achievement of independent statehood, especially as the result of a colonial transfer of power, signifies a shift in the political and ideological compass of the military. The Pakistani army, like its Indian counterpart, had to adjust its organizational identity, as well as its raison d’être, from that of a colonial army trained for the protection of imperial interests to one tasked with the preservation of the sovereignty of the new nation-state against its enemies.

The Pakistani army’s identity and beliefs were molded in an authoritarian direction during its formative institutional experience. This experience was defined by at least two factors. First, the perceived threat of war from India resulted in the early militarization of the state, a process enabled and reinforced by US Cold War security assistance to Pakistan, which created the context for increased military influence in national political affairs. Second, the early problems of nation building created by the contradiction between the country’s multiethnic society and the founding Muslim League leadership’s nation-state policies politicized and polarized ethnic (especially Bengali) identities and spurred movements for autonomy that sparked military and civilian elite fears of internal fragmentation and put a premium on assimilation. The army’s composition played an important role in exacerbating problems of national integration. As a result of colonial policy, which remained unaltered after independence, Pakistan’s army was almost entirely recruited from West Pakistan (or, more accurately, from the Punjab). Hence the centralizing, militarizing state became synonymous with Punjabi domination and a symbol of Bengali alienation from the outset.

As noted earlier, Pakistan’s experience in the foundational period after independence offers the opportunity to reconcile two opposing theoretical approaches to explaining the effects of security threats on civil-military relations. Military danger is believed to both reduce¹² and increase civilian control over the military.¹³ Threats can surely have different effects on domestic politics. In some countries, geopolitical imperatives may be associated with stable civilian control, such as in the United States during the Cold War. In other states, security threats may have corrosive effects on democratic civil-military relations, for example, pre–World War II Japan or Burma during the Cold War. The initial experience of Pakistan suggests that the association between civilian supremacy and external security threats may play out differently in states with different levels of national cohesion and unity.

The West Pakistani civilian and military elites perceived the threat from India as existential, whereas Bengali and other ethnonationalist elites considered it of relatively less import because of their forcefully diminished stake in the Pakistan project. These differing perspectives meant that the prospect of war did not have the effect of keeping the devil busy and out of politics or generating the rallying-around-the-flag effect in which the nation unites behind the army to fight its enemies. Some scholars argue that both of these effects render the military politically less meddlesome. Instead, the prospect of war had the effect of making the professional managers of violence in Pakistan the most powerful group in society. The missing link is national cohesion. Shared notions of the nation make for shared notions of the other. At least at the outset of state formation, the effect of threats on civilian supremacy is likely to be conditioned by prior social cohesion.

In the case of India, Stephen Cohen has argued that civilian control was the product of elite institutional design.¹⁴ However, newly available historical materials suggest that Pakistan and India established almost identical formal institutions and agencies for civilian control, but civil-military relations took a sharply divergent path. Like India, Pakistan created a hierarchical structure for civilian oversight and management of the defense sector. The Defense Committee of the Cabinet (DCC) was created in June 1948 as the highest decision-making body on defense policy.¹⁵ Under the DCC, there was a Defense Council headed by the defense minister and a civilian-staffed Ministry of Defense, which became the main institutional channel for civilian administrative and financial oversight over the military.¹⁶ As in India, each of the three armed forces (army, navy, and air force) was assigned its own commander in chief. Like the Indian military, the Pakistani military’s status in the official hierarchy of precedence was also adjusted to reflect the supremacy of civilians.¹⁷

All the civilian oversight institutions established in Pakistan were clearly designed to empower civilians to regulate the military, but they failed to perform their intended function. The crucial difference was that in India these formal institutional structures were embedded within a larger democratic constitutional framework. Indian political leaders also had relatively more latitude to restrain the military because of the country’s more benign threat environment. No less important, India’s nationalist movement was as much an anticolonial nationalist movement as it was a “nation-building movement.” Under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawarhalal Nehru, the Congress Party mobilized and deepened mass support throughout India and in the process “turned regionally and locally oriented folk into Indians.”¹⁸ The mass base of the Congress Party reinforced the nationalist leadership’s political will to craft a democratic constitutional settlement of the multinationality problem on which a stable democratic order could be erected.¹⁹ The Constituent Assembly of India swiftly instituted a consensus constitution in less than three years after independence, which established a parliamentary form of government with a clear chain of authority over the military, culminating in the prime minister. Crucially, the constitution also made provisions for accommodating India’s deep diversity by devolving powers to the regional state levels and recognizing language as a legitimate basis for the future territorial reorganization of the state. This balancing act between central and regional power helped legitimize the center and contained the potential threat of internal fragmentation, thus depriving the military and other rebellious groups of the pretext for fatally challenging or seizing the state. Universally franchised founding elections, first held in 1952 and repeated at regular five-year intervals, renewed the legitimacy and mandate of the Congress Party and thus signaled the institutionalization of civilian rule to all politically significant actors, including the armed forces, as the only game in town.

Pakistan’s founding nationalist movement, the Muslim League (ML), had acquired the formal mandate to rule the country after winning an absolute majority of the seats reserved for Muslims in the last preindependence elections, held in 1946.²⁰ But the demand for a separate state of Pakistan was historically rooted in the fear of Hindu political and economic domination felt by Muslim elites in Hindu-majority provinces, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Bombay. Hence the ML did not have a stron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Waging War, Building a Nation
• 2. Marching toward Martial Law
• 3. “Revolution” to Revolt
• 4. Recapturing the State
• 5. From Zia to Musharraf
• 6. Musharraf and Military Professionalism
• 7. The Military and Democracy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index