Military Control in Pakistan

The Parallel State

Mazhar Aziz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134074099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This volume examines the role of the military, the most influential actor in Pakistan, and challenges conventional wisdom on the causes of political instability in this geographically important nuclear state.

It rejects views that ethnic and religious cleavages and perceived economic or political mismanagement by civilian governments triggers military intervention in Pakistan. The study argues instead that the military intervenes to remove civilian governments where the latter are perceived to be undermining the military's institutional interests. Mazhar Aziz shows that the Pakistani military has become a parallel state, and given the extent of its influence, will continue to define the nature of governance within the polity. Overall, Military Control in Pakistan is a timely reminder and an important resource for both scholars and policy makers, clearly demonstrating the need to refocus attention on the problem of an influential military whilst drawing appropriate conclusions about issues ranging from democratic norms, political representation and civilian-military relations.

1
Conceptualising political developments in Pakistan

An examination of some of the existing accounts of political developments in Pakistan lays the foundation for a better understanding of the institutionalised role of the military. The analysis demonstrates how conventional explanations of political crises are weakened by the failure to ascribe sufficient instrumentality to the extent of the military’s involvement in civilian affairs. It is shown that the lumping together of Pakistan with the political trajectories of a number of other developing countries under the rubric of ‘post-colonial experiences’,¹ is not very illuminating. Such arguments do not persuasively account for the variation that one encounters within these political systems. For example, where India (and for that matter Sri Lanka) managed elections and serial changes of governments, Pakistan’s trajectory of political developments has taken a different course. We also sketch some of the crucial historical antecedents of Muslim separatism in united India to identify the problem of threat perception in relation to a hostile India that defined many policy choices made by Pakistan in the subsequent years.

Pakistan’s conflict with India over Kashmir, among other contentious issues, translated into the pursuance of self-defence and state survival as the prime objective of national policy.² Though the studies that have dealt with the aforementioned issues have added to our understanding of the complexity of the issues, the analyses are generally marked by a lack of engagement with the role of the military as an explanatory variable in the political developments of the state.³ That in Pakistan the military and the bureaucracy were fairly entrenched and organised in 1947 compared with the other political institutions, became evident once the political leadership had to cope with the problems of running the business of the state. The government increasingly relied on the civil bureaucracy and, later, the military in an attempt to extricate itself from the problems of partition, including the issue of resettlement of millions of refugees and coping with a poor economic infrastructure, among others.⁴

The events leading to the partition of India and their aftermath shed light on political outcomes in the successor states. There are three aspects to the argument. First, though India too had to come to terms with the traumas of partition, it managed and mediated the systemic pressures of the event more coherently. Second, equally important was the continuity of the political leadership in India, encapsulated in the consolidation of the main political party, the Indian National Congress.⁵ Third, what was absent from within the Indian political equation was the threat perception from a hostile, larger neighbour and the issue of the survival of the Indian state itself. Pakistan, created out of a united India, perceived its larger neighbour as not reconciled to the partition as the final settlement.

Political problems

An earlier study mapping the difficulties in nation-building in Pakistan is Keith Callard’s historical account.⁶ Observing the failure of political parties to organise in terms of aggregating and representing public interest, Callard informs the ‘[Pakistani] state has been run largely by the Civil Service, backed by the Army’⁷ acutely observing that politics in Pakistan would be defined by the legacy of partition and the country’s relations with India.⁸ Now, explaining the salience of path dependence (as a factor in economic performance), Douglass C.North points out that ‘Path dependence means that history matters. We cannot understand today’s choices…without tracing the incremental evolution of institutions’⁹ and that ‘once a development path is set on a particular course…the historically derived subjective modelling of the issues reinforce the course.’¹⁰ The argument alerts us to the importance of understanding the historical role and subsequent growth of the military as the most powerful institution in Pakistan.

In the autobiographical account of Chaudhri Muhammad Ali¹¹ (a civil servant turned finance minister, who briefly became the prime minister of the country from August 1955 to September 1956), there is evidence the main pillars of the establishment, the civilian bureaucracy and the military, were well entrenched within the polity. The creation of the civil service position of Secretary-General to the government in 1947, on Ali’s initiative, demonstrates this; the arrangement was designed to maintain ‘effective liaison between the cabinet on the one hand and the administration on the other.’¹² Ali thus became the cabinet secretary and took charge of the Establishment Division, overseeing all transfers and postings in the civil services. Another significant example relates to Ali’s argument for inducting the military personnel into the civil administration of the state. The task of running the government needed trained personnel, so went the argument, and it was imperative that the base of the civil services be enlarged. Thus ‘a number of military officers and provincial service officers were appointed to it [the federal civil services].’¹³

A penchant for control, political and administrative, is similarly discernible in the statements of Iskander Mirza, another civil servant who later become the Governor-General of Pakistan in 1955. Mirza declared that the ‘masses of this country [Pakistan] are overwhelming illiterate. They are not interested in politics. They are bound to act foolishly sometimes’ and the ‘people of this country need controlled democracy [emphasis added] for some time to come’.¹⁴ Mirza probably introduced the notion of controlled democracy for the first time in the political discourse in Pakistan, though the notions of illiterate and, by extension, irresponsible masses seemed to be more generic across the executive branches, including the military.

In his influential (if controversial) work, Samuel P.Huntington¹⁵ identifies the military as a source of stability and a modernising influence¹⁶ in the post-colonial state. While the approach taken to the study is reflective of the top-down model of economic and political development in line with the prevalent theoretical accounts of the times, Huntington does refer to the imperative of having an institutionalised polity based on political parties and the party system.¹⁷ Nevertheless, on Pakistan’s first military ruler, Huntington makes the extraordinary comment that ‘More than any other political leader in a modernizing country after World War II, Ayub Khan came close to filling the role of a Solon or Lycurgus or “Great Legislator” on the Platonic or Rousseauian model.’¹⁸

Strikingly, Huntington failed to account for the fallout of an unrepresentative regime in Pakistan and especially its impact on the politics of the country’s eastern wing, East Pakistan. Here, the leader of the strongest political party in the region had already issued his demands for regional autonomy in 1966,¹⁹ (before the publication of Huntington’s book and during the military regime of General Ayub Khan). Another serious drawback of his study is contained within its argument to justify the Basic Democracy system invented by the military government in Pakistan. Under this system, the influential civilian bureaucracy was mandated a key role²⁰ in propping up an authoritarian regime.

While Huntington’s study can be considered as more a piece of how history should be, it remains important for identifying themes and studying political developments of the region. It could perhaps also be argued that Huntington, in his attempt at constructing a general theory, had consciously avoided any normative references to the question of the unrepresentative character of the military regime in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s first military coup d’état of 1958 is analysed by Herbert Feldman²¹ with an emphasis on the persona of the coup leader and army chief General Ayub Khan, rather than the institution of the military itself. Feldman’s narrative, with an historical overtone, presents evidence of the centralisation of the state in the Pakistani context and notes the blurring of the lines between the government, and the administrative machinery required to run the government. Feldman correctly identifies the 1962 Constitution of Pakistan promulgated by Ayub Khan as redefining the terms of reference between state and society and severely diluting the powers of the National Assembly through introduction of presidential form of governance.²² Ayub’s constitutional re-engineering has been a model for all military rulers in Pakistan where they have designed constitutional provisions to restrict the powers of the prime ministers or the parliament. Feldman’s study therefore sheds light on significant historical events that continue to impact negatively on the politics of contemporary Pakistan.

We have referred to the problems associated with the partition of India and briefly mentioned the difficult state of affairs that marked the birth of Pakistan. Equally significant is the instrumentality ascribed in the literature to the historical antecedents of this event. Thus, Khalid B. Sayeed informs us that ‘Pakistan was the end product of Muslim anxiety’ to safeguard its interests within a united India and the ‘bold assertion that Muslims, being a separate nation, must have a separate state.’²³ Sayeed draws on history to account for the political evolution of Muslim separatism, and from this narrative one can tease out the national security dilemmas faced by Pakistan based on the fear of a much larger India, probably contributing to the consolidation of the military–bureaucratic nexus in Pakistan. In a later study, Sayeed notes that given the growing political disorder, a distinctive role for the establishment (namely the civilian bureaucracy and the military) emerged to the effect that ‘Pakistan could be governed best by tightening the grip of these two institutions on its government and people.’²⁴

The problems of weak political institutions dominated by an authoritarian bureaucracy are an important theme with Lawrence Ziring.²⁵ This is another study with a limited scope, for it does not engage sufficiently with the military interventions (there had been two by the time of the publication of the book in 1980). Instead, observations such as ‘the time had arrived for those more experienced in the craft of ruling to assume responsibility for Pakistan’s political future’²⁶ and that ‘there was little resentment, and quite a bit of relief’²⁷ in the wake of the overthrow of the political governments, pepper this account. Thus on the one hand, Ziring re-frames a coup as ‘responsible’, and on the other reports, without evidence, on the psychological state of mind of the population. The questions that are consistently left unanswered are as to what empirical evidence or theoretical framework of inquiry explains or legitimises military intervention? And more to the point, what political training or capacity-building skills the military brings in to assist governance at all? Is there a case for the legitimate acceptance of the military in the political framework, beyond the modernisation or developmental equation? Ziring does provide the useful insight that the American military aid to Pakistan from 1953–54 onwards gave the Pakistani military confidence to overthrow the government.²⁸ It is debatable, however, that the absence of this military aid would have restricted the military in any way. Ziring comments on the disintegration of Pakistan, and makes an important observation that regardless of the ineffectiveness of the political governments ‘they [the political governments] did not preside over so grievous a national loss’²⁹ that is, the loss of more than half of the population of the country, never mind the territorial and strategic ramifications of the crisis.

It can therefore be hypothesised that military regimes in Pakistan have tended to introduce deep fissures in the politics of the country while leaving the succeeding political governments with legacies with which the latter are not equipped to cope. This observation dovetails with the original research proposition, namely, that a transition from the military rule to an elected form of government in Pakistan is likely to produce weak civilian governments due to the presence of a strongly institutionalised military. It is also highly likely that the government thus formed shall remain unstable and in the transitory phase, given the...