Pakistan at the Crossroads

Domestic Dynamics and External Pressures

Christophe Jaffrelot

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231540254
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Pakistan at the Crossroads, top international scholars assess Pakistan's politics and economics and the challenges faced by its civil and military leaders domestically and diplomatically. Contributors examine the state's handling of internal threats, tensions between civilians and the military, strategies of political parties, police and law enforcement reform, trends in judicial activism, the rise of border conflicts, economic challenges, financial entanglements with foreign powers, and diplomatic relations with India, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the United States.

In addition to ethnic strife in Baluchistan and Karachi, terrorist violence in Pakistan in response to the American-led military intervention in Afghanistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by means of drones, as well as to Pakistani army operations in the Pashtun area, has reached an unprecedented level. There is a growing consensus among state leaders that the nation's main security threats may come not from India but from its spiraling internal conflicts, though this realization may not sufficiently dissuade the Pakistani army from targeting the country's largest neighbor. This volume is therefore critical to grasping the sophisticated interplay of internal and external forces complicating the country's recent trajectory.

PART I

THE DOMESTIC SCENE

CHAPTER 1

THE MILITARY AND DEMOCRACY

Aqil Shah

The Pakistan military has repeatedly intervened to arrest the development of democracy in the country, ruling Pakistan directly for almost half the country’s existence. Between 1947 and 2012, not even once did an elected government complete its tenure and peacefully transfer power to another elected government. All of Pakistan’s previous transitions to democracy were aborted by military coups. Even when the armed forces were not in power, they maintained a firm grip on national politics. Pakistan made its latest transition to democracy in 2008 when the military extricated itself from government, once again, after eight years of authoritarian rule under General Pervez Musharraf (1999–2007). In 2013, Pakistan finally broke its curse of zero democratic turnovers when the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) completed its full constitutional term of five years and surrendered power, and its main challenger, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, emerged victorious in the parliamentary elections held in 2013, both at the center and in Punjab Province.

In order to understand the trajectory of civil–military relations since 2007, this chapter examines the mode of military disengagement from politics while locating military interventions and dominance in historical perspective. Faced with a mobilized opposition led by the “lawyers’ movement,” seeking to reinstate the sacked Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the military government reached out to the largest opposition party, the PPP, to negotiate its exit. But despite blows to its public standing and without extracting any formal legal safeguards to preserve its interests once it had left power—conditions associated with the diminution of military entitlements in other contexts¹—the Pakistan military was able to retain its core institutional privileges, concerning control over its internal structure, national security missions, budgetary allocations, intelligence gathering, and so on.

What explains why the military remained strong enough to maintain its political and strategic influence in the post-authoritarian context despite a weakened military-led authoritarian regime?² How and to what extent have the military’s entitlements impeded the consolidation of democratic government,³ including the procedural minima of civilian control over the military?

In order to answer these questions, this chapter makes a twofold argument. First, it contends that the paradox of weak military government–strong military institution was the result of structural differentiation between these two components of the state that allowed the institutional military to disassociate itself from the authoritarian regime and withdraw on its own terms.⁴ While the government and the military were connected at the top by the president and army chief of staff, General Musharraf, the institution was not directly involved in government. Many military officers were appointed to the civilian bureaucracy, but the military institution did not hierarchically take over direct command of the state. There were no military councils of ministers and no reserved seats for members of the military in the Parliament, as in Suharto’s Indonesia or Pinochet’s Chile. In fact, the large majority of the military was focused on combat readiness against its archrival India and, to a lesser degree, on counterinsurgency missions against Taliban militants in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan.

Therein lies the crux of the matter: the almost permanent perceived threat from India makes the government-institution distinction imperative for the maintenance of military cohesion and integrity and accords the armed forces a preeminent strategic position within the state that is unaffected by the political or economic performance of a particular military government. Thus, while the antiregime mobilization attacked the legitimacy of the military government, the military institution qua institution generally managed to remain above the political fray. No less important, the uniformed military did not directly participate in repressing the antigovernment protests, which enabled it to leave power without incriminating itself in the unsavory deeds of the despot. In fact, the high command compensated for the military institution’s association with the military government by withdrawing support from Musharraf during the opposition movement, thus depriving him of his core power base and ultimately convincing him to resign.

Second, the chapter argues that the degree to which the military can impose constraints on democratic governance after it leaves power is better explained by focusing on two interrelated dimensions of civil–military relations in a new regime: military prerogatives and military contestation.⁵ Military prerogatives are policy areas where “whether challenged or not, the military as institution assumes they have an acquired right or privilege, formal or informal, to exercise effective control.”⁶ Contestation is the military’s “articulated disagreement” or protest against the policies of civilian governments that challenge its prerogatives.⁷

The chapter proceeds in the following manner. The next section traces the formative historical conditions that helped foster the military’s institutional prerogatives. It then illuminates the context of the military’s latest institutional extrication, paying special attention to the interacting processes of authoritarian liberalization, opposition mobilization, regime weakening, transitional bargaining, and the actual transition to civilian rule in 2007–2008. Finally, it examines post-authoritarian civil–military relations in Pakistan from the perspective of military prerogatives and military contestation of civilian authority to assess their impact on the consolidation of democratic rule.

THE HEAVY HAND OF HISTORY: “NATION-STATE” BUILDING UNDER CONDITIONS OF WARFARE

Given a bitter rivalry in the decade preceding independence, Pakistan’s founding Muslim League leadership, led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, suspected that the Congress government of India viewed the creation of Pakistan as a “temporary recession of certain territories from India which would soon be reabsorbed.”⁸ The onset of the territorial conflict between the two countries over the princely state of Kashmir, which sparked military hostilities in 1947–1948, turned this suspicion into deep insecurity, further complicated by irredentist Afghan claims on Pakistan’s northwestern territories.⁹ It also spurred the “militarization” of the Pakistani state in the early years,¹⁰ thus providing the context in which the generals could increase their influence in domestic politics and national security policy while at the same time observing constitutional procedures. As state building and survival became synonymous with the “war effort,” the civilian leadership diverted scarce resources from development to defense¹¹ and abdicated its responsibility of oversight over the military, thereby allowing the generals a virtual free hand over internal organizational affairs and national security management.

Reinforcing the emergence of this warrior state was an equally crucial political handicap: Pakistan lacked the primary background condition that makes democracy (and, by implication, civilian democratic control of the military) possible: national unity.¹² In the words of Christophe Jaffrelot, Pakistan’s was a “nationalism without a nation.”¹³ Pakistan emerged from British colonial rule with a deep ethnic diversity that overlapped with its geographical division into two wings, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, separated by Indian territory. While West Pakistan (or, more precisely, the migrants or Mohajirs from northern and western India and the Punjabis) dominated the central government and its institutions, East Pakistan had a territorially concentrated and politically conscious Bengali majority, which was excluded from the armed forces and the civil bureaucracy.¹⁴ Independence provided a “brief moment of political unity.”¹⁵ However, the West Pakistani elites’ desire to forcefully integrate the Bengalis and other smaller West Pakistani ethnic groups (Pashtuns, Sindhis, and the Baluch) into the “nation-state,” while denying the legitimacy of all claims for political representation, participation, and regional autonomy based on subnational identities, led to the centralization of power, which decreased provincial autonomy and further strained the internal cohesion that can greatly facilitate the crafting of democratic institutions.

Strong political parties can be crucial to political stability and democratic consolidation. In particular, parties with “stable roots in society” have the capability to peacefully moderate and mediate social conflict. The Muslim League had weak social and organizational roots in Pakistan.¹⁶ Hence, the League leadership’s ability to “govern with consent” was complicated by the existential political threat stemming from the numerical logic of electoral democracy. Rather that pursuing “state-nation” policies that could help the development of “multiple and complementary identities” and accommodate distinct ethnic and cultural groups within a democratic federal framework, Pakistan’s founding elites followed “nation-state policies” designed to create a single nation congruent with the political boundaries of the state, albeit for “reasons of state” or political expediency.¹⁷ However, this national unification project only exacerbated “the chasm between the ideology and sociology” of Pakistan, especially by politicizing Bengali identity.¹⁸ For instance, even though 98 percent of the majority Bengalis (54 percent of the total population) spoke Bangla, the central government denied that language the national status it deserved and imposed Urdu (the first language of only 7 percent of the total population) as the sole state language immediately after independence, which sparked a “language movement” in East Pakistan as early as 1948.

Seeking to consolidate state authority, Jinnah and his successors found a ready-made governing formula in the iron fist of viceregalism. Backed by the military, the viceregal executive sacked noncompliant civilian cabinets (1953), delayed constitution making, disbanded Parliament when it crafted a federal democratic constitution (1954), removed an elected government in East Pakistan (1954), and ultimately amalgamated the provinces of West Pakistan into “One Unit” to create parity with East Pakistan (1955–1956). As governmental legitimacy was eviscerated under the heavy burden of authoritarian centralization, especially in East Pakistan, the emerging guardians of national security in the military developed serious doubts about the appropriateness and feasibility of parliamentary democracy in a fragile polity threatened by external threat and internal dissension. By the mid-1950s, the military under its first Pakistani commander-in-chief, General Ayub Khan, had dropped its pretensions of political neutrality and was no longer concerned merely with protecting its autonomy or budgets. Instead, the generals (and influential civilian bureaucrats) began to envisage a new form of “controlled” democracy “suited to the genius” of the Pakistani people.¹⁹

Here, institutional developments within the military had important consequences for civilian politics because they reinforced the officer corps’ emerging guardian mentality. Starting in the early 1950s, the military underwent a formative process of institutional transformation from an “ex-colonial” army into a “national” army with a corporate identity and ethos of its own. This pr...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pakistan, the Interface State
• Part I: The Domestic Scene
• Part II: The International Dimensions
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List