Since Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, the country’s military has
governed the country outright three times and exerted a strong political
influence even when not in power. Pakistan’s tradition of military dominance
stems above all from the fact that the Pakistani military is the only
institution that works more or less as it is meant to, as measured against
the generally accepted standards of a modern state institution. This creates
the belief among some sections of Pakistan’s population that the efficiency
displayed by the military within its own sphere can be extended via military
government to the working of the state as a whole. This belief, however, is
a mistake. Each time the military takes over the entire Pakistani system, it
soon finds that the state is so weak that it has no choice but to work through
the same old local elites, using the familiar methods of patronage, corruption
and exploitation of kinship ties.
Within its own sphere, the military is undeniably impressive. One reason
for this is that the military is the only state institution that truly embodies a
modern (and potentially modernising) ideology, that of Pakistani nationalism.
Another, closely related reason has to do with the ancient question of
how a society that is ethnically divided and structured around kinship loyalties
and rivalries can generate an army that will not itself be riven by these
divisions, and therefore be rendered useless or, worse, become a source of
endless civil wars.
Military Exceptionalism in
Pakistan
Anatol Lieven
Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and a senior fellow of
the New America Foundation in Washington DC. This essay is adapted from his book Pakistan: A Hard Country,
which was published in April 2011 by Allen Lane in the United Kingdom and PublicAffairs in the United States.
Survival | vol. 53 no. 4 | August–September 2011 | pp. 53–68 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2011.603562
54 | Anatol Lieven
The Mameluk imperative
From its first years, the Pakistani high command has been haunted by the
fear that the factionalism of Pakistani politics would spread to the military,
dividing it along ethnic, political, personal or clan lines. Hence the categorical
resistance of the military to any involvement of elected prime ministers
in the military-promotion process, the threat of which has several times led
to military coups or the threat of them. In the words of a senior officer of
Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with
whom I spoke in 2009,
Under the British, the military was kept in cantonments very separate from
society. That was a good model, because in Pakistan, there is a permanent
threat of politicisation and corruption of the military. We fear this very
deeply and try to keep ourselves separate … We have a great fear of the
politicians interfering in military promotions and appointments. This
could split the Army and if you split the Army you destroy the country.
Look at what happened under Nawaz Sharif’s last government. Karamat
[General Jehangir Karamat, then chief of army staff] accepted a lot from
Nawaz, but in the end the Army couldn’t take any more. Whenever a
civilian government starts trying to interfere in this sector, we have to act
in self defence.1
In both past and present autocracies, one way of preserving the unity
of the military has been to restrict membership in the armed forces to the
monarch’s own tribe. This approach is still alive in the Middle East, as seen
in the efforts of the late Saddam Hussein to create an army composed only
of Tikritis, of the Assad dynasty in Syria to establish an all-Alawite army
(Alawites are a religious sect but with many of the characteristics of a tribe),
and of Colonel Muammar Gadhafi to similarly favour his own tribe in Libya.
This strategy has two massive drawbacks. Firstly, it creates an army that
may be useful for internal repression but which will be too small to engage
in wars of conquest or national defence against a powerful enemy. Secondly,
the monopolisation of the military by one tribe is likely to cause such resentment
among the other tribes that they eventually unite in revolt against it.
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 55
The simplest solution to the unity dilemma is to recruit only eunuchs as
state servants, as these cannot form kinship groups and loyalties. A wide
range of states have resorted to this solution, but for some reason (despite
the glorious record of the Byzantine eunuch General Narses), this is not an
approach that has ever caught on among militaries.
Instead, faced with the twin challenges of excluding kinship divisions
from the army and guaranteeing its loyalty to the sovereign, Muslim rulers
of the Middle Ages and the early modern period resorted to a solution
which was at once successful and disastrous: the recruitment of soldiers
from outside the dominant society. In the Middle East and South Asia,
Muslim rulers recruited Turkic troops from among prisoners of war. These
troops were called Mameluks, from the Arabic word for ‘owned’ (hence the
name often given to the Mameluk dynasty of Delhi from 1206 to 1290 CE,
the ‘Slave Kings’).
In their first centuries, the Mameluks were extremely successful militarily,
defeating the Crusaders and beating back the Mongols. At the same
time, however, they also overthrew their Arab sovereigns and took state
power for themselves. Perhaps with this history in mind, the Ottoman
Turkish sultans adopted a different approach, conscripting (and converting
to Islam) boys from the Christian minorities of the empire, who by definition
could have no kinship links to the Turkish tribes. These were known
as the Janissaries, from the Turkish for ‘new soldiers’, yeniceri. Given their
backgrounds, the Janissaries could not seize supreme power, but they did
become such a powerful and obstructive force within the state that in 1826
a reforming sultan, Mahmud II, felt compelled to disband and massacre
them.2
Pakistani soldiers do not serve a hereditary autocrat, and are neither
Mameluks nor Janissaries. However, they do owe their unity, discipline and
effectiveness largely to the fact that they are at least partly separate from
society and therefore independent of the kinship loyalties that dominate
the Pakistani political system, and which are bound up with the extraction
of patronage that so cripples and corrupts the rest of the Pakistani state.
Consequently, the military functions to a great extent as a modern meritocracy,
and internally is remarkably free of corruption, at least as compared
56 | Anatol Lieven
with the civil service, the police and the judiciary, let alone the elected politicians.
While electoral politics are dominated by a mixture of wealth, birth
and kinship links, in the army, as an officer told me,
You rise on merit – well, mostly – not by inheritance, and you salute
the military rank and not the sardar [tribal chieftain] or pir [hereditary
religious leader] who has inherited his position from his father, or the
businessman’s money. These days, many of the generals are the sons of
clerks and shopkeepers, or if they are from military families, they are the
sons of havildars [non-commissioned officers]. It doesn’t matter. The point
is that they are generals.3
Indeed, at the time of writing, Pakistan’s chief of army staff was General Ashfaq
Kayani, the son of an non-commissioned officer from a peasant family, while
the heads of the main political parties and factions (with the exception of the
Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and the purely urban Muttahida Qaumi Movement
in Karachi) were all hereditary landowners or hereditary industrialists.
Kinship, politics and patronage
Kinship is central to the weakness of the Pakistani state not just because of
the way it is entwined with the plundering of state resources for political
patronage, but more fundamentally because, in much of the Pakistani countryside
(and still more in neighbouring Afghanistan), true sovereignty – in
the sense of primary collective loyalty and the enforcement of collective customary
law, and even the provision of effective security forces at the local
level – resides in the kinship group rather than the state. Thus, Pakistan is in
some respects at an earlier stage of state formation than the Western states
on which its institutions are formally modelled.
In addition to the competing demands of kinship loyalty, the Pakistani
state suffers from rivalry between two more sets of alternative loyalties. The
first, a modern loyalty, is to ethnicity, leading at its weakest to a deep-seated
unwillingness to make sacrifices for the sake of Pakistan, and at its strongest
to outright demands for secession, as have already been made by Pashtuns,
Sindhis and Baloch. The second, a much older loyalty, is to forms of religious
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 57
belief and allegiance which are in conflict with the demands of the state, a
phenomenon going back to the very first decades of Islam. This has led to
the current rebellion by various Islamist groups against the Pakistani state.
The strength of kinship ties, which can vary considerably depending
on the circumstances and degree of kinship, is rooted in a sense of collective
solidarity directed at the defence and promotion of kin-based interests.
These interests do not just involve the pursuit of concrete advantage, but
are also inextricably bound up with powerful feelings of collective honour
or prestige (izzat) and shame; and indeed, a kinship group which is seen
as dishonoured will find that its interests decline in every other way. This
sense of collective honour is reflected most dramatically in the prevention or
punishment of any illicit sexual behaviour by the kinship group’s women,
but is also seen in efforts to advance the political and economic power and
public status of the group.
As Alison Shaw and others have noted, the immense strength and flexibility
of the kinship system in Pakistan (and in most of India too) are shown
by the way in which it has survived more than half a century of transplantation
to the very different climes of Britain. Shaw writes that
families [of Pakistani origin] in Oxford are … best seen as outposts
of families in Pakistan whose members have been dispersed by labour
migration … [In Britain] a distinctive pattern of living near close kin
has emerged, echoing that of earlier migrations within the Indian
subcontinent.4
The need to defend the honour and interests of the kinship group usually
outweighs loyalty to a party, to the state or to any code of professional ethics,
not only for ordinary Pakistanis, but for most politicians and officials. Thus,
Pakistani corruption is not the result of a lack of values (as it is usually seen
in the West) but of the positive and ancient value of loyalty to family and
clan.
Since the kinship group is the most important force in society, the power
of kinship is inevitably reflected in the political system. As in much of the
rest of South Asia, a majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic. The
58 | Anatol Lieven
Pakistan People’s Party, for example, is the party of the Bhutto family; the
Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz is controlled by the Sharif family; and the
Awami National Party is the party of the Wali Khan family.
The local political groupings that serve as the building blocks of these
parties are themselves based on local dynasties. With the exception of the
Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the religious parties, all of Pakistan’s
political parties are controlled by landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses
seeking state patronage for themselves and their followers and vowing
allegiance to particular dynasties. Most of these individuals inherited their
positions from their fathers or (more rarely) other relatives. In cases where
new individuals gain political power, they invariably found political dynasties
of their own, and seek to pass on their power, influence and followers to
their own sons (or occasionally their daughters).
Indeed, the most powerful remaining ‘feudals’ in Pakistan owe their
power not to the extent of their personal landholdings but to the fact that
they are the chiefs of large tribes. This type of authority extends to the lesser
gentry as well. The way in which individual landowners are embedded
in landowning clans (such as the Gujjars of Attock, the subject of a classic
study by Stephen Lyon) gives them tremendous strength and resilience, and
allows them to go on controlling the politics of the countryside, and indeed
of the country as a whole.5
If the political power of the kinship group in Pakistan depended only
on the distribution of patronage, this power might well have declined over
time, given that patronage will always be limited. However, it is also rooted
in the oldest of social compulsions: collective defence. As one landownerpolitician
in Sindh told me,
This is a hard country. You need family or tribal links to protect you,
so that there are people who will stick with you and sacrifice for you
whatever happens. That way you will not be abandoned even when out
of government. The tribal people gives even ordinary tribesmen some
strength and protection against attack, whether by dacoits [bandits], the
police, the courts – your tribesmen will get you out of jail, lie for you to the
court, avenge you if necessary.6
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 59
Since the days of British occupation, outside the Baloch and Pathan areas
collective defence has rarely been a matter of the whole clan taking up arms
against a rival clan. Rather, in a violent society in which none of the institutions
of the state can be relied upon to act in accordance with their formal
rules, close relations with kinfolk are essential for securing help against
rivals, against the predatory and violent police, in the courts, in politics, and
in the extraction of political patronage, all areas of activity which overlap
and depend on each other.
The weakness of the state, combined with the power of kinship, is an
important reason why urbanisation has had a much smaller impact on political
patterns and structures than one might otherwise have expected. Rather
than driving the emergence of a new urban population, the huge influx of
peasants into the cities has instead caused the reproduction of rural cultural
patterns in urban areas. The peasants remain deeply attached to their
kinship groups, which are still needed for many of the same reasons as they
are in the countryside. Underlying all this is the fact that a large proportion
of the urban population remains semi- or informally employed, rather than
moving into modern sectors of the economy, largely because such sectors
usually do not exist.
Of course, while the power of kinship is necessary to defend against the
predatory state, it is also one of the key factors making the state predatory,
as kinship groups use the state to achieve their goals of attaining power,
wealth and dominance over other kinship groups. As Muhammad Azam
Chaudhary put it,
Below the level of the High Courts all is corruption. Neither the
facts nor the law in the case have real bearing on the outcome. It all
depends on who you know, who has influence and where you put
your money.7
In addition, the power of Pakistan’s elites, rooted in the leadership of local
kinship groups and in control over local sources of wealth, also allows them
successfully to resist paying taxes, thereby undermining the state’s ability to
invest in essential infrastructure and services.
60 | Anatol Lieven
The roots of military exceptionalism
The virtues of the Pakistani military as compared to the rest of Pakistani
society are due to four factors, which can be summed up as isolation,
recruitment, money and morale. Several of these features originated in
the British Indian Army from which the Pakistani Army is derived and on
whose structures it is still largely based. Following the Indian mutiny of
1857, the British were perennially anxious about the loyalty of their Indian
soldiers. In response to these fears they adopted a range of strategies, which
included isolating the soldiers as far as possible from Indian society as a
whole, recruiting them from a very limited number of areas and ethnic
groups, and extending the considerable rewards of military service not just
to soldiers but to soldiers’ families as well.
The mutiny in 1857 of most of the soldiers from the traditional British
recruiting grounds of Bihar and Awadh left the British unwilling to trust
soldiers from these regions again. By contrast, Muslim and Sikh soldiers
from the recently conquered Punjab mostly remained ‘true to their salt’. In
the case of Muslims, this was partly because the British had delivered them
from the hated rule of the Sikhs. To this was added British racial prejudice,
which saw the tall, fair-skinned Punjabis and Pathans as ‘martial races’,
superior in military terms to the smaller and darker peoples of the rest of
India – a prejudice that is shared by the Punjabis themselves, Pakistani and
Indian alike.
By the 1920s, Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and
Nepal (home of the Gurkhas) were providing some 84% of the soldiers of
the British Indian Army. Punjabi Muslims alone accounted for almost 30%
of soldiers in the lead-up to the Second World War. These were recruited
chiefly from the Potwar (Potohar) area of northwestern Punjab adjoining
the NWFP, where the chief British military headquarters and depot at
Rawalpindi were located. The Jat, Rajput, Awan, Gakkhar and Gujjar tribes
of this region, together with Pashtuns from a few neighbouring districts of
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) continue
to provide a majority (though a diminishing one) of Pakistani soldiers
today.8 Thus, more than 80% of the rank and file of the Pakistani army (and
even more of the infantry and armoured forces) is drawn from less than 15%
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 61
of Pakistan’s population. This has regularly allowed the army to be used to
suppress rebellions or disturbances in Sindh, Balochistan and even some
Pashtun areas (though this has caused severe problems of morale in the military).
Whenever unrest has spread to northern Punjab, the high command
has become anxious concerning the loyalty of its troops.
The British also sought to consolidate the loyalty of their troops through
pay and benefits far above those available in the villages from which they
came. This practice has endured and today the Pakistani armed forces offer
both high pay and services that measure up to world standards. In addition,
these services are offered not just to active soldiers and their immediate
families, but also to retired soldiers and to soldiers’ parents. The effect has
been to make military service very attractive for many ordinary Pakistanis,
and to ensure a high standard of volunteer. It has also meant that the armed
forces are less susceptible to corruption, as a journalist in the Sindhi town of
Larkana explained:
One friend of mine, a colonel in the army, is about to retire. He has been
allocated a plot of land in Islamabad, which he can either build a house on
or sell for a big profit, and there is also a job in the Fauji Foundation. So
he doesn’t need to steal. Another friend, an SSP (Senior Superintendent of
Police), will also retire soon, and he will have nothing but his miserable
pension to live on, so he has to secure his retirement through corruption.9
Equally, the superintendent of police will need to maintain all his kinship
links and loyalties so as to gain political cover and protection for his corrupt
activities. In return, he will have to offer the protection and help of the police
to his kinsmen in their disputes with other kinship groups.
Benefits to servicemen are therefore of immense importance in maintaining
discipline and obedience to the high command, even when this conflicts
with the soldiers’ own feelings on specific issues. This has been of immense
importance in the context of Pakistan’s assistance to the United States in
Afghanistan and of its actions (at least until 2009) against militants within
Pakistan itself, activities that have been very unpopular with many soldiers
and the communities from which they are drawn.
62 | Anatol Lieven
To maintain the military’s benefit scheme and to ensure that it is not
plundered requires both a strong sense of collective solidarity, with the
dedication and honesty that this creates, and a great deal of money. Neither
element can exist without the other. The Pakistani military has been able
to maintain its relative immunity to the demands of kinship ties and the
imperatives of corruption in large part because, since 1947, it has been able
to direct a huge share of the resources of the Pakistani state to its own ends.
Of course, military benefits, and the very large share of the overall
state budget they require, have proven unpopular among other sections
of Pakistani society. Two types of benefit have been especially criticised.
The first is the grant to the military of huge urban landholdings, plots of
which are then sold to officers on easy terms in order to help them prepare
for retirement, a practice with roots in the British system of providing land
grants to Indian soldiers, and beyond that to the Mughals.10
Lt-Gen. (Retd) Tanvir Naqvi justified the military’s system of land purchase
to me this way:
The officer in general sees himself as leading a frugal life compared to
the civilian officials, let alone the politicians and businessmen. An officer’s
career may seem privileged, but it involves a nomadic life, living for long
years in freezing or boiling garrisons in the middle of nowhere, not being
able to look after your children after a certain age because they have to
be sent off to school and live with your parents. Wages have gone down
radically compared to the private sector over the past 30 years, though
you are still quite handsomely rewarded at retirement. That is why it is
so important to have the possibility to buy land for a house over a long
period and on easy terms.11
The problem is that the military’s power over and importance to the
state have meant that over the years it has given the military free land in
what used to be the outer suburbs of cities but which is now among the
most expensive pieces of real estate in Pakistan. In the case of land grants
in Lahore, for example, the BBC has reported that the real value of a plot
increased from $65,000 in 2000 to more than $1.5 million in 2006.12
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 63
Inevitably, officers, who can acquire up to four plots depending on their
rank (or even more at the very top: President Pervez Musharraf had seven)
are purchasing plots at subsidised rates and then making a fortune by selling
them at market prices. This practice, while perfectly legal, could be said to
come under the heading of behaviour that is not illegal but damned well
ought to be, and has even attracted some criticism from within the military
itself.13
The second main area of criticism relates to the military’s possession
of extensive industrial holdings, which also serve to look after retired
and disabled soldiers.14 The foundations were laid by the British Military
Reconstruction Fund for retired and wounded Indian soldiers during the
Second World War. In 1953, the Pakistani military decided to invest its share
of the remaining funds in commercial ventures, with the profits used to
support needy soldiers as before.
In 1967, the resulting complex of industries and charitable institutions
was renamed the Fauji Foundation. By 2009, the Fauji Group (the commercial
wing) had assets worth Rs125 billion ($1.48bn), while the Fauji Foundation
(which runs the welfare institutions) controlled assets worth Rs44bn ($510
million). Contrary to popular belief, the Fauji Group’s commercial activities
are not exempt from taxation, and in 2005–06 it paid Rs32.4m ($380,000) in
taxes. The Fauji Foundation’s welfare spending, however, is tax-exempt.
One of the key activities of the Fauji Foundation, with a budget of around
Rs4bn ($50m) a year, is to provide health care, education and vocational training
for the children and dependents of ex-servicemen, and for the parents,
widows and families of soldiers killed or disabled in action. Men actually
serving in the military are helped by the welfare trusts of the Army, Navy and
Air Force. The Army Welfare Trust has total assets of some Rs50bn ($590m),
and owns, among other things, 16,000 acres of farmland, rice and sugar mills,
cement plants, and an insurance company.15 Unlike the Fauji Group, the
welfare trusts benefit from lower rates of tax and other state subsidies.
The military and nationalism
The Pakistani military distributes its internal benefits in an honest and
orderly way, for the good of soldiers but also of the armed forces as a
64 | Anatol Lieven
whole. Thus, in some ways the military could be regarded as a kind of
kinship group, extracting patronage from the state and distributing it to its
members. The military could not do this, however, without a strong sustaining
and disciplining ethos. Instead of the blood ties that sustain ordinary
kinship groups, this ethos is provided by Pakistani nationalism, of which
the military feels itself to be the embodiment.16
A central reason for the military’s belief in its own indispensability and
superiority over all other institutions is that it feels itself to be the only
section of Pakistani society, and certainly the only state institution, which is
a true bearer of Pakistani loyalty. Outside the military, Pakistani nationalism
is seen as hopelessly qualified by some mixture of corrupt self-interest
and loyalty to other kin-based, ethnic or religious allegiances.
Loyalty to Pakistan is drilled into both officers and the rank and file
from the moment they join the military, and great care is taken, not least
by Military Intelligence, to discourage soldiers from holding any other
allegiance, at least as long as they remain in the service. For this reason,
with the exception of General Zia’s term as military dictator, the Army
has not favoured open religious preaching within the military. (General
Zia favoured the preaching of the Tablighi-Jamaat organisation, which
is explicitly non-political, but even so his successors have sought, with
some success, to roll back its influence.) Despite the growth of explicitly
Islamist allegiances, the military continues to regard Islam as a personal
matter and as a feature of the national identity, rather than as a guiding
ideology.
Of course, nationalism can be just as dangerous as religion. True, it has
been crucial to state-building and economic and social progress in many
parts of the world. Often, an appeal to strengthen the nation is the only thing
that can motivate large numbers of people to overcome their separate loyalties
and identities and pool their efforts behind a common purpose. Equally,
nationalism very often is the only force that can legitimise the beating down
of old customs and entrenched elites for the sake of modernisation. On the
other hand, nationalistic appeals have frequently been directed at strengthening
the nation against enemies, and the wars that have resulted have all
too often plunged whole societies into disaster.
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 65
In Pakistan, leaders such as Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and military
rulers Muhammad Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf have explicitly
patterned their rule on that of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, whose secular,
modernising nationalism laid the foundation of modern Turkey. Both
Generals Khan and Musharraf publicly honoured Ataturk’s memory and
saw themselves as promoting programmes of Kemalist-style nationalist
modernisation in Pakistan. Both were strongly opposed to religious conservatism,
and both made some attempt to modernise
Pakistani society, especially concerning the treatment
of women.17 Despite the rise of the conservative lowermiddle
classes in the officer corps, some aspects of this
commitment to social modernisation have remained in
the military. This can be attributed in part to a recognition
that some degree of modern thinking and attitudes
are essential to the maintenance of effective armed forces.
Also of great importance is the fact that, in fighting with Baloch tribal chieftains
and Pashtun Taliban ultra-conservatives, the Army has developed an
idea of itself as representing some degree of social progress and modernity.
This aspect of the military struck me rather strongly during a visit in
March 2011 to the district of Swat, which was largely controlled by the
Pakistani Taliban and their local allies until spring 2009, when the militants
were driven out by a ruthlessly effective military counter-offensive. At a
military centre for the rehabilitation of lower-level Taliban prisoners, I saw
how the Army was trying to counter Taliban ideology with a mixture of
Pakistani Muslim nationalism and education in literacy and other modern
skills.
Even more striking was a visit to a centre for the vocational training of
women near the town of Matta, formerly a Taliban stronghold. Local women
were being taught sewing and handicrafts, and helped to market their products
in Pakistan’s cities, both to boost their incomes and to encourage them
to use their influence in their families against the militants. Twice a week, a
female military doctor held a clinic to treat these women and their children.
The photographs on the walls of the clinic, which depicted women in the
military, were clearly intended to inspire these women with a belief both in
Both generals
honoured
Ataturk’s
memory
66 | Anatol Lieven
Pakistani nationalism and in their own capacity for development and progress.
The largest image showed one of Pakistan’s six women fighter pilots
climbing into the cockpit of her plane, wearing her helmet and goggles – a
sight to gladden any Kemalist’s heart.
Unfortunately, there is almost no chance that the Pakistani military will
be able to successfully pursue a nationalist modernising strategy, as the
failures of both Ayub and Musharraf demonstrate. For this, the military
would need its own strong sense of nationalism to be replicated among the
general population, something that Pakistan’s deep ethnic and ideological
divisions have worked against. While the restricted ethnic make-up of the
military may be crucial to preventing it from disintegrating along ethnic
lines, an Army composed chiefly of northern Punjabis cannot possibly
mobilise Sindhis, Baloch or even southern Punjabis to
revolt against their own elites in the name of strengthening
Pakistan. Unlike Ataturk, who benefited from a very
strong sense of Turkish ethnic nationalism among large
sections of the population, Pakistan does not enjoy such
unity and cannot generate it.
The contrast with Kemalism highlights another way
in which nationalism is not only inadequate for the transformation
of Pakistan but also threatens Pakistan with
destruction. Ataturk’s ability ruthlessly to modernise Turkey was founded
not just on a strong sense of nationalism but on a national military victory,
which saw Turkey defeat the French, Armenians and Greeks, confront the
British and expel all non-Turkish forces from Anatolia. These were enemies
the country could feasibly defeat: the weak forces of Greece and Armenia,
and the exhausted ones of Britain and France, had been worn down by the
horrors of the First World War. Pakistani nationalism, on the other hand,
especially among the military, is structured around hostility to India,
a country with six times Pakistan’s population and almost ten times its
economy.18 (Over the past decade, the United States too has in some respects
become Pakistan’s enemy, through Washington’s ‘tilt towards India’ and
through the US military presence in Afghanistan, which is detested by most
Pakistanis and seen by the Pakistani security establishment as embody-
Nationalism
threatens
Pakistan with
destruction
Military Exceptionalism in Pakistan | 67
ing a future threat of Indian domination of Afghanistan.) Yet India (to
say nothing of the United States) is a rival far beyond Pakistan’s strength.
Ayub’s prestige was shattered, and his modernising programme brought
to an end, by the failure of his war against India in 1965. In 1971 in East
Pakistan, the Pakistani military suffered a defeat from which its prestige
has never fully recovered. The US and international response to the Kargil
adventure of 1999 and to the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008 (carried out by
Lashkar-e-Tayiba, a group established with the help of the Pakistani military
to attack India) should have demonstrated to Pakistan that, quite apart
from India’s own strength, the international community will not tolerate
Pakistani attacks on another nuclear-armed power. The Pakistani military
dreams that China’s growing power will in future allow Pakistan to balance
against the United States and India, but so far China has pursued a very cautious
strategy in this regard. Meanwhile, the military’s anti-Indian strategic
calculations over the future of Afghanistan have brought it into ever greater
conflict with the United States.
Thus, while the Pakistani military can maintain the existence of Pakistan, it
is not nearly strong enough to transform the country into a successful modern
state. The armed forces’ Mameluk-style features, so important for saving it
from disintegration, work against its ability to unify the country. At the same
time, the nationalism on which the military relies to maintain its own morale
and discipline serves to draw the country into dangerous international rivalries
and equally dangerous entanglements with extremist groups such as the
Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Tayiba. If there were to be another successful
terrorist attack on the United States by a Pakistan-based terrorist group, US
retaliation could threaten Pakistan and its army with destruction.
Notes
1 Interview in Islamabad, 15 July 2009.
2 For a fascinating discussion of
Mamelukism and its origins see
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of
Political Order (London: Profile Books,
2011), pp. 189–228.
3 Interview in Peshawar, 1 September
2008.
4 Alison Shaw, Kinship and Continuity:
Pakistani Families in Britain (Reading:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000),
p. 99.
68 | Anatol Lieven
5 Stephen M Lyon, An Anthropological
Analysis of Local Politics and Patronage
in a Pakistani Village (Lampeter: Edwin
Mellen, 2004).
6 Interview in Shikarpur, November 1988.
7 Muhammad Azam Chaudhary, Justice
in Practice: The Legal Ethnography of
a Punjabi Village (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 43.
8 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan,
Its Army and the Wars Within (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.
570–1.
9 Interview in Larkana, 25 April 2009.
10 See Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State:
Military, Government and Society in
Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (London:
Sage Publications 2005), p. 26.
11 Interview in Karachi, 1 May 2009.
12 Adnan Adil, ‘Pakistan’s Post 9/11
Economic Boom’, cited in Brian
Cloughley, War, Coups and Terror:
Pakistan’s Army in Years of Turmoil
(Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books,
2008), p. 157.
13 Criticism from General Naqvi and
other officers with whom I have
spoken.
14 See Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.:
Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy
(Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2007).
15 Figures available at the Fauji
Foundation website, www.fauji.org.
pk.
16 Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army
(Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 105–6.
17 Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter,
Pakistan Under the Military (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1991).
18 Cohen, The Pakistan Army, p. 179.