Crossed Destiny

The Pakistan army has long been a major player in the politics of the country it is mandated to defend. Direct military rule accounts for over half of Pakistan’s history while much of the rest has been spent under a tenuous hybrid system prone to breakdown. A consistently high level of defense expenditure has assured the Pakistan army a ubiquitous presence in almost all social and economic sectors. Shuja Nawaz’s Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within narrates the history of Pakistan’s dominant institution from 1947 to 2007. Nawaz succeeds in providing an empathetic and detailed account of the institution with which he and his family have long enjoyed an intimate association.

The greatest strength of Crossed Swords is the historical narrative. Eighteen chapters organized in chronological order cover the major historical developments pertinent to the army. International conflicts such as the first Kashmir War of 1947-49, the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971, and the Afghan anti-Soviet war of 1979-1989, are rigorously and effectively covered. As the title indicates, internal conflicts, such the 1973 Balochistan crisis or the operation to restore law and order in Sindh in the mid-1990s, and the role of the intelligence agencies associated with the military, are also given substantial treatment. The military’s involvement in politics, its internal problems and present dynamics are persistently identified and discussed. With some 600 pages of main narrative backed by a diverse array of primary and secondary sources, Nawaz ought to be commended for the readability of his work. Crossed Swords is and will remain for many years the standard military history of Pakistan regardless of whether or not one agrees with Nawaz’s reading of events, trends and personalities.

The historical pattern that emerges from the narrative is that Pakistan has experienced a steady shift in favor of greater power and prestige for the army in the broader context of the failure of civilian institutions and leaders to function properly. Periodically the reverses suffered under military rule compel the army to take a back seat but this is a temporary arrangement that starts to unravel as soon as civilian actors begin getting themselves into trouble. 

This pattern is accompanied and to an extent sustained by the changing demographic profile of the Pakistan army. In the 1950s and 1960s the Pakistan army was officered by men drawn from upper and upper-middleclass backgrounds while the ordinary soldiers were almost entirely peasants from a handful of districts in the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P). Many of the attitudes and practices of the British era, including a secular outlook and the continued insulation of the military at all but the most senior levels from politics and administration were preserved.

In the 1970s and 1980s the army broadened its recruitment pool and a greater portion of the officers began to be drawn from urban middleclass backgrounds. For the first time, Sindhis, Balochis and Punjabis and Pathans from districts other than the traditional recruitment grounds of the British Empire in India began to be drawn into the military as officers, technical staff and enlisted men. The Pakistan army thus became more conservative in social and cultural terms and tensions arising from junior officers in the 1970s demanding an end to British-era practices such as serving alcohol in army messes, found more formal expression in General Zia-ul Haq’s Islamization. Haq contended that the army was not only responsible for defending Pakistan’s territorial frontiers but also its ideological frontiers. The middleclass officers and urban recruits, being upwardly mobile and eager to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their modest origins took the culture of material entitlement that had started to develop under Ayub Khan in the 1950s, to unprecedented heights. After Zia’s death in a mysterious air crash in 1988, a succession of unstable democratically elected government failed to check these trends although Islamization of the army was not pursued with the intensity of the 1980s. The Pakistan army, Nawaz contends, has for better and for worse become more like the national entity it defends and as the dominant institution is both a barometer and driver of national development. 

The major external variables that have influenced the Pakistan army’s evolution are conflict with India and relations with the United States of America. The two, as Nawaz demonstrates, are intimately related and cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Pakistani leaders, from Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan to Pervez Musharraf and the late Benazir Bhutto, have consistently sought to enlist the United States as a permanent ally. The calculation made by the Pakistan leadership was, and substantially still is; that regardless of the terms and conditions of US economic and military assistance its practical impact is that it inflates the assets under Pakistani control that can be used to resist India.

Perhaps the greatest example of this policy came in the 1950s and 1960s. Pakistan successfully shifted its military deployment pattern and infrastructure from the Afghan frontier, where the British had deployed the Indian army to deter the Russians and keep the Afghans in line, to the borders with India and the major cities of the Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and former East Bengal/East Pakistan. This movement was facilitated by hundreds of millions of dollars of military and economic assistance provided by the United States in order build Pakistan up against communist aggression from the Soviet Union. Evidently the United States diplomatic and military corps did not consult a map of the subcontinent before helping Pakistan build military infrastructure and raise fresh divisions deployed as far as away as possible from the frontier likely to the be threatened by a Soviet advance towards the Arabian Sea. 

In the 1980s a similar situation played out in the context of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s support for the anti-Soviet resistance and the military and economic assistance that flowed from the United States as a result produced nuclear dividends. In March 1983, Pakistan successfully conducted the first of over two dozen cold tests of its nuclear weapons systems. It during this time that the Chagai hills in Balochistan, the site of Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests, were selected for the same purpose. There is little doubt that that quality and quantity of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal owes a great deal to the US-Pakistan anti-Soviet alignment of the 1980s.

At present, in the context of the US-led war on terror, the ten billion dollars or so of US military aid have not changed the Indo-centricity of Pakistan’s military thinking. The Pakistan army, Nawaz notes, has not even half-heartedly reoriented itself to fighting terrorists or insurgents and remains wedded to its traditional doctrine of resisting attacks on its territories at the borders and making counter-thrusts. Nawaz argues that this approach is no longer relevant and leaves the Pakistan army dangerously ill-adjusted to the flexible, limited and rapid, military response capabilities necessitated by the present struggle against terrorists and insurgents. 

Nawaz’s explanation of the army’s involvement in politics can be described as a vacuum hypothesis. The recurrent failure of the civilian leadership to exercise power lawfully and effectively generates a succession of crises that eventually invite military intervention. Often this intervention is facilitated by components of the civilian political leadership who hope to use the military to prop up their governments or opposition leaders inviting the army to rescue them from an oppressive and arbitrary civilian government. Once the military intervened in politics in the mid-1950s at the behest of the Governor General Ghulam Muhammad and again in 1958 in support of President Iskandar Mirza’s coup, it helped perpetuate the vacuum that enabled its intervention.  

In the first stage of this exercise existing political parties and organization were manhandled through selective accountability, martial law regulations, intelligence operations, monetary incentives and administrative reforms, such as Musharraf’s devolution of power to local governments. In the second stage, an assortment of pliant and compromised individuals were put together to confer legitimacy upon the military as it sought to prolong its rule beyond the initial clean-up operation. Third, when forced by circumstances to hand power back to popular politicians the military clung jealously to its corporate hyper-autonomy and bided its time until the genetic predisposition of the new government towards arbitrariness and excess restored the relative credibility of the army.

It is in trying to “coup-proof” the army that Nawaz needlessly gets himself into trouble and exposes the dangerous limitations of his understanding. Nawaz asserts that the US Tile X reforms should be introduced in Pakistan and the army ought to be divided into regional commands headed by four-star generals appointed, like the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), by the political executive. By doing away with the unity of command, Nawaz believes, Pakistan can be vaccinated against coups.

Nawaz doesn’t seem to understand that Pakistan is not the United States and that the historical experience and conditioning of the two countries render analogical arguments essentially unsound. In Pakistan, abandoning the unity of command and having the political executive directly appoint regional commanders of almost equal seniority and power would create ideal conditions for the eruption of violence within the army. It would also politicize and factionalize the army as rival four-star generals with field commands appointed directly by the political executive jostled for influence. Nawaz doesn’t seem to realize that it is the respect for seniority that enables the COAS to control the army even though he does not personally command any troops. Musharraf, for instance, was not even in the country when, on October 12, 1999, the corps commanders executed a bloodless coup against Nawaz Sharif. The coup was precipitated by Sharif’s decision to arbitrarily dismiss Musharraf and appoint a political loyalist as COAS. After the coup was completed they handed control over to Musharraf. It seems as if Nawaz is oblivious to the degree to which the Pakistan army retains its pre-independence structure and conditioning or how this retention has helped prevent the politicization of the rank-and-file and almost all officers except for those at the senior-most levels. 

Overall Crossed Swords is superior in the quality of its narrative than contemporary works such as Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy and Hussain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military and no worse in its understanding of the Pakistani state and the institutions that comprise it. It is a timely and important work that deserves to be read for the great volume of information that it contains. Well-written and easy to access, Nawaz has produced a commendable work on an important aspect of Pakistan history. It is strongly recommended to anyone seeking to understand the phenomenon of praetorian control in general and Pakistan’s military in particular.

Ilhan Niaz is a faculty member at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Department of History, Islamabad and author of An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent.

Ilhan Niaz is the author of ‘The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008’ and ‘An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent’ He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

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