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Pak Army take-over preplanned
by: M V Kamath

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Pak Army take-over preplanned
Free Press Journal
December 2, 1999
By M V Kamath

Was the Army take-over of Pakistan an accident -following the attempt by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to dismiss the Commander-in-Chief Gen. Musharraf, or had the Army made contingency plans to dismiss the Prime Minister and take over power when it suited it? The general belief is that the whole thing just happened sequentially without any pre-planning. That is just not true as information now available clearly shows.

The army take-over was quite predictable if one is to go by reports that first appeared in the May 1999 issue of The Herald, a Karachi-based monthly which had a special report on the Pakistan Army under the title "The Creeping coup". The Army coup obviously was coming. It was merely precipitated by the dismissal of Gen. Musharraf while he was on his way from Sri Lanka back home on a Pakistani Airline flight.

If The Herald could predict an army coup as early as in May, neither India and certainly not the United States can pretend ignorance. Both Delhi and Washington surely were aware that something was likely to happen, even if they could not guess the timing. The Herald cover story had blown the lid off Army pretences.

The Pakistan Army apparently had been very alert to the continuing deterioration of law and order in the country. On every front - political, economic, social - the country was moving towards collapse.

The Army was the only institutionally sound body in Pakistan. And the Army was only too aware of that fact. Did it have a duty to perform or should it look the other way as Nawaz Sharif took the nation towards disaster? Apparently the Army leadership had decided to be pro-active, and to take a more positive stand vis-a-vis the civilian authority.

The idea was to map out for itself a new role within the parameters of democracy. The prevalent belief in Army circles was that if Pakistan collapsed as a nation, the Army naturally would go down with it. Something in the circumstances had to be done and the matter apparently was discussed threadbare among officials from the Major level upwards.

The discussions preceded the May revelations by The Herald, and the civilian authorities, it would seem, were fully aware of them. In fact the latter themselves were looking for military involvement in civil affairs. In the Punjab, the state government run by the Prime Minister's brother Shahbaz Sharif had set an example by using the Army to check 'ghost schools' (schools that were only on paper and did not exist) and health centres, construct roads in Lahore, conduct entrance examinations and maintain peace during Moharrum. Some ten Army officers had even been appointed to supervise some major departments in the Punjab. The Secretary of the Forest Department, the Director General of the Rawalpindi Development Authority, the Secretary of the Construction Works Department, the vice-Chairman of the Cholisatan Development Authority, the chairman of the Chief Minister's Inspection Team (CMIT) and the Adviser to the Chief Minister on the CMIT were all Army officers! In practice, then, the Army had for all practical purposes taken over power even before Nawaz Sharif dismissed Gen. Musharraf and the latter then overthrew the Prime Minister in a coup. To the people neither came as a surprise.

The Army thinking was somewhat as follows: First was the belief that Pakistan need not in future fear a conventional war with India since acquisition of nuclear arms precluded an easy Indian victory in battle. Second was the belief that the enemy was now internal and not external. The problem was how to contain peace in the country. Crime was on the increase.

In comparison to the 4,846 people murdered in Punjab in 1996, the number had jumped to 5,050 in 1998. In just the first quarter of 1999 some 1,086 people had been murdered in Punjab State alone. And robberies were also steeply on the increase. What could be the role of the Army in such circumstances? The Army apparently asked itself four questions: First, by taking up the job of taking on civil administration would the border along India face risk of Indian intrusion? Second, was the task so important that it might cause irreparable damage if left undone? Third, was there any other department of authority that could run the civilian government effectively? And finally, the fourth: what were the chances of the Army's success in handling civilian authority?

The Army, it seems, was also acutely aware of "an increased incidence of India-sponsored terrorism within Pakistani territory". In India there has been a lot of talk of ISI-sponsored terrorism. Obviously India has been returning the complement in Pakistan without talking about it. How was the Army to tackle this?

Then there was the question of corruption. Was it at all possible for the Pakistani Army to reduce corruption? The Armed Forces had been in power before. In fact for many years. Had corruption been properly tackled then and finally eliminated? The Herald said in its analysis that "the biggest lesson that the Army appears to have drawn from General Zia's regime is that direct involvement in civilian politics cannot be beneficial in the long run" and that "in fact, never before was the Army's name as tarnished as it was during Gen. Zia's 11 years".

And yet, the civilians themselves seem to have been convinced that without Army aid no progress in Pakistan was possible. Actually it was Punjab's Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif who told a gathering of Army veterans not long ago that he was of the "firm belief" that if basic changes are to be brought about in Pakistan society in the shortest possible time, the involvement of the Armed Forces was a must. And this, notwithstanding the fact that an Army Officer and "a few Junior Commissioned officers" had been court-martialled for indulging in corruption. The Army had, as a matter of fact, earlier taken over a major organisation WAPDA, on the theory that if WAPDA sank, it could take the economy of the country down with it.

But as cynics saw the situation WAPDA had been under sole Army control between 1977 and 1988, the period when Gen. Zia was in power and that throughout this period it had remained as corrupt and inefficient as ever. So what good could Army take-over of it do now? And if the Army were to take over WAPDA again, what would stop it from taking over other public sector undertakings like, for example, the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation and such other works? And, in the end, wouldn't the Army be transformed into a civilian set-up despite its protestations otherwise? As Dr Eqbal Ahmed, a well-known Defence Analyst was quoted as saying that military take-over of civilian organisations would only show how incapable civilians are of performing their duty.

He told The Herald: "Even if the Army takes over the country and runs it like a military camp, after five years it will become equally corrupt. It will take just six months for the Army officers to start taking bribes".

The take-over of civilian authority by the Pakistan Armed Forces was considered apparently on the theory that the threat to Pakistan from India had receded and that continuing Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) in Kashmir would keep India from indulging in a direct war with Pakistan. How true was that? The answer provided by Dr Eqbal Ahmed is very revealing. He told The Herald: "It is very dangerous. It is particularly dangerous if two things happen. Firstly, if the notion of deterrence is allowed to take hold of the military ethos. Secondly, if on the assumption of this notion strong steps are not taken to discourage its logical extension - the inevitability of Low Intensity Conflict". But why? To quote Dr Eqbal Ahmed again: "If we look at this matter more simply, we would realise that Pakistan is much more vulnerable to low intensity warfare than India.

The sheer size of that country, its vast diversity and extreme complexity, even their caste system, affords them protection. We, on the other hand, are a long narrow country inhabited by very insurrectionary people. There is a certain group in our country which believes that it has mastered the art of covert warfare better than anyone else has in the world including the CIA and the KGB. This is self-delusion. We accept it at our own peril".

Some things follow from the analysis of the Pakistan Military take-over an in our neighbourhood. One is that Pakistan will continue to create trouble in India and encourage cross-border terrorism, no matter what warnings Washington may issue to Islamabad. This is on the belief that as long as Indian military is engaged in Jammu & Kashmir, it loses its 3:1 conventional superiority over Pakistan. For India to hope that Pakistan will cease and desist from indulging in cross-border terrorism is to hope for the impossible.

The second is that instead of hoping for democracy to he established in Pakistan India must and pray that military dictatorship will continue there to the actual detriment of the Pakistani Army.

The third is that without talking about it India must outdo the ISI at its own game and encourage trouble within Pakistan thus keeping whatever forces are available in the Pakistan Army fully tied up to contain disorder in the state.

India must work towards a collapse of Pakistan in every way. That collapse seems to be coming as it is inevitable and nothing that General Musharraf can do can possibly save his country. It is obviously that which is bothering Washington and compelling it to postpone if not totally abandon President Clinton's visit to south Asia in early 2000.

All that India has to do is to stay patient. The collapse of Pakistan despite Gen. Musharraf will be India's gain, and that collapse will come later if not sooner for the ultimate betterment of Pakistan and for peace in south Asia.

Source:
http://www.indiavotes.com/elections/news/feature196.html

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