Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [101]
It would also be quite unfair to see the role of ex-soldiers in society as chiefly the result of state patronage. As in some Western societies – but to a far greater extent – retired soldiers are also prized by private businesses and NGOs for the qualities of discipline, honesty, hard work and indeed higher education that they have acquired during their military service – qualities which alas are not so common in wider Pakistani society.
Thus one of the most moving and convincing tributes to the military that I have seen was paid by the Citizens’ Foundation educational charity, mentioned in the last chapter. The Foundation, which is funded by a mixture of business and individual contributions, largely employs ex-officers as its administrative and directing staff. This is both because of their reputation for efficiency and honesty, and because the soldiers, having spent so much of their lives in garrisons, are prepared to go and work in the countryside and small towns, in a way that most educated Pakistani civilians are not.
There has, however, been one very dark spot on the military’s involvement in the economy. This was the use in 2002 – 3 of the paramilitary Rangers to brutally suppress protests by tenants on agricultural land owned by the military at Okara in Punjab after the terms of their tenancy were arbitrarily changed. This behaviour was no worse than that of the ‘feudal’ politicians whom officers profess to despise – but also no better. The Okara case indicates the improbability of the military ever returning to the land reform agenda of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and of launching a serious assault on the ‘feudal’ elites – of which the army itself has to some extent become a part. It was apparently, however, a unique case, which has not been repeated on military-owned land elsewhere.
The imperative to look after retirees and soldiers’ families is especially strong in the Pakistani military because of the central role of morale in Pakistani military thinking. Recognizing from the first that the Pakistani armed forces were going to be heavily outnumbered by the Indians, and that Pakistan could only afford limited amounts of high technology, a decision was made to rely above all on the morale and fighting spirit of the soldiers. This emphasis also reflected self-perceptions of Muslim Punjabis and Pathans as natural fighters, and the legacy of British belief in loyalty to the regiment.
As part of the effort to maintain strong morale, the Pakistani armed forces offer both high pay and excellent services – services that are good by world standards, not just the miserable ones of Pakistan in general. They offer these services not just to the soldiers and their immediate families, but to retired soldiers and the parents of soldiers. The effect has been to make military service very attractive indeed for many ordinary Pakistanis, and to ensure a high quality of recruits.
The family aspect of the Pakistan military was illustrated for me by a visit to the Combined Military Hospital in Peshawar in July 2009, an old red-brick British building with Pakistani additions. Until the fighting with the militants began, its biggest task was delivering babies – 1,321 of them in 2008, ‘because Pakistani soldiers are very vigorous, you see’, as Colonel Bushra, the female head of the family wing (and indeed a grandmotherly kind of officer), told me with a twinkle.12
When I visited the hospital, of its 600 beds, 47 were occupied by the parents of soldiers, some 60 by children, and around 40 by non-military civilians. The hospital and its seventy doctors provide important additional services to the horribly underfunded and overloaded civilian medical services of Peshawar, with specialist paediatric and intensive care units, incubators for premature