Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [103]
The soldiers, like Pakistanis in general, see no difference between the American and the Russian presences in Afghanistan. They see both as illegal military occupations by aliens, and that the Afghan government are just pathetic puppets. Today, also, they still see the Afghan Taleban as freedom-fighters who are fighting these occupiers just like the Mujahidin against the Russians. And the invasion of Iraq, and all the lies that Bush told, had a very bad effect – soldiers think that the US is trying to conquer or dominate the whole Muslim world. But as far as our own Taleban are concerned, things are changing.
Before, I must tell you frankly, there was a very widespread feeling in the army that everything Pakistan was doing was in the interests of the West and that we were being forced to do it by America. But now, the militants have launched so many attacks on Pakistan and killed so many soldiers that this feeling is changing ...
But to be very honest with you, we are brought up from our cradle to be ready to fight India and once we join the army this feeling is multiplied. So we are always happy when we are sent to the LOC [the Line of Control dividing Pakistani and Indian Kashmir] or even to freeze on the Siachen. But we are not very happy to be sent here to fight other Pakistanis, though we obey as a matter of duty. No soldier likes to kill his own people. I talked to my wife on the phone yesterday. She said that you must be happy to have killed so many miscreants. I said to her, if our dog goes mad we would have to shoot it, but we would not be happy about having to do this.
Between 2004 and 2007 there were a number of instances of mass desertion and refusal to fight in units deployed to fight militants, though mostly in the Pathan-recruited Frontier Corps rather than the regular army. By early 2010, more than 2,000 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries had been killed. In these morally and psychologically testing circumstances, anything that helps maintain Pakistani military discipline cannot be altogether bad – given the immense scale of the stakes concerned, and the appalling consequences if that discipline were to crack.
HISTORY AND COMPOSITION
Given the circumstances of its birth, it is somewhat surprising that the Pakistani military survived at all – and, at the same time, it was precisely because Pakistan’s birth was so endangered that the new state came to attach such central importance to its military, and from the first gave the military such a disproportionate share of its resources. As Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, stated in 1948, ‘the defence of the state is our foremost consideration. It dominates all other governmental activities’. 14 This is a statement with which almost all subsequent governments (civilian and military) would have agreed. It is still true today – though the defence of the state is now belatedly being seen in terms of defence against religiously inspired revolt as well as against India and ethnic separatism.
From the first, therefore, the leaders of the Pakistani state felt acutely endangered from within and without: from India of course, but also from Afghanistan with its claim to Pakistan’s Pathan territories, and equally importantly by internal revolt. This combination of threats led to the creation of what has been called Pakistan’s ‘national security state’. The same sense of external and internal threats has led to the creation of a powerful national security establishment in India also – but on a far smaller scale compared to the Indian state as a whole, and with a far smaller role for the uniformed military.
Relative size and geography have contributed greatly to the sense of danger, often spilling over into paranoia,