Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [104]
This led in the past to a frequent obsession with strategic depth in the Pakistani military, which has had particularly damaging effects on Pakistani policy towards Afghanistan – seen as a potential source of that increased depth. In February 2010, the then COAS (Chief of Army Staff), General Kayani, publicly defined ‘strategic depth’ as meaning ‘a peaceful and friendly Afghanistan’, and offered to help train the Afghan National Army.15 However, most of the Pakistani military see such a stable and friendly Afghan state as unachievable, and an Indian-influenced and hostile government in Kabul as a real possibility. So a Taleban-controlled territory under Pakistani influence remains the Pakistani high command’s reserve position.
Before being too harsh on the Pakistani military over this, one should remember that it is the job of militaries to be paranoid, and that the US security establishment in its time has generated remarkable levels of concern over infinitely smaller potential threats than those faced by Pakistan. The sense of strategic disadvantage and embattlement has been with the Pakistani military from the start. Partition left Pakistan with hardly any of the military industries of British India, with an acute shortage of officers (especially in the more technical services) and with a largely eviscerated military infrastructure.
The institutional and human framework inherited by Pakistan, however, proved resilient and effective. This framework remains that created by the British. As the history of law, democracy, administration and education in Pakistan demonstrates, other British institutions in what is now Pakistan (and to a lesser extent India as well) failed to take, failed to work, or have been transformed in ways that their authors would scarcely have recognized. The British military system, on the other hand, was able to root itself effectively because it fused with ancient local military traditions rather than sweeping them away (as was the case with education and law).
By a curious paradox, the Indian revolt of 1857, the defeat of which dealt a shattering blow to Muslim power and civilization in South Asia, also laid the basis for the future Pakistani army. The mutiny of most of the soldiers from the traditional British recruiting grounds of Bihar and Awadh left the British extremely 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 the Muslims, in part because the British had delivered them from the hated rule of the Sikhs. To this was added British racial prejudice, which saw the tall, fairskinned Punjabis and Pathans as ‘martial races’, providing military material far superior to the smaller and darker peoples of the rest of India. This was a strange belief, given that by far the most formidable Muslim opponents the British Raj ever faced, the armies of Tipu Sultan, were from South India – but it is a prejudice that is completely shared by the Punjabis themselves, Pakistani and Indian alike.
By the 1920s, Punjab, the NWFP and Nepal (i.e. the Gurkhas) were providing some 84 per cent of the soldiers of the British Indian army. On the eve of the Second World War, almost 30 per cent of all soldiers were made up of Punjabi Muslims alone. These in turn were recruited chiefly from the Potwar (Potohar) area of north-western Punjab adjoining the NWFP, where the chief British military headquarters and depot at Rawalpindi was situated. The Jat, Rajput, Awan, Gakkhar and Gujjar tribes of this region continue to provide a majority (though a diminishing one) of Pakistani soldiers