Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [105]
Punjabi domination of the army (not to nearly the same extent of the air force and navy, but these are much smaller services) is a central element in complaints from the other provinces about Punjabi domination of Pakistan as a whole – an issue which will be discussed further in Chapter 7 (on Punjab). This accusation is somewhat overstated, at least as far as the senior ranks are concerned. Of Pakistan’s four military rulers, only Zia-ul-Haq was a Punjabi.
The British land-grant system, derived from the Mughals but based on the new giant irrigation schemes of the ‘canal colonies’, has passed into Pakistani practice. It was intended most of all to provide a loyal and reliable source of recruitment of the Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers (VCOs), who constituted the backbone of the British Indian army, and under new names continue to play a key role in that of Pakistan. At a time when the officer corps was monopolized by the British, the native VCOs served as the essential link with the ordinary soldiers (colloquially known as jawans – ‘boys’ or ‘lads’).
This remained true for a considerable time in the army of Pakistan. The vast increase of officers of middle- and even lower-middle-class origin means that it is less so today, but the bulk of the soldiers still come from traditional rural backgrounds, have often not travelled far beyond their own villages, and find the rhythms, the disciplines and the technicalities of military life very alien. Though of course this is much less so than in the past, the Pakistani army still makes the process of introducing them to military life a more gentle and prolonged one than in other military services, and one in which the Junior Commissioned Officers (JCOs) and NCOs are central. This in turn is part of the belief in morale and the regiment as family which is central to the whole Pakistani military system – and, once again, is of critical importance today, given the issue of how far the military can be isolated from the feelings and passions of the society that surrounds them.
The idea of the regimental family has been tested in recent years by the army’s attempts to create a more truly national army by increasing the (previously tiny) numbers of Sindhi, Mohajir and Baloch recruits and reducing the dominance of north-west Punjab and the NWFP. This has involved, among other things, the creation of new military cantonments in Sindh and Balochistan, and a propaganda drive to encourage volunteers. As Lt-Colonel (retired) Anwar Awan told me:
Twenty years ago a Sindhi in the infantry would have been seen as like a girl flying a fighter aircraft – absolutely impossible. But now we have three girls flying fighter aircraft, and more and more Sindhis are joining the army. So you see in the Pakistani military, nothing is impossible!16
In fact, the effectiveness and determination of this programme are difficult to judge. The military are extremely cagey about releasing figures for ethnic proportions in the military, while critics from the other provinces claim that the whole business is mere window-dressing. According to Shuja Nawaz, who obtained internal army documents, 65 per cent of the army by 1990 was made up of people from Punjab (some 10 per cent more than Punjab’s proportion of Pakistan’s population), 14 per cent of people from the NWFP and FATA, 15 per cent of those from Sindh and Balochistan, and 6 per cent from Kashmir (reflecting the large numbers in paramilitary units along the Line of Control).17
It should be noted that ‘from Sindh’ is not the same as ‘Sindhi’, as ever since the British rewarded retired Punjabi soldiers with land grants in the new canal colonies in Sindh, Punjabi settlers there have contributed a disproportionate number of recruits. A more significant shift may be within Punjab itself, where more soldiers (and an even higher number of officers) are now recruited from southern districts that previously provided very few soldiers. Anecdotal evidence from conversations with military officers suggests that the change in ethnic balance over the past twenty years