Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [106]
The lt-colonel with whom I spoke in Buner told me that his battalion of the Punjab regiment contained roughly equal numbers of Punjabis and Sindhis (despite the territorial names of Pakistani infantry regiments, they are not based on deliberate recruitment from particular territories), as part of the general principle that no unit should have more than 50 per cent from one province, except Punjab – naturally. The colonel is the sixth generation of his family to serve in the military, and his father was, like himself, an officer of the Punjab Regiment. The family are Awans from Chakwal in the Punjab – another classic military recruiting ground.
Echoing the views of other Punjabi and Pathan officers with whom I spoke, the colonel expressed unease about the effects of increased recruitment of Sindhis, both on the army and his own family:
To increase the number of Sindhis and Baloch, we had to lower educational and fitness standards, because in those provinces education is less and poverty is worse. Perhaps this does not matter too much – we look after our soldiers’ education and health, and in the end 30th Punjabi will fight for 30th Punjabi, not for anyone else – the old British regimental spirit is still very strong with us. But I do feel that some important standards have been compromised, and that is bad and causes resentment.
Colonel Awan (himself another Potwari from Chakwal), who served as chief of the army’s training centre at Sukkur in Sindh, told me that:
It was a great problem at first getting Sindhis to join, but now many are coming in – native Sindhis, not just local Punjabis. And at first it is true that we had to go soft on discipline problems because of local culture. When Sindhis go to the local town twenty miles away, they say ‘we are going abroad’. The Sindhi soldiers used to rush back to their villages at every opportunity. But now there is no problem with Sindhi officers, and less and less with the men. And after all, if we have to compromise a bit on standards, still we have to look at the wider canvas and think about the integration of the country. We also have to cast our net wider because the Potwar region itself is changing as a result of economic development, education, and people going to work in the Gulf ... The army is no longer the only road to get ahead, even for village kids from Chakwal.
Nonetheless, the tens of thousands of men (and some women) in the Pakistani officer corps make the armed forces Pakistan’s largest middle-class employer by far. In recent decades, it has also become perhaps the greatest agency of social advancement in the country, with officers originally recruited from the lower middle classes moving into the educated middle classes as a result of their service with the military.
One sign of this is the way that knowledge of English – that quintessential marker of Pakistani social status – improves as officers move up the ranks. To judge by my experience, the Pakistani military almost has a new variant of an old British army adage (about marriage): lieutenants need not speak very good English; captains may; majors should; colonels must. In the process, the officers also acquire increasing social polish as they rise.
The military therefore provides opportunities which the Pakistani economy cannot, and a position in the officer corps is immensely prized by the sons of shopkeepers and bigger farmers across Punjab and the NWFP. This allows the military to pick the very best recruits, and increases their sense of belonging to an elite. In the last years of British rule and the first years of Pakistan, most officers were recruited from the landed gentry and upper middle classes. These are still represented by figures such as former Chief of Army Staff General Jehangir Karamat, but a much more typical figure is the present COAS (as of 2010), General Ashfaq Kayani, son of an NCO. This