Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [108]
General Musharraf exemplified the kind of officer who was well known to like a whisky and soda but was never (to the best of my knowledge) known to get drunk.
On the whole, by far the most important aspect of a Pakistani officer’s identity is that he (or occasionally she) is an officer. The Pakistani military is a profoundly shaping influence as far as its members are concerned. This can be seen, among other things, from the social origins and personal cultures of its chiefs of staff and military rulers over the years. It would be hard to find a more different set of men than Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia, Musharraf, Beg, Karamat and Kayani in terms of their social origins, personal characters and attitudes to religion. Yet all have been first and foremost military men.
This means in turn that their ideology was first and foremost Pakistani nationalist. The military is tied to Pakistan, not the universal Muslim Ummah of the radical Islamists’ dreams; tied not only by sentiment and ideology, but also by the reality of what supports the army. If it is true, as so many officers have told me, that ‘No army, no Pakistan’, it is equally true that ‘No Pakistan, no army’.
In the 1980s General Zia did undertake measures to make the army more Islamic, and a good many officers who wanted promotion adopted an Islamic façade in the hope of furthering this. Zia also encouraged Islamic preaching within the army, notably by the Tablighi Jamaat. However, as the careers of Generals Karamat and Musharraf indicate, this did not lead to known secular generals being blocked from promotion; and in the 1990s, and especially under Musharraf, most of Zia’s measures were rolled back. In recent years, preaching by the Tabligh has been strongly discouraged, not so much because of political fears (the Tabligh is determinedly apolitical) as because of instinctive opposition to any groups that might encourage factions among officers, and loyalties to anything other than the army itself.
Of course, the army has always gone into battle with the cry of Allahu Akbar (God is Great) – just as the old Prussian army carried Gott mit Uns (God with Us) on its helmets and standards; but, according to a moderate Islamist officer, Colonel (retired) Abdul Qayyum:
You shouldn’t use bits of Islam to raise military discipline, morale and so on. I’m sorry to say that this is the way it has always been used in the Pakistani army. It is our equivalent of rum – the generals use it to get their men to launch suicidal attacks. But there is no such thing as a powerful jihadi group within the army. Of course, there are many devoutly Muslim officers and jawans, but at heart the vast majority of the army are nationalists, and take whatever is useful from Islam to serve what they see as Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani army has been a nationalist army with an Islamic look.21
However, if the army is not Islamist, its members can hardly avoid sharing in the bitter hostility to US policy of the overwhelming majority of the Pakistani population. Especially dangerous as far as the feelings of the military are concerned has been the US ‘tilt towards India’, which associates the US closely with all the hostility, suspicion and fear felt by the soldiers towards India.
To judge by retired and serving officers of my acquaintance, this suspicion of America includes the genuine conviction that either the Bush administration or Israel was responsible for 9/11. Inevitably therefore, despite the billions of dollars in military aid given by the Bush administration to Pakistan (which led to the army being portrayed not just by Islamists but by sections of the liberal media as ‘an army for hire’), there was deep opposition throughout the army after 2001 to US pressure to crack down on the Afghan