Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [97]
However, this change is not proven yet, and depends critically on how Pakistani civilian governments perform in future. On that score, by the summer of 2009, only a year after Musharraf’s resignation, many Pakistanis of my acquaintance, especially of course politicians who had failed to find a place in the Zardari administration or the PML(N) government of Punjab, and in the business classes, were once again calling for the military to step in to oust the civilian administration of President Zardari. They did not necessarily want the military to take over themselves, but to purge the most corrupt politicians and create a government of national unity or a caretaker government of technocrats.
Civilian governments themselves have often asked the military to step into aspects of government, because of its greater efficiency and honesty. For example, in 1999 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, faced with a disastrous water and power situation, put the military in charge of these sectors in order to bring some order and enforce the payment of fees. Both the Sharif and Musharraf administrations also used the military in the field of education, to search for ‘ghost schools’ (ones which are officially listed as operating, but in fact do not exist because the money for them has been stolen by officials, local politicians or both). In July 2009, the military – in the person of Lt-General Nadeem Ahmed, commander of the First Corps at Mangla, and his staff – were put in charge of co-ordinating relief and reconstruction in Swat and elsewhere.
Apart from its inherent qualities and a strong measure of popular support, the military’s power comes from the fact that it has far greater financial resources than any other state institution – indeed, than almost all the rest put together. Voltaire remarked of Frederick the Great’s Prussia that ‘Where some states have an army, the Prussian army has a state.’ In view of the sheer size and wealth of the Pakistan military and associated institutions compared to the rest of the state, much the same could be said of Pakistan – especially if the nuclear sector is included.
By world standards, the scale of the Pakistani army is very great. As of 2010, it had 480,000 men (with another 304,000 serving in paramilitary units), almost as large as the American, and far bigger than the British army. These are not the demoralized conscripts of Iraq in 2003 or the rag-tag Taleban militias of Afghanistan in 2001, but highly motivated volunteers. Fears of the effects on international terrorism if Pakistan were to collapse have focused on the fate of the country’s nuclear deterrent; but a more immediate – and absolutely inevitable – result would be the flow of large numbers of highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosives experts and engineers, to extremist groups.
The Pakistani army is the world’s largest after China, Russia – and India, which is of course the rub. In the Middle East, South-East Asia, Africa or South America, Pakistan would be a regional great power. India, however, eclipses it on every front. The Indian army as of 2008 had 1.1 million men, twice Pakistan’s numbers; but the Indian military budget, at the equivalent of $23.5 billion, was almost seven times Pakistan’s $3.56 billion, just as India’s GDP, at more than 1 trillion dollars, was eight times Pakistan’s $126 billion.6
Pakistan’s military spending in that year made up some 17.5 per cent of the government’s budget. This was a radical reduction from the 1980s, when the military proportion of Pakistan’s budget was around 60 per cent. With India spending on the military 14.1 per cent of a vastly greater 2008 budget, Pakistan’s expenditure was not remotely enough to compete with India. Meanwhile, this military spending has gravely undermined the ability of both India and Pakistan to provide essential services to their citizens.
THE MILITARY FAMILY
The Pakistani military likes to think of itself as a big family – and in some ways it is more like a Pakistani big family than it likes to think. Its success as an institution