Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [98]
Much Pakistani corruption is obviously about personal gain. Equally important, however, is corruption as patronage – the recycling of state money by politicians to win, retain and reward supporters, and (which comes to the same thing) to help members of the politicians’ kinship groups. Outright individual corruption in the Pakistani military is, as one would expect, centred on weapons procurement and those branches of the military dealing with civilian businesses. The most notorious case (or, at least, the most notorious that was exposed) in the past twenty years involved the chief of the naval staff from 1994 to 1997, Admiral Mansur-ul-Haq, who was convicted of taking massive kickbacks from a submarine contract and was eventually sentenced to seven years in jail, which he managed to have radically reduced by paying back most of the money. Such cases, however, seem to be relatively rare – and, by the standards of Pakistan in general, remarkably rare.
A journalist in the Sindhi town of Larkana explained this lack of outright corruption in the military as follows:
One friend of mine, a colonel in the army, is about to retire. He has been allocated a plot of land in Islamabad, which he can either build a house on or sell for a big profit, and there is also a job in the Fauji Foundation. So he doesn’t need to steal. Another friend, an SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police], will also retire soon, and he will have nothing but his miserable pension to live on, so he has to secure his retirement through corruption.
A military friend told me of some retired military men, like Colonel Shafiq-ur-Rehman, who have become well-known Pakistani humorist writers, ‘but they write humour, not satire, because they are happy, live comfortably and play a lot of golf’.
In the Pakistani military, as in some Western defence establishments, one can almost speak of ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ corruption. The first is theft pure and simple, as in the case of Mansur-ul-Haq. The second is benefits to servicemen – and, much more importantly, to retired servicemen – not accessible to the rest of the population. In this, it is worth noting, Pakistan is not so different from the US, where senior officers and officials on retirement step into senior jobs with private corporations dealing with the military, and use their military knowledge and connections for personal gain.
Concerning the military patronage system, public criticism in Pakistan has focused on three areas: the appointment of retired officers to senior jobs in the administration and state-owned corporations (true, but also true in the US, albeit to a lesser extent); the ability of officers to buy land through instalment plans on easy terms in Defence Housing Associations (or to be allocated a free plot after thirty-two years’ service); and militarycontrolled businesses. Some of this criticism is fair, but some reflects ignorance both of military needs and of Pakistani realities.7
Thus the Pakistani military, like all militaries, suffers from the problem of a sharply tapering promotion pyramid as officers and soldiers get older, and the need to retire large numbers of officers in their forties or fifties into an economy which cannot provide nearly enough middle-class jobs to support them. Access to plots of land is in itself a reasonable way of ensuring a decent retirement, and is part of a South Asian tradition going back to British and indeed Mughal days. Also reflecting this old tradition is the military’s grant of land to wounded soldiers and the families of soldiers killed in action.
The state also reserves certain junior categories of state service for ex-soldiers, including 50 per cent of places for official drivers.8 Officers of the rank of captain or its equivalent are also allowed to transfer to the