Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  In this effort, I modify Zionts’ (2006) framework to help explain Pakistan’s persistent revisionism in several important ways (Figure 2.2). First, rather than retaining his language of reasonable or unreasonable revisionism as outcomes, I simply use persists in revisionism or abandons revisionism as the possible outcomes of state behavior. This language is preferable because it avoids any normative connotation suggested by Zionts’ terminology. Second, I replace the army’s elite ideology with strategic culture. Third, because there has yet to be a government that is genuinely controlled through constitutionally elected representatives and that sets domestic and foreign policies, I further modify Zionts’ illustration to reflect the Pakistani reality of army-controlled democracy as the alternative regime type to military rule. Under periods of direct army rule, the ideological strategic culture of the Pakistan Army results in persistent revisionism. Zionts’ alternative pathway of a pragmatic elite ideology is not germane to the Pakistan case. When Pakistan is under a notionally civilian governance regime, the army’s preferences dominate in one or two ways. The civilian elites may share the strategic commitments of the army and thus continue the same policies as the army did when in power. Alternatively, if the civilians reject the army’s strategic understanding and concomitant preferences, they may not wish to overturn the army’s preferences for the purposes of staying in power. The outcomes are the same: revisionism persists. It is impossible to discern whether civilians pursue the army’s preferred policies out of fear of the army, embrace of its strategic culture, or both.

  Figure 2.2 Domestic politics of Pakistan’s persistent revisionism.

  When civilians have reversed course on the army’s preferred policies, the army has ousted them and has resumed its preferred suite of policies. Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Kamal Matinuddin (1994) provides an account of this from 1971. Even though the Bengali and East Pakistan–based politician Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his party the Awami League swept the 1970 polls, the army refused to let him form the government. Twelve senior generals protested that if Mujib were in power he “would adopt a conciliatory attitude towards India, relegate Kashmir to the back-burner and direct funds from defence to economic development of East Pakistan” (156). The army’s decision to disregard the results of Pakistan’s general elections brought the country to the 1971 civil war in which India ultimately intervened to liberate East Pakistan. In 1988, Zia’s prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo signed the Geneva Accords to end hostilities in Afghanistan despite Zia’s opposition to the terms of the agreement. As soon as Zia received the last tranche of US assistance, he sacked the government. In 1998, Prime Minister Sharif embarked on a major diplomatic overture to normalize relations with India. While Musharraf did not take over the government at that time, he simply undermined the peace initiative by planning what would become the spring 1999 Kargil War. When Sharif tried to rid himself of Musharraf in October 1999, Musharraf seized power. Either through cooptation or coercion, the preferences produced by the army’s strategic culture dominate even during periods of civilian governance.

  Strategic Culture Wars

  Since the start of World War II, several waves of cultural theorists have argued for the importance of phenomena derived from historical or other ideational considerations to understand how states behave. As Alastair Johnston (1995b, 33) notes, much of this scholarship is consistent with the conclusions of Joseph Nye and Sean Lynn-Jones (1988), who argue that the strategic studies literature tends to be ethnocentrically American and that it demonstrates a concomitant neglect of other “national styles of strategy.” Proponents of cultural explanations for state behavior contend that states facing otherwise similar conditions will adopt varying strategic preferences depending on their formative experiences. These strategic preferences are therefore influenced to varying degrees by cultural, political, philosophical, and even cognitive characteristics of the states’ elites, if not the citizenry from which these elites emerge (Johnston 1995b; Desch 1998).

  International relations scholars continue to debate the role culture plays in international politics (see, e.g., Chaudhuri 2009; Desch 1998; Duffield et al. 1999). Its proponents value the concept because they believe it helps explain the choices that states make to secure their national security objectives and may even inform how these objectives are formulated in the first place. While many scholars have deployed the concept to inform their empirical analyses, the intellectual underpinnings of “strategic culture” remain contested (see, e.g., Basrur 2001; Booth 1979; Chaudhuri 2009; Desch 1998; Farrell 2002; Foster 1992; Glenn 2009; Gray 1999; Johnston 1996, 1995a, 1995b; Kier 1995; Lantis and Charlton 2011; Lock 2010; Snyder 1977). Scholars disagree fundamentally about what strategic culture is and how it can be described. Some scholars contend that, even if one accepts the concept as intellectually justified, it is difficult to demonstrate that state behavior (the dependent variable) is causally influenced by strategic culture (the independent variable). Others note with concern that it is easy to overly essentialize the subject of inquiry and produce crude, if not racist or ethnocentric, caricatures (e.g., Larus 1979; Tanham 1992).

  After robustly critiquing three generations of strategic culture theorists, Johnston (1995b) offers up a concept of strategic culture that has four key features. First, strategic culture must be observable and distinguishable from nonstrategic culture variables. Second, it must provide decision-makers with a “uniquely ordered set of strategic choices” (45) from which analysts can make predictions about state behavior. This set of ranked preferences must be consistent across the objects of analysis and even across time, and it may be nonresponsive to noncultural variables (e.g., threat level, organization, technology).12 Third, this strategic culture must be observed in strategic cultural objects (e.g., speeches, policy documents). Fourth, the transmission of this strategic culture must be traceable (46).

  Johnston (1995b, 46) offers up a definition of strategic culture meeting these criteria that is derived from the work of Clifford Geertz (1973):

  Strategic culture is an integrated “system of symbols” (e.g., argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conception with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious.

  Johnston’s (1995b) system of symbols has two components. The first is the basic assumptions that both the institution in question and its stakeholders hold concerning the strategic environment. Do they view war as inevitable or an aberration? How do they view the nature of the adversary and the threat it poses? How efficacious do they judge the use of force to be to eliminate threats, and under what conditions do they believe the use of force is most likely to prevail? These assumptions about the strategic environment provide important shared information among key stakeholders and reduce uncertainty about the strategic environment. Importantly, they emerge from “deeply historical sources, not from the current environment” (46).

  The second component of this system of symbols is an operational understanding of which means are the most efficacious for managing threats, contingent on how the institution understands its strategic environment. Johnston (1995a) argues that, while it is very difficult to relate strategic culture to specific behavioral choices in part because the evidentiary requirements are quite onerous, scholars should at least be able to demonstrate how strategic culture limits the options available to the institution in question (37).

  How can we apply this system of symbols to the Pakistan Army? For purposes of this study, I first assembled a collection of defense writings—a sample—that was as comprehensive and specifiable as possible. These strategic cultural objects are described later in this chapter. I began systematically working through this sample, which included thousands of articles and dozens of books authored by senior officers, to understand how the Pakistan Army unde
rstands its conflict with India and other competitors and adversaries, how it appreciates the nature of these foes, and how it appraises the efficacy of the application of force or other means to manage the threat environment it faces. Several consistent and enduring themes emerged from this effort. First, the army understands Pakistan to be an insecure state born from an inherently unfair Partition process in 1947. For Pakistan, the business of Partition is unfinished. Second, the army believes that it inherited most of the threat frontiers managed by the British Raj but only a fraction of its resources. Third, the army believes that India is implacably opposed to the very existence of Pakistan and seeks to subjugate if not outright annihilate the state. This conviction was given further ballast by the 1971 war when India did in fact vivisect the young nation.

  Fourth, the army is obsessed with various notions of strategic depth, whether geographical, territorial, or political. This concept of strategic depth has sometimes meant cultivating a physical space to place its military assets in the event of an Indian attack. Pakistan’s territory lacks depth. Its main lines of control run parallel to the Indian border, and at several points along the main Karachi-Peshawar road it comes within 60 miles of either the international border with India or the Line of Control in Kashmir (Rizvi 2002). A few natural barriers, such as rivers and mountains, separate the two adversaries in the strategic planes of the Punjab. With the exception of the airfield in Quetta, there is no airfield farther than 150 miles from the Indian border. More often than this territorial concept, Pakistan has sought political strategic depth in Afghanistan. That is, the army has sought to cultivate a regime in Afghanistan that is favorably disposed toward Pakistan and that will deny India access to Afghanistan, from where it could harm Pakistan’s interests (Rizvi 2002).

  Where possible, I also sought to identify the second component in Johnston’s (1995b) definition of strategic culture: namely, what are the more operational aspects of contending with this environment in light of how the army answers the previous questions? Distinguishing these elements is easier said than done. Nonetheless, I have identified several potential elements of this putative strategic culture and, most importantly, have traced the origins of the cultural and historical factors that shape the army’s evaluation of the world in which it lives as well as the means it has cultivated to best manage that world. One such means is Islam, variously used. The army has cultivated Islam to contend with internal and external threats alike. Because the army has arrogated to itself the defense of Pakistan’s ideology, which is essentially Islam, Pakistan’s perceptions of its internal and external threats are inherently intertwined. The Pakistan Army believes that India seeks not only to undo Pakistan’s territorial integrity but also to undermine the founding logic of the state and sow discord among Pakistan’s varied ethnic and sectarian groups. As detailed herein, the label “Islam” is constant even if the content of that label have changed over time.

  An equally enduring part of Pakistan’s strategy to meet its security needs has been the cultivation of important partnerships with the United States, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, among others. Pakistan has also invested heavily first in conventional defense assets and, from the late 1960s, also in nuclear assets, facilitated by its varied partnerships. From 1947 onward, Pakistan has used nonstate actors to wage proxy warfare and campaigns of terrorism in India and Afghanistan variously under the guise of people’s war, guerilla warfare, or jihad (which some Pakistani writers alternatively spell jehad). Over time, Pakistan’s military has masterfully used its nuclear deterrent to expand the scope of operations undertaken by nonstate actors on behalf of the state, confident that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons will shield it from Indian or international retaliation.

  The British handed down some of Pakistan’s beliefs about its strategic environment and the tools available to manage them: for example, its management of its border areas with Afghanistan; its appreciation of martial races; and instrumentalization of religious and ethnic difference. However, these beliefs have been consistently reinforced as a consequence of Pakistan’s efforts to apply those very tools. Other aspects of Pakistan’s perceptions of its environment and enemies are of more recent vintage and stem from the Pakistan movement or from the processes of Partition.

  This study presents considerable evidence that the Pakistan Army, based on its accumulating body of history and experiences, will prefer to challenge the territorial status quo and India’s rise under virtually all circumstances. It will do so when possible in India, but when necessary it will do so by challenging India in the region—such as in Afghanistan. The tools that Pakistan has developed to do this include instrumentalizing religion at home and abroad, devising elaborate governance regimes within Pakistan to manage the western frontier, developing and supporting nonstate actors under its expanding nuclear umbrella, and forging rent-seeking relations with key external actors. Because the army defines defeat in terms of being unable to mount a challenge to India either territorially or politically, the army will prefer to take risks than to do nothing at all, which is synonymous with defeat.

  Pakistan: An Army with a Country

  Pakistanis and analysts of Pakistan have long remarked, with more truth than hyperbole, that while generally countries have armies, in Pakistan, the army has a country. This aphorism reflects the unfortunate history of Pakistan’s floundering attempts at democratization. Brigadier (Retd.) Abdurrahman Siddiqi (1996, ii), detailing this phenomenon in his 1996 volume titled The Military in Pakistan: Image and Reality, observed the progressive subordination of Pakistan’s “national identity and interest” to the “growing power of the military image.” By way of explanation, he suggests that because “there is no other institution to rival the military in organization and discipline, above all, in its control of the instruments of violence, its image … reaches a point of predominance and power” (ibid.). Consequently, “A sort of Prussianism is born to produce an army with a nation in place of a nation with an army” (ibid.). Because the Pakistan Army is the largest and dominant service, military dominated in fact means army dominated, even though Pakistan does have an air force and a navy as well as an array of paramilitary organizations. Lt. Gen Chishti (1989, 65), who was a key general in the Zia coup of 1977 notes that successful “coups d’état in Pakistan have always been … led by the C-in-C Army or the COAS [Chief of Army Staff], and never a subordinate general or a junior officer … The Army generals would not do it, and it is beyond the capability of the Navy and the Airforce to do so.”13

  Pakistan’s generals step in when they believe that the civilian order has failed disastrously and that their service to save the nation is required by virtue of their duty to the nation and because they believe that Pakistan’s citizenry welcome the intervention. They are not entirely incorrect in their assessment that Pakistanis approve of the coup. Generally, Pakistanis have heaved sighs of relief when the generals oust the elected kleptocrats and install a technocracy, usually with the stated agenda of making Pakistan’s system more suitable for democracy. Pakistan’s encounters with military rule follow a similar pattern (International Crisis Group 1004, 2005, 2006a, 2007). The army chief seizes the government, suspends the constitution, issues a Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO), dismisses the parliament, and requires the Supreme Court to justify the coup under the principle of the doctrine of necessity (Wolf-Phillips 1979). The complicity of the Supreme Court is profoundly important. Justices who prefer to uphold their original oath to defend the constitution are simply replaced with justices who will acquiesce to the generals. Because the election commission draws from the superior judiciary, when elections are at last held they are conducted under the auspices of officials drawn from a highly compromised cadre of judges.

  Perhaps reflecting the army’s understanding of the democratic preferences of their citizenry, Pakistan’s military leaders have all sought to govern with a patina of democracy, albeit under their control. Thus, within a few years of the coup the army chief,
with the help of the intelligence agencies, cobbles together a “king’s party,” which draws from established mainstream political parties and new entrants seeking to take advantage of the military regime’s patronage. In addition, the military uses its intelligence agencies to fashion an opposition of choice, usually composed of Islamist political parties. The Islamists become an important ally of the military government. Confident of an electable king’s party and opposition of choice, the regime holds (inevitably flawed) elections that install the king’s party in government. The ensuing pro-military parliament then enacts into law the various extraconstitutional orders issued by the army chief in his capacity as the president.

  This is an interim move before the army regime collapses completely, partly due to the pressure from the military itself and partly due to the popular unrest and concomitant public distrust that develop toward the military government. The army retreats from formal power and permits a weak democratic restoration. In Pakistan, even though constitutionalism and democracy have never fully fructified, Pakistanis do not embrace military authoritarianism over long periods of time. The army is able to govern directly only for limited periods of time and only with the façade of democratic institutions. This is largely because the army fails to manage the state any better than the civilians it ousted and because army personnel themselves begin to resent the politicization of the force and missed promotions (and thus forced retirements) of senior generals arising from the army chief’s refusal to leave his post. Eventually, the public demands a return to democracy—however imperfect or limited—and the army obliges in principle.