The army can be confident that democracy will remain under its thumb because Pakistan’s military dictators have always left constitutional legacies that enable it to continue manipulating political affairs from the barracks. The army was hesitant to allow Benazir Bhutto to become prime minister after Zia’s death. (Ms. Bhutto assumed leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party [PPP] after Zia assassinated her father and founder of the party, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.) Nonetheless, the army was confident that it could keep her and her government in line due to a Zia-era constitutional measure: Article 58(2)(b) of the 1973 Constitution enacted with the Eighth Amendment. This provision allowed the president to dismiss the prime minister and the provincial chief ministers, dissolve the national and provincial assemblies, nominate judges to the superior judiciary, and appoint chiefs of the armed services. With the Eighth Amendment, Zia shifted the balance of power away from the position of the prime minister to that of the president. Throughout the 1990s, no parliament served out its term due to early dismissal by the president under 58(2)(b). This occurred with the connivance of the military (e.g., Bhutto’s ouster in 1990 and Sharif’s in 1993) and without (e.g., Bhutto’s ouster in 1996 due to differences with President Farooq Leghari, also a member of the Ms. Bhutto’s PPP). No civilian government could muster the two-thirds majority to repeal this amendment until 1997, when Sharif returned to power and jettisoned the odious 58(2)(b). Pakistan again returned to a parliamentary form of democracy, but the interregnum was brief: Musharraf restored 58(2)(b) when he seized the government in October 1999. It remained in place until the Eighteenth Amendment was passed in April 2010, which again returned Pakistan to a parliamentary democracy (Hoffman 2011; Jaffrelot 2002a; Shah 2003).
This antagonistic relationship between the military and the democratic parties is more reciprocal than may seem at first blush. When opposition political leaders request help with weakening their opponents, the military often obliges (Siddiqa 2007). As a consequence of this elaborate collusion between the military, politicians, judiciary, and bureaucracy, the first quasi-civilian government to serve out its entire five-year term since 1977 was elected under the auspices of Musharraf in October 2002. It should be noted that Musharraf had every incentive to keep this parliament in place as long as it more or less served his purposes. In June 2004, Musharraf dismissed Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who came into office following the October 2002 elections conducted under Musharraf’s government. Musharraf replaced him with Shaukat Aziz, the American Citibank executive, who remained in that capacity until November 2007. In March 2013 when the previous PPP-led government stepped down to give way to a caretaker government and fresh elections in May, it was the first wholly civilian government to serve out its term and be replaced by a constitutionally elected new government.
It is a curious fact that, despite the generally democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people, the army has dominated the state since the early years of independence. Given the army’s ability to bring down a civilian government through direct or indirect intervention, few politicians are willing to take on the army. Most prefer to defer to the military in exchange for the opportunity to remain in power (Haqqani 2005; Siddiqa 2007). Not only has the Pakistan Army directly and indirectly manipulated the domestic and foreign affairs of the state, but it also has had a preeminent role in shaping Pakistan’s educational curricula, textbooks, and the publicly and privately owned media (Fair 2011c; Farooq 2012a, 2012b; Haqqani 2005; Kohari 2012; Sabri 2012; Yusuf 2011). Thus, the Pakistan Army is able to cultivate support for its strategic imperatives across a wide swath of Pakistan’s diverse public.
Given the army’s power to set Pakistan’s foreign policy, as well as any domestic policy in which it is interested, it is reasonable to simplify Pakistan’s strategic culture to that of the army. While some studies of strategic culture focus on the civilian decision-making institutions that shape a country’s defense policy (Johnston 1995a, 1995b; Kier 1995; Snyder 1977), this effort focuses narrowly on the army. Critics may argue that this approach is overly reductionist and may counter that there have indeed been important periods in Pakistan’s history when civilians took the initiative. One example of this is the democratically elected but highly autocratic government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who served as prime minister from 1973 to 1977 and as president and chief martial law administrator between 1971 and 1973. Bhutto was able to take advantage of the army’s weakened position due to the national belief that it was responsible for the loss of East Pakistan. However, by 1978 the army was back in power (Siddiqa 2007). Another example is that of Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo, appointed by Zia following the 1985 elections, which were held on a nonparty basis. Zia’s amendments to Pakistan’s constitution had weakened the prime minister’s powers, bolstering his confidence that Junejo would be an easily controlled puppet. But Junejo infuriated Zia by demanding the end of martial law, refusing to let the parliament rubber-stamp Zia’s various ordinances, and signing the Geneva Accords in April 1988, thus ending the conflict in Afghanistan without specifying who would govern Afghanistan after the Soviet departure. After having received the last tranche of assistance from the United States, in May 1988 Zia dissolved the parliament and dismissed Junejo (Haqqani 2005).
But notwithstanding these examples, the army has still dominated Pakistan’s foreign policy (Schaffer and Schaffer 2011). Moreover, with the return of democracy following Zia’s death in 1988 and Benazir Bhutto’s election that same year, every prime minister has governed with the explicit understanding that the civilian government will not interfere in military or foreign policy. Prime ministers who reneged on this commitment have quickly found their governments dismissed (Khan 2012a; Shah 2004). Taken together, these facts justify speaking of Pakistan’s strategic culture as identical with that of the army, at least to a first-order approximation.
Reproducing Culture: Recruitment in the Pakistan Army 14
Pakistan’s army is an all-volunteer force, with far more applicants for officer and other ranks than there are positions to fill. Like most militaries, “while [it is] composed of many, ever-changing individuals,” the Pakistan Army has “distinct and enduring personalities of [its] own that govern much of [its] behavior” (Builder 1989, 3). Even though militaries are composed of individuals, one of their goals is to shape the behavior, comportment, and beliefs of the men (and in some cases women) in uniform. Like all militaries, the Pakistan Army does this by imposing recruitment standards, mandating consistent and regularized training at the country’s military institutions for various levels of promotion and specialization, and constantly asserting selection pressure as enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and officers come up for promotion. Krebs (2006), describing this general socialization process, explains that militaries may “socialize the rank and file and officers to national norms reflected in the military’s manpower policy. Because the military is (often presumed to be) a ‘total institution’ and because soldiers generally serve during their ‘impressionable years,’ inductees may be nearly blank slates on which the military can inscribe values” (6). The Pakistan Army, like most modern armies, must bring together individuals of “various backgrounds in common cause and in a collaborative spirit, providing a setting seemingly well-suited to breaking down dividing lines based on race, ethnicity, religion or class” (7). As described throughout this volume (especially Chapter 4), the army sees itself as a site of nation formation, with soldiers and officers alike entering as Punjabis, Sindhis, Pakhtuns, or Baloch but becoming Pakistani.
Generally, enlisted personnel (also called jawans in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, which translates as “young men”) must have at least a tenth-grade education, be between 17 and 23 years of age, and meet a number of physical requirements. However, the army relaxes its educational and even physical standards in places where it hopes to expand recruitment. For example, in Balochistan, recruits with an eighth-grade education will be considered for all positions except as technic
ians, nurses, or military police. Recruits from Balochistan can be somewhat shorter as well, with a minimum height of 5 feet, 4 inches instead of 5 feet, 6 inches, among other relaxations of physical standards (Pakistan Army n.d.). While there are no recent, publicly available data for the recruitment of the enlisted ranks (jawans), Cohen (1984) found that they tended to come from throughout Pakistan but from remote districts with rural peasant backgrounds. These recruits are brought together at regimental training centers, which are the core of the army’s training system. Some of these soldiers may be unaccustomed to bathrooms or latrines, fixed meals, or regular working hours. If necessary, before training commences recruits learn Urdu and receive supplementary primary education. All recruits learn a stylized version of Pakistan’s history, and they are encouraged to “take pride in the fact that they are Muslims and part of a broader world community” (38; see also Schofield 2011).
Enlisted personnel train at a regimental center for 36 weeks, which is often a self-contained community, with its own hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and housing. Jawans remain with their original regiment for much of their military career (typically eighteen years). Like most militaries, the Pakistan Army affords enlisted personnel numerous educational opportunities throughout their time in the service, and some enlisted men will eventually become noncommissioned officers (NCOs) or junior commissioned officers (JCOs). The latter serve as an important link between the enlisted personnel and the officers, who are often better educated and of higher socioeconomic status and who are increasingly likely to have urban roots (Fair 2012).
In contrast to the various regimental centers that serve to train jawans, the principal institution for training officers is the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) at Kakul, in the town of Abbottabad in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province—made famous when bin Laden was discovered in a safe house a short distance from the PMA. Admission to the PMA is very competitive. The Pakistan Army does not release public information about the number of applicants it receives, and scholarly estimates vary. Fair and Nawaz (2011) report that each year some 3,000 candidates apply for about 320 cadet places in each of two regular long courses at the PMA. Schofield (2011), however, claims that between 45,000 and 50,000 apply each year, of which the PMA accepts only 1,000.15 Per her interview data, the PMA admits roughly 400 cadets for each of the two long courses, which begin in spring and fall. A few hundred others enter the PMA’s one-year Technical Graduate Course as well as a six-month course that trains officers for the medical corps, education corps, judge advocate generals, and veterinarians, among other specialized fields. Personal biographical accounts of officers coming from the PMA (or, prior to Partition, Sandhurst or the Indian Military Academy) stress that they were called gentlemen cadets, which emphasizes that the entire program at the PMA stresses character development and the production of well-rounded, polished officers (ibid.).
The criteria for officer candidates are not particularly onerous. Aspirants must be single, hold at least an intermediate degree (i.e., 12 years of schooling), and be between 17 and 22 years of age. They must also obtain a score of at least 50 percent in their matriculation (tenth grade) or Fine Arts (FA), which one receives upon successfully completing twelfth grade exams (Pakistan Army n.d.). Applicants undergo initial testing and screening at eight regional selection and recruitment centers across the country, located at Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Multan (in the province of the Punjab); Hyderabad and Karachi (in the province of Sindh); Quetta (in the province of Balochistan); Peshawar (in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province); and Gilgit (in the administrative area of Gilgit-Baltistan, previously known, with Pakistani Kashmir, as the Northern Areas). Those who meet the basic criteria next take an intelligence exam on which they must score at least 50 percent. (At various times, the Pakistan Army has relaxed standards for applicants from Sindh and Balochistan, provinces in which the army has had difficulty recruiting and in which educational standards are low.) If they score satisfactorily on the written exam, candidates undergo physical and medical tests and a preliminary interview at the recruitment centers (Pakistan Army n.d.).
Successful candidates continue on to screening at the Inter-Services/General Headquarters Selection and Review Board in Kohat or at satellite centers in Gujranwala (Punjab), Malir (Sindh), or Quetta (Balochistan). The screening process is arduous and includes four days of observation and testing to assess recruits’ intelligence, psychological profile, leadership potential, and physical fitness. Successful candidates are then recommended for the PMA. Each year, Army General Headquarters determine the precise number of slots for the PMA using regimental reports of shortfalls. Officer selection is generally based on merit, with the exception of episodic efforts to enhance the prospects of cadets from provinces such as Sindh and Balochistan, which are considerably underrepresented in the officer corps (Fair and Nawaz 2011; Pakistan Army n.d.).
Gentlemen cadets come from all over the country as well as from every socioeconomic class. (Analysts of the Pakistan Army speculate, in the absence of hard evidence, that PMA cadets no longer come primarily from the upper middle class, as was once the case.) Some recruits may speak English well, while others have little English proficiency. The PMA aims to “bring them all up to the same cultural level” (Schofield 2011, 77). Apart from learning how to salute and march, PMA recruits—like their enlisted counterparts—are taught how to use a flush toilet, sit on the commode, care for their uniforms, perform physical exercise, and even use the proper dining etiquette (ibid.). After graduating from the two-year program, cadets are commissioned with the rank of second lieutenant (Fair and Nawaz 2011). Notably, the current recruitment procedures do not appear to differ markedly from those in the past, according to the 1976 account of Lt. Gen. Attiqur Rahman, a noted army historian who served as the martial law administrator of West Pakistan during Gen. Yahya Khan’s military regime.16
The Pakistan Army, like other militaries, uses its selection process and criteria, its various educational and training institutions and opportunities, and regular evaluation for promotion to ensure cohesion and adherence to standards across the ranks of the force. South Asian Foreign Area Officers in the US Army as well as scholars of the Pakistan Army also note that in the Pakistan Army officers are also “judged on their personal behavior to a degree that is uncommon” in western armies.17 Penetration by the military’s values is likely to deepen as the period of service lengthens, in part because a soldier’s professional trajectory depends on the military command’s assessments of his performance. The Pakistan Army fosters an institutional body of knowledge by commissioning studies at the Command and Staff College, the National Defense University (previously National Defense College), and other training centers and through a massive body of military publications published either by the General Headquarters or through Inter-Services Public Relations, a military organization headed by a major general.
Methods and Sources of This Study
To illuminate the lineaments of the Pakistan Army’s ostensible strategic culture, I explore six decades of the Pakistan Army’s security discourse, through which the army articulates external dangers and “carve[s] out and maintain[s] a particular version of national identity for the state” (Nizamani 2000, 11). A fundamental assumption of this project is that these writings comprise an evolving discourse rather than a collection of prescriptions, descriptions, and assessments offered by disconnected authors at particular times. These essays reflect “expressions of particular interests and justifiers of a distinct regime of practices or truth” (ibid.). In this work, I use Nizamani’s concept of discourse analysis, which he employed to understand the elite rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan. Nizamani’s notion of discourse draws on Foucault’s earlier contention that “each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to disti
nguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true” (12). In Pakistan, as I have already discussed and will continue to demonstrate throughout this volume, the army has a privileged place in defining truth, determining how truth is described, and regulating who gets to articulate it. For most of Pakistan’s existence as an independent state, the Pakistan Army has exercised its power to produce truth from its privileged position as the supreme manager of the state’s affairs.
One of the ways the army has produced truth has been by exercising control over knowledge and information and developing, nurturing, and policing epistemic communities. Nizamani (2000), to explain the elite consensus in Pakistan and India on their nuclear weapons program, adopts this concept of epistemic communities from the work of Peter M. Haas (1992) and describes them as essentially networks of persons who are granted expertise on particular issues and who share fundamental worldviews or epistemes. As Haas notes, whereas some scholars associate “epistemic communities” with “scientific communities” in particular, in his formulation, they “need not be made up of scientists or of professionals applying the same methodology” (3). His conceptualization of epistemic community resembles Fleck’s (1979) “thought collective” or a “sociological group with a common style of thinking” (3). Haas describes a number of other characteristics of epistemic communities: they share ways of knowing and patterns of reasoning and espouse a common “policy project drawing on shared values, shared causal beliefs, and the use of shared knowledge” (ibid.). Nizamani expands this concept of epistemic communities to include public intellectuals, media personalities, and retired and serving military and civilian personnel, who advance state preferences for nuclear weapons and build consensus for them among the citizens of the states of India and Pakistan.
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