Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  In 1879, the Eden Commission “noted that the Punjab was ‘the home of the most martial races of India’ ” and “ ‘the nursery’ of the best soldiers” (Rizvi 2000a, 38), and by 1909 the Government of India, reflecting on 50 years of Crown rule after the rebellion, could boast that the “proportion of soldiers drawn from unwar-like races has been greatly reduced while the proportion of Goorkha [sic] regiments and of soldiers from the martial races of northern India has been increased” (Peers 2008, 38). For the British, the concept of martial races retained its validity throughout their tenure in South Asia: during both World War I and World War II, Punjabi Muslims were the largest population within the Indian Army.

  The composition of the Indian Army was also shaped by several important supply-side considerations stemming from the socioeconomic standing and the preferences of potential recruits. At the time the British entered the region, the Punjab peasantry was in difficult economic straits. Army service afforded peasants opportunities to augment family income and insulate themselves from the vicissitudes of a dependence on agriculture. Many of these recruits came from the Salt Range (Potwar, also spelled Potohar) regions of northern Punjab (e.g., the districts of Jhelum, Rawalpindi, and Attock) and areas adjoining the NWFP (Rizvi 2000a). The British encouraged peasant interest by granting recruits agricultural land in the Punjab as a reward for military service. When, in 1885, the British Indian government began developing a network of canals to irrigate the Punjab, these lands became even more productive and thus more attractive allurements into army service. This practice continued until independence, by which time nine Canal Colonies had been built on previously nonarable land. The British allotted plots within the Canal Colonies, especially to officers and former enlisted men, as rewards for service to the Raj. (Substantial land grants, for example, were made to World War I veterans.) Land grants were also made for purposes of breeding horses, camels, and other animals needed by the army. This practice made the army an extremely attractive profession for Punjabi peasants seeking to improve their socioeconomic standing (Rizvi 2000a).

  During World War I, the British were compelled by the need for men to attempt to extend recruitment opportunities to nonmartial races; however, they largely failed to increase the diversity of their recruitment pool even though the areas populated by nonmartial races comprised some 70 percent of the empire’s territory. Bengal, for example, which had nearly 45 million inhabitants, produced only 7,117 combat recruits. The Punjab, with a total population of only 20 million, yielded 349,689 recruits. In the Punjab, 1 of every 28 men was mobilized; in the rest of British India, only 1 of every 150 men was mobilized. In the late 1920s, the Punjab, the NWFP, and Nepal provided 84 percent of all troops in the British Indian Army. On average, the Central Provinces, Bihar, and Orissa provided only 500 troops, and Bengal and Assam produced none (Rizvi 2000a).

  The British recruitment experience during World War II was similar: the Punjab and the NWFP produced 712,952 of India’s 2,047,430 total recruits. In contrast, Bengal produced a mere 171,252 men. More than 60,000 Bengalis were recruited to pioneer (i.e., construction) units, but no regular Bengali Muslim unit was formed. Despite all efforts to effect change, the Punjab and the NWFP continued to dominate army recruitment until Pakistan’s independence in 1947 (Rizvi 2000b). Given that the Japanese actually reached the Bengal border, the dearth of recruitment from that region is curious given the imminent nature of the threat.

  This created a number of problems for the post-independence army. Pakistan’s military was dominated by Punjabis and Pakhtuns from West Pakistan, while predominantly Bengali East Pakistan had virtually no representation in the military. In fact, East Pakistanis constituted less than 1 percent of the total strength of Pakistan’s armed forces, a fact that exacerbated mounting ethnic and political tensions between Bengali East Pakistan and Punjabi- and Pakhtun-dominated West Pakistan. Nor was the army representative of the West itself: the Punjab and the NWFP continued to produce the majority of officers and cadres, while Sindh and Balochistan remained massively underrepresented. The districts of Kohat, Peshawar, Campbellpur (now Attock), Rawalpindi, Jhelum, and Gujarat were the main recruiting areas for the Pakistan Army, with nearly every second family having some kind of link to the military (Cohen 1984; Rizvi 2000, 2000b).

  Liaquat Ali Khan, troubled by the extreme imbalance in recruitment, appointed a committee to investigate why the army had so few East Pakistanis (Bengalis) and to find ways of increasing its representativeness. Although neither the report nor its recommendations were made public, the army did take a number of steps to redress the situation. Most notably, it raised two battalions of a new East Bengal Regiment. Some of these recruits came from the pioneer units or were Muslims who had served in the Bihar Regiment of the pre-partition Indian Army, but others were junior commissioned officers from the Punjab Regiment. As Bengalis became available for service, the Punjabis were replaced. These regiments were unique in that they were exclusively Bengali. (No other regiments were made up of a single ethnic group.) In 1968–1969, the Army raised 10 more exclusively Bengali battalions and opened recruitment for all branches of the Pakistan military to East Pakistanis (Cohen 1984; Rizvi 2000b).

  In 1959, General Ayub Khan reduced the physical standards for recruitment into the Army for East Pakistanis (but not West Pakistanis) in hopes of encouraging them to join the armed forces. Although the number of Bengalis serving in the army (as well as the air force and navy) did increase, Bengalis did not achieve a level of representation proportionate to their population distribution (nearly 50 percent of Pakistan’s population).

  The army resisted further expansion of Bengali representation, at least in part because many within army leadership harbored “considerable distaste for the quality of Bengali officers and other ranks” (Cohen 1984, 43). The maltreatment of Bengalis and their lack of representation within the military were festering problems that ultimately undermined the unity of Pakistan. Bengali officers and other ranks formed the backbone of the Bengali resistance during the civil war of 1971. Despite clear warnings that its policy of discriminating against Bengalis endangered the nation, the Pakistan Army remained ambivalent about “whether [Bengalis] should be taken into full partnership or completely eliminated” (ibid.).

  The army’s anti-Bengali preferences are well-known, but the lack of Bengalis in the army was not entirely driven by demand-side constraints (i.e., was not entirely the result of the army’s official policies). Pakhtun tribesmen enthusiastically joined the army, as did others from West Pakistan. With the supply of willing recruits dwarfing the demand (for both officers and jawans), the army had its choice of candidates. Bengalis, who were often physically smaller (or least assumed to be by those in West Pakistan), could not compete with groups presumed to have greater martial prowess. If Pakistan had faced a shortage of recruits, perhaps the army and the other services would have been more interested in rethinking their facile assumptions about the connections between ethnicity and military competence. Furthermore, it is not clear whether Bengalis ever had the same level of interest in the military as those in West Pakistan. Certainly, the number of applications received from East Pakistan was a full order of magnitude smaller than those from West Pakistan (Rizvi 2000b).

  Because the army ran the country for much of Pakistan’s pre-civil war existence, the exclusion of Bengalis, who composed a majority of the population, was particularly problematic: arguably, the compulsion to have a nationally representative army is stronger when that army directly or indirectly governs a state. Thus, until 1971 the lack of representation of Bengalis was a preeminent concern. But similar doubts about the martial qualities of the Baloch and Sindhis have been in circulation since 1947. Both Balochistan and Sindh have hosted ethno-nationalist insurgencies of varying degrees of severity. In each case, Pakistan (under civilian and military leadership) pursued military responses, often using excessive force.

  The loss of Bangladesh, the persistent complaints about Punjabi domination
, and the underrepresentation of Sindhis and Baloch have occasioned concerns about the further disintegration of Pakistan (see Harrison 1980, 2009). Motivated by such concerns as well as by the need to become truly representative, the army has tried to expand the numbers of Baloch and Sindhis within its ranks, with modest success (Fair and Nawaz 2011).

  Building a Modern Army

  The Pakistan Army has grown steadily since 1947. During the 1950s, it received considerable assistance from Britain and the United States, with which it was variously allied through the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact—subsequently renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). This assistance enabled Pakistan to increase the size of the army, to expand the quantity and quality of its inventory, and to enlarge its cantonments to meet the growing Indian threat.18 While the 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times for US–Pakistan ties, Pakistan again became closely allied with the United States in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan argued that US military assistance was required to expand the Pakistan Army, ostensibly because doing so would enable Pakistan to better counter the emerging Soviet threat, even though Pakistan sought this assistance to strengthen its position vis-à-vis India. Consequently, with US military and economic assistance, by 1989, the Pakistan Army had grown to nearly 450,000 and had become increasingly reliant upon US weapon systems.

  Pakistan had to modify the army’s organizational structure to keep step with its expanding size. At independence, all of the army’s divisions were commanded directly from General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. As the army continued to grow and as it fought (and lost) several wars with India (in 1947, 1965, and 1971), its leadership realized the need to add additional corps headquarters. The first addition was I Corps (now located in Mangla), formed in 1957. The IV Corps (in Lahore) was formed in 1965. Several corps headquarters (II, V, X, and XI) were added in the 1970s, and several more (XII, XXX, and XXXI) were added during the 1980s. The current Pakistan Army is composed of nine corps and the Army Strategic Forces Command, created in 1999 to exercise control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and is thus treated as an equivalent to a corps command and has an end strength of 555,000 active-duty personnel (International Institute for Strategic Studies 2012). Table 3.1 lists each corps headquarters, its location, and the date on which it was founded.

  Table 3.1 Corps and Locations

  Corps

  Headquarters

  Date Formed

  I

  Mangla (Kashmir)

  1957 (originally in Abbott abad)

  II

  Multan (Punjab)

  1971

  IV

  Lahore (Punjab)

  1965

  V

  Karachi (Sindh)

  1975

  X

  Rawalpindi (Punjab)

  1974

  XI

  Peshawar (NWFP)

  1975

  XII

  Quett a (Balochistan)

  1984/1985

  XXX

  Gujranwala (Punjab)

  1986/1987

  XXXI

  Bahalwpur (Punjab)

  1986/1987

  Sources: Cloughley 2002; GlobalSecurity.org.

  Implications for the Pakistan Army’s Strategic Culture

  The Pakistan Army that emerged in 1947 was substantially less well organized than was the Indian Army. It was plagued by an acute officer shortage, incomplete units, and a debilitating scarcity of Muslim officers with staff experience. This motivated the army to seek outside help to rebuild its military. The breakdown in trust that resulted from the contentious division of personnel and fixed and moveable assets, the gruesome communal violence that marred the cleavage of the new states, and the war of 1947–1948 all contributed to the emergence of an enduring Indian–Pakistani security competition that persists to this day.

  As I will show in subsequent chapters, the way the army came into being continues to shape the way it sees itself and, equally important, India—which remains the perfidious foe seeking to undermine Pakistan’s security, if not existence. The two-nation theory, which was the founding logic of independent Pakistan, remains one of the most important political concepts in Pakistan generally and is steadfastly defended by the army. This has imbued the army with an obligation to defend and instrumentalize Islam and to manage internal and security concerns.

  While Partition no doubt has shaped the way Indians view Pakistan, with fewer assets and more problems, Pakistan bore the brunt of the crisis. India inherited a largely intact government structure with a national political party and regional (e.g., ethnic, caste, linguistic) groups that could aggregate interests. In contrast, British colonial parliamentary processes had not come to full maturity in the areas that became Pakistan due to the uneven “geography of early colonial parliamentarism” and the different schedules according to which different territories of the Raj were allowed to democratize (Jaffrelot 2002b, 253).19 Pakistan was “moth-eaten,” with two wings separated by the expanse of hostile India. Its government structure had to be built on the heterogeneous foundations of the provincial governments, which “had been suddenly deprived of their decision-making centre, Delhi, from which they had always taken their lead” (255). As Lord Mountbatten said of the administrative arrangements for the new states: “Administratively, it is the difference between putting up a permanent building, a nissen hut or a tent. As far as Pakistan is concerned we are putting up a tent. We can do no more” (1958, 70).

  Pakistan felt cheated by Partition, from the Gurdaspur award to India’s forceful annexation of Junagadh and Hyderabad and the ultimate injury of being denied Kashmir. For India and the Congress party, Partition was undesirable and even avoidable, but once it had occurred the process was complete. India was essentially a territorially satisfied state. For Pakistan, Partition is unfinished business (Tellis 1997). The Pakistan Army has never ceased trying to seize Kashmir, nor has it ever been able to fathom the notion of normalization with India. Neither the army nor the country’s security managers have ever been able to see the events of Partition as Pakistan’s past; rather, Partition permeates the present and casts a long shadow over the future.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Army’s Defense of Pakistan’s “Ideological Frontiers”

  Because the Pakistan Army sees itself as securing Pakistan’s ideological frontiers, Islam is an enduring feature of the army’s strategic culture. However, the prominence of Islam within this organization disquiets policymakers, analysts, and scholars in the United States, Europe, and increasingly Pakistan.1 Unfortunately, this speculation about the purported Islamization of the Pakistan Army rarely involves defining what the authors mean by Islamization.2 This term is often associated with the potential for army personnel to support Islamist terrorism in the region and beyond as well as with deepening anti-Americanism within the army (Paris 2010). These apprehensions about the Pakistan Army take several forms. First, because it has relied on Islamists and Islamist militants to prosecute its interests in India and Afghanistan since 1947 and 1960, respectively (Haqqani 2005; Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002), some analysts and policymakers speculate that elements within the army may sympathize deeply with the worldview of its past and current clients.3 Others suggest that a radical, rogue Islamist column may split off from the army. Such a rogue group, operating beyond the control of the army and intelligence agencies such as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, Military Intelligence, and the Intelligence Bureau, might work to undermine the state or might support Islamist militancy (Roach 2013; Stratfor 2007). Third, some analysts fear that Islamist elements within the Pakistan Army may provide terrorists with nuclear materials, know-how, or perhaps even operational nuclear weapons (see, e.g., Grare 2006; Riedel 2011, 2012).4 Thus, the mention of Pakistan in US—and, increasingly, Pakistani—policy discourse conjures up the horrific and intertwined specters of nuclear proliferation and international terrorism.

  In this chapter, I posit t
hat the fears of Islamization in the Pakistan Army are both under- and overstated. They are understated insofar as they posit that the Islamization of the army began in earnest only with Gen. Zia ul Haq’s coup and the anti-Soviet jihad Afghanistan. The Pakistan Army was born an ideological army that specifically espoused Islam as its corporate ideology. Inheriting the British practice of institutionalizing religion (as well as ethnicity) to serve corporate goals, the Pakistan Army quickly began to revise the traditions it inherited from the British Army to reflect the Islamic identity of the new state. Conventional wisdom about the Islamization of the army attributes a relative novelty to the phenomenon and thus underestimates its longevity. Yet these fears of the Pakistan Army and its alleged Islamization also overstate the problem because they lack an understanding of the reasons for which the army has embraced the concept of an ideological military, with Islam as the basis for that ideology. Moreover, these fears of Islamization derive from a widespread tendency to assume that deepening commitments to political Islam (Islamism) or increasing personal piety or even conservatism is coincident with a greater propensity to support Islamist militancy in Pakistan (Ahmed 2007).

  In this chapter, I first delineate what Pakistanis typically mean when they refer to the ideology of Pakistan, which has been an elemental part of Pakistani identity from the state’s earliest days. This ideology, which draws on the two-nation theory and on Islam as the founding logic of the Pakistani state, predates the emergence of Pakistan itself. Next, I detail the ways the Pakistan Army has championed Islamism as the ideology of Pakistan, beginning with the tenure of its first chief, Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan, who went on to seize power in a bloodless coup in 1958. Third, I elaborate the ways the army has Islamized. Finally, drawing upon some six decades of army publications and officer memoirs, I explicate the specific ways the Pakistan Army instrumentalizes the ideology of Pakistan to unify the polity, to motivate the Pakistani people to support unending praetorianism and belligerence, and to bolster the troops’ morale. I conclude with a discussion of some of the implications of the army’s enduring espousal of Islam for the army itself as well as for regional and international security.