Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  Ahmad (1963) analyzed several other battles in which the early Muslims took part and derived four lessons. First, in each battle, the Muslim contingent was inferior in strength, ill equipped, and poorly trained. Nonetheless, despite early setbacks and obvious disadvantages, in each case they won “due … to their moral qualities” (11). Second, each battle ended in their favor not simply because they defeated the enemy but because they destroyed the enemy’s will to fight. In other words, “It is … the moral and not the physical condition of a force which is the decisive factor in war” (ibid.). Third, the Muslim combatants entered into each battle fully aware that they were outmatched. They came out onto the battlefield “only to defend the intrinsic values of their faith. They entered every battle completely sobre [sic] and cool. And to the end, even under the most adverse conditions, they continued to fight unruffled and with the same cool determination” (12). Fourth, he concludes that “the main-stay of the morale of these Muslims was … the identification of life with and its subordination to the ideal: a fundamental of the faith. An army equipped with this faith will always dominate the adversary” (13).

  Similar lessons from Islam’s martial history are offered throughout Pakistan’s defense literature. In 1990, Brig. Ashfaq Ahmad examined Pakistan’s geopolitical realities and its enormous security burdens: over 1,500 miles of border to defend against a “treacherous and numerically superior adversary while in the west the threat of a super power, having confluence of interests with India, continues to linger and weigh on the minds of our planners … [the] rapidly deteriorating political situation in Occupied Kashmir has further complicated and compounded the problem and increased the threat” (105). Ahmad argues that the only way to manage the threat posed by these more powerful enemies is to draw inspiration from Islam. Thus, “our limited numbers will definitely beat the heavy odds against them … more than once, in the Holy Quran … fully armed with the strength of character, a Muslim will prove superior to ten non-Muslims” (ibid.).

  Haq (1991) devotes an entire chapter, titled “Quality vs. Quantity in the Muslim Military Campaigns,” to this subject. He believes that the Quran demonstrates repeatedly that high-quality Muslim soldiers can defeat a numerically dominant foe since “no power on earth can subdue the valour of the Mujahidin” (43). A later chapter titled “Combat Motivation” instructs his readership in how Muslims use Islam to compensate for lack of numbers, mobilizing numerous Quranic verses to show that “the inferiority in numbers or weapons can be made up by superior moral stamina, patience and trust in Allah” (46).

  It is worth noting that The Pakistan Army Green Book 1990: Year of the Junior Leader is festooned with Quranic verses extolling the mujahideen, encouraging readers to be ready for war, and advising them in conduct on the battlefield and the importance of prayer and perseverance, among other themes. It contains numerous essays on “Islamic Concepts of Leadership” (see, e.g., Ahmad 1990; G.M. Malik 1990; A.R. Malik 1990; Sarfraz 1990). Brig. Muhammad Sarfraz (1990), for instance, explains that once a man enters the army “he can begin to understand that his regard for his uniform must be a far different thing from what he felt about his civilian dress, since it is identified with the dignity of ‘soldier of Islam’. … [The] edifice of our leadership must be built upon the true ideals of our religion” (23). Like numerous similar essays, Sarfraz’s essay seeks to situate the Pakistani soldier within the historical and cultural contexts of the great soldiers of Islam.

  Mobilization of Islam and early Islamic military history bolsters the confidence of the Pakistani fighter by reassuring him that, as a Muslim, he is an innately superior fighter. Pakistan’s defense literature, however, also mobilizes Islamic martial history to denigrate the enemies of Islam, be they kufar (infidels) or muratid (apostates). There are several narrative means of achieving this, one of which is to denigrate the legitimacy of India’s cause. For example, Iqbal (1966) ascribes the failure of the Hindus in the 1965 war to the fact that the Indians lacked a legitimate cause. For this reason, nothing could persuade the Indian soldier of the need to endure “the hardships of battle, the pangs of hunger and thirst, the merciless beating of hostile elemental fury and the extreme rigours and suffering, trials and tribulations and death and decay that had started with it” (8).

  Another way of denigrating the enemy is to reduce the diverse Indian Army to a solely Hindu force. This is in keeping with the line that Pakistan’s army has drawn between the civilizations of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan and the frequent resort to characterizing the conflict with India as jihad. Perhaps one of the most important examples of such exposition was written by Brig. Javed Hassan (1990). Hassan, who would retire as a lieutenant general, published India: A Study in Profile while at the Faculty of Research and Doctrinal Studies (FORAD) at the Command and Staff College in Quetta. It is now required reading at the National Defense University as well (National Defense University, n.d.). Among Hassan’s other derogatory remarks (181–214), he argues that India is not a nation, characterizes its past as having a “total absence of any popular resistance against foreign domination and rule” (49), describes the Indians as “less Warlike” than Pakistanis (52), and attributes India’s military failures to “racial” shortcomings (53).

  While most of the military writers proffering varied accounts of Islamic military history focus on unexpected victories in the face of near certain defeat, other writers present a less optimistic set of lessons. Haq (1991) warns that being Muslim itself is not enough to ensure victory against a more numerous, kafir foe: ultimately god gives victory only to good Muslims. To drive home this point he contends that there have been no victorious “Muslim armies in the 20th century,” a failure he explains by arguing that “the neglect of faith and abandonment of Jihad had led to poor ethics, the creation of an unjust social order, corruption and cultivation of bad habits … If we want to survive, we must understand the conduct of war in Islam” (51). Needless to say, he also devotes an entire subsection to jihad, titled “Motivation for War: The Doctrine of Jihad,” which reinforces the previous points about the justness of Pakistan’s military cause.

  Fourth, the Pakistan Army and the intelligence agency it controls (the ISI) have relied on Islam to legitimize their actions in Afghanistan since the late 1950s, when they introduced JI into the country. Many anti-Soviet commanders—such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masood, and Maulvi Mohammad Yunus Khalis—had JI backgrounds. After the Soviet withdrawal, as Afghanistan succumbed to internecine warfare, Pakistan supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (an Islamist Pakhtun) in the hope that he could pacify Afghanistan and ensure it remained aligned with Pakistan. After Hekmatyar repeatedly demonstrated to Army General Headquarters and the ISI that he could not do so, Pakistan began patronizing the Taliban, a Deobandi group (Haqqani 2005). Pakistan has also relied on a bevy of Sunni Islamist militant groups to advance its interests in Indian-administered Kashmir and throughout India. Many of these groups, which come from Ahl-e-Hadith, JI, and Deobandi backgrounds, originated in the anti-Soviet jihad and were later redeployed to India. After 1990, these Islamist militant groups, operating at Pakistan’s behest, worked to undermine groups like the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, an anti-India group that coalesced around ethnic Kashmiri identity as opposed to Islam (Evans 2000; Jamal 2009).

  Not all versions of Islam are treated equally in the history of the military. The secondary literature on the army suggests that the military patronized different sectarian traditions at different times, to the discomfort of Shia, Ahmediyas, Sufis, and non-Muslim minorities (Abou Zahab 2002; Nasr 2002). But the military professional publications and even officer memoirs very rarely discuss sectarian-specific issues. In fact, many writers such as Ayub abjure sectarian cleavages and are wary of the ritualization of Islam in the armed forces. In 1992, Lt. Gen. Jehangir Karamat (who eventually became the chief of army staff during Nawaz Sharif’s second term) explained in The Pakistan Army Green Book 1992: Year of the Senior Field Commander that “the thrust in o
ur military culture should be towards development of a code of ethics rather than overemphasis on rituals. This code of ethics should be based on our faith in Allah and the senior leader should be seen as a God-fearing person who can be relied upon for fair play and justice … The senior commander must seek to create a command environment in which obsession with rituals or religions does not become a refuge for incompetence” (12).

  Implications

  Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the United States, the Pakistan Army’s embrace of Islam as Pakistan’s ideology, and of its own role of defending both ideological and territorial frontiers, is not solely the product of the Zia regime or of the US- and Pakistan-led jihad in Afghanistan. In fact, Pakistan and the army embraced these concepts far earlier. Given the numerous references to jihad and Islamic warfare in Pakistan’s professional journals, it would be easy for an untrained reader to assume that the Pakistan Army is a jihadi army. And in fact, this reading is encouraged by Pakistan’s long-standing reliance on Islamist militancy as a tool of foreign policies and its insistence that these militants are mujahideen. A more nuanced reading suggests that the army employs Islam for numerous reasons, including forging national unity across ethnic and sectarian cleavages, pushing the public to support sustained praetorianism and war with India, and motivating the troops by boosting morale and denigrating their foe as perfidious, effete Hindus.

  The story, however, does not and cannot end there. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the army has sustained steady infiltration by Islamist militants. Military elites may well have a complex understanding of the multiple purposes Islam serves, but it is far from clear how ordinary officers, much less the enlisted ranks, interpret these incessant references to Islamism, jihad, and perpetual enmity with India, especially when they coexist with some six decades of explicit mobilization of Islamist militants under the banner of Islam.

  CHAPTER 5

  Pakistan’s Quest for Strategic Depth

  An enduring component of the Pakistan Army’s strategic behavior has been its belief that it requires strategic depth in Afghanistan. Despite the ubiquity of the term in the Pakistani national security discourse, there is considerable debate about what it actually means and, more recently, about whether or not the concept retains salience for Pakistan. Many scholars date Pakistan’s pursuit of strategic depth to the tenure of Zia ul Haq, during which Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia backed Islamist guerillas—the so-called mujahideen—against the Soviets. Olivier Roy (2004), for example, describes strategic depth as a “geo-strategic perspective, designed at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with the aim of asserting the regional influence of Pakistan by establishing a kind of control on Afghanistan through a fundamentalist, Pakhtun-dominated movement” (149). Dietrich Reetz (1993), a prominent European scholar of Islam in South Asia, gives a slightly different account, dating Pakistan’s pursuit of strategic depth to the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. He agrees, however, that “it was Zia who believed that the ‘strategic depth’ his country needed in its confrontation with India was best achieved by building an Islamic block [sic] between the Arabia Sea and the Urals” (30). Marvin Weinbaum (1991) also suggests that Pakistan’s interest in strategic depth dates to the Afghan war, after which, he writes, “Zia felt that by assuming the position of a front-line state, Pakistan had won the right to a regime of its choice in Kabul” (499). In contrast, Rasul Bakhsh Rais (2008), a well-regarded Pakistani political scientist at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences and writer for such military publications as Hilal, contends that the policy was not implemented until after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, when Pakistan decided to pursue “a policy of ‘strategic depth,’ meaning that Islamabad would contest the influence of non-friendly states in Afghanistan by retaining some degree of influence” (18).1

  In addition to the disagreement over when Pakistan began its quest for strategic depth, analysts present different accounts of what Pakistan has tried to achieve through its pursuit of it. Some describe strategic depth as a geographical concept, even though few Pakistani security managers have advocated thinking of Afghanistan in those terms—that is, as a physical space in which Pakistan could safely disperse its personnel and assets during a war with India. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, army chief during Benazir Bhutto’s first term as prime minister (1988–1991), is the only member of the Pakistani strategic elite to have defined strategic depth in this way (Hussain 2005). Because Beg’s concept of territorial depth is anomalous, it should be considered as distinct from the more common understandings of strategic depth that have dominated Pakistani military thinking. The more common understanding of strategic depth requires the cultivation of a “friendly regime, expectedly an Islamist one, in Kabul that would enable Pakistan to avoid traditional insecurity or at least neutralize its western tribal borderlands and avoid future Afghan governments with strong links to New Delhi”; the former emphasizes reducing Pakistan’s vulnerability to India’s presumably “superior military forces” via “new military assets and capabilities” (Weinbaum 1991, 498–499).

  One of the reasons why the army’s concept of strategic depth is so poorly understood in the scholarly literature is that the Pakistan Army itself has adopted different definitions of the goal (Beg’s territorial strategic depth versus the more typical political strategic depth) and how best to achieve the goal in Afghanistan (e.g., direct intervention, use of proxies, cultivate influence). In this chapter I explain what strategic depth has meant for the army at different points in time and how the army has sought to attain it. While some scholarship maintains that strategic depth is a relatively new addition to the army’s evolving inventory of strategic culture components, I agree with Haqqani (2005) that the Pakistan Army’s appreciation for strategic depth and concomitant compulsion to develop it is a colonial legacy. There is a high degree of continuity between what Pakistan has sought to do since 1947 and British efforts to conceptualize and manage the various threats coming from the north of the empire. This strategic legacy has shaped Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan but also its policies with respect to its own expansive frontier regions: those areas of Balochistan that abut Iran and Afghanistan, as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Provinces, or NWFP), and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan.2

  Because Pakistan’s army inherited much of the British Raj’s strategic appraisal of the threats from the western frontier, in this chapter, I first recount Britain’s efforts to manage its frontier and the areas beyond in the context of the competition between imperial Britain and, sequentially, Tsarist Russia (1721–1917), post-Revolutionary Russia (1917–1922), and the Soviet Union (from 1921)—usually given the sobriquet The Great Game (Fromkin 1980; McMahon 1993). Next I enumerate the threats inherited by the independent Pakistani state. As I will show in this chapter, the new state of Pakistan, with only a fraction of the empire’s resources, faced a threat environment that was in many ways more hostile than that confronted by its colonial predecessor. For the nascent Pakistan Army the compulsions of strategic depth were more or less continuous with those of the Raj, but its resources were a fraction of those possessed by the Raj to manage the same challenges. Subsequently I exposit how Pakistan began its efforts to acquire strategic depth, primarily through manipulating internal affairs in Afghanistan. I then focus upon the complementary internal policies that Pakistan pursued with respect to its frontier populations and the role of the army therein. I conclude this chapter with a reflection on what this enduring feature of Pakistan’s strategic culture means for future Pakistani behavior toward Afghanistan.

  British Management of the Frontier: The Great Game

  The British began to develop the governance and security architecture of the frontier areas (now Balochistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or KP) in the 1830s, and at the time of independence this architecture was still evolv
ing (Tripodi 2011, 9). Over the course of some 117 years, British policy changed in response to prevailing strategic concerns (within both Europe and the wider region) and domestic political developments. For much of this period, British security managers focused on Russia’s purportedly inexorable expansionism. In 1759, the British Indian and Russian territories were separated by some 4,000 miles. By 1885, the gap had closed to a mere 400 miles (ibid.). It was this imperial rivalry (in the form of the Anglo-Afghan wars) that drew Afghanistan into the international state system (Rubin 2002).

  As the Russian and British empires vied for dominance in Central Asia, the areas now known as Afghanistan, Iran, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then known as the NWFP) became sites of contestation and the spaces in which the British sought to develop their concept of strategic depth. Of particular interest were the strategic passes of Balochistan and the Hindu Kush, both of which had long afforded invaders access to the South Asian subcontinent. The British understood that the support or even noninterference of the frontier populations would benefit their interests while their hostility could prove injurious. Thus, these sparsely populated frontier areas became the foci of British efforts to deter an armed invasion of British India via Afghanistan (Hussain 2005; Tripodi 2011). The emphasis on the frontier areas was even greater once the British concluded that Persia was unsuitable as an ally against Russia.3