Pakistan Army Has Cultivated The Image Of Pakistan As An International Jihadi Tourist Resort
By Mohammed Hanif
June 2011
What is the
last thing you say to your best general when ordering him to conduct a
do-or-die mission? A prayer maybe, if you are religiously inclined. A short
lecture underlining the importance of the mission if you want to keep it
business-like. Or maybe you just say ‘good luck,’ accompanied by a clicking of
the heels and a final salute.
On the
night of July 5, 1977 as Operation Fair Play, meant to topple Z.A. Bhutto’s
elected government, was about to commence, the then army chief General
Zia-ul-Haq took his right-hand man and the Corps Commander of 10th Corps, Lt
General Faiz Ali Chishti aside and whispered to him: “Murshid, Marwa Na Daina.” (Murshid, don’t get us killed.)
Zia was
indulging in two of his favourite pastimes: spreading paranoia among those
around him, and cosying up to the junior officer he needed to do his dirty
work. General Zia had a talent for that; he could make his juniors feel as if
they were indispensable to the running of this world. And he could make his
seniors feel like gods — as Bhutto found out at the cost of his life.
General
Faiz Ali Chisti’s troops didn’t face any resistance that night; not a single
shot was fired and like all military coups in Pakistan, this was dubbed a
‘bloodless coup.’ There was a lot of bloodshed in the following years though;
in military-managed dungeons at Thori gate, in Bohri Bazar, around Ojhri camp
and finally at Basti Laal Kamal near Bahawalpur, where a plane exploded killing
General Zia and most of the Pakistan army’s high command. General Faiz Ali
Chisti, of course, had nothing to do with this. General Zia rid himself of his
murshid soon after coming to power. Chishti had started to take that term of
endearment — murshid — a bit too seriously, and dictators can’t stand anyone
who thinks of himself as the king-maker.
Thirty-four
years on Pakistan is a society divided at many levels. There’s the beghairat
bunch throwing economic statistics at the ghairat brigade, there are laptop
jihadis and liberal fascists and fair-weather revolutionaries. There are
Balochi freedom fighters up in the mountains and bullet-riddled bodies of young
political activists in obscure Baloch towns. And of course there are the members
of civil society with a permanent glow on their faces, presumably on account of
all their candlelight vigils.
All these
factions may not agree on anything, but there is a consensus on one point:
General Zia’s coup was a bad idea. When was the last time anyone heard Nawaz
Sharif or any of Zia’s numerous protégés thump their chest and say, ‘Yes, we
need another Zia?’ And have ever you seen a Pakistan military commander who
stood on Zia’s grave and vowed to continue his mission?
It might
have taken Pakistanis 34 years to reach this consensus, but we finally agree
that General Zia’s domestic and foreign policies didn’t do us any good. They
brought us automatic weapons, heroin and sectarianism; they also made fortunes
for those who dealt in these commodities. And they turned Pakistan into an
international jihadi tourist resort.
And yet
somehow, without ever publicly owning up to it, the army has continued Zia’s
mission. Successive army commanders, despite their access to vast libraries and
regular strategic reviews, have never actually acknowledged that what they
started during the Zia era was a mistake. Clearly, the late Dr Eqbal Ahmed
wasn’t off the mark when he said that the Pakistan Army is brilliant at
collecting information, but its ability to analyse this information is
non-existent.
Looking
back at the Zia years, the Pakistan army begins to appear like one of those
mythical monsters that chops off its own head, but then grows an identical one
and then proceeds on the only course it knows.
Illustration
by Abro
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In 1999,
two days after the Pakistan army embarked on its Kargil misadventure, Lt
General Mahmud Ahmed gave a ‘crisp and to-the-point’ briefing to a group of
senior army and air force officers. Air Commodore Kaiser Tufail, who attended
the meeting, later wrote in an article that they were told that it was nothing
more than a defensive manoeuvre and the Indian Air Force would not get involved
at any stage. “Come October, we shall walk into Siachen — to mop up the dead
bodies of hundreds of Indians left hungry, out in the cold,” General Mahmud
told the meeting. “Perhaps it was the incredulousness of the whole thing that
led Air Commodore Abid Rao to famously quip, ‘After this operation, it’s going
to be either a court martial or martial law!’ as we walked out of the briefing
room,” Air Commodore Tufail recalled.
If Rao Abid
even contemplated a court martial, he must have lacked leadership qualities
because there was only one way out of this mess; a humiliating military defeat,
a world-class diplomatic disaster, followed by yet another martial law. The man
who should have faced the court martial for Kargil appointed himself the
country’s president for the next decade.
General
Mahmud went on to command ISI, Rao Abid retired as Air Vice Marshal; both went
on to find lucrative work in the army’s vast welfare empire and Kargil was
forgotten as if it was a game of dare between too juveniles who were now beyond
caring about who had actually started the pointless game. The battles were
fierce and some of the men and officers fought so valiantly that two were
awarded Pakistan’s highest military honour, the Nishan-e-Haider.
But nobody
seems to remember the amount of bloodshed during the mission And where were
hundreds of others whose names never made it to any awards list, whose names
were, in fact, not mentioned at all, and whose families consoled themselves by
saying that their loved ones had been martyred while defending our nation’s
borders. Nobody pointed out the basic fact that there was no enemy on those mountains
before some delusional generals decided that they’d like to ‘mop up’ hundreds
of Indian soldiers after starving them to death.
The
architect of this mission, the daring commando, General Musharraf, who didn’t
bother to consult his colleagues before ordering his soldiers to their
slaughter, doesn’t even have the wits to face a sessions court judge in
Pakistan, let alone a court martial. During the entire episode the nation was
told that it wasn’t the regular army that was fighting in Kargil, it was the
‘mujahideen.’ But those who received their loved ones’ flag-draped coffins, and
those that didn’t even get a corpse to mourn, had sent their sons and brothers
to serve in a professional army, not a freelance lashkar.
The
Pakistan army’s biggest folly has been that under Zia it started outsourcing
its basic job — soldiering — to these freelance militants. By blurring the line
between a professional soldier who, at least in theory, is always required to
obey his officer, who in turn is governed by a set of laws, and a mujahid who
can pick and choose his cause and his commander depending on his mood, the
Pakistan army has caused immense confusion among its own ranks. When soldiers
who cry ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ when mocking
an attack are ambushed in real life by enemies who shout ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ even louder, can we blame them if they waver in
their response? When the naval chief Nauman Bashir calls the PNS Mehran
attackers “very well trained,” is he just giving us hollow justification for
what transpired, or admiring the creation of the institution he serves? When
naval officials tell journalists that the attackers were “as good as our own
commandos,” are they giving themselves a back-handed compliment?
In the wake
of the attacks on PNS Mehran in Karachi, some TV channels pulled out an old war
anthem sung by Madam Noor Jehan and started playing it against the backdrop of
images of the young, hopeful faces of the slain officers and service men.
Written by the legendary teacher and creator of children’ Tot Batot stories,
Sufi Tabassum, the anthem carries a stark warning: Aiay puttar hatan tay nahin
vick day, na labh di phir bazaar kuray (You can’t buy these brave sons from
shops, don’t go looking for them in bazaars).
Whereas
Sindhis and Balochis have mostly composed songs of rebellion, Punjabi popular
culture has always lionised its karnails and jarnails and even an odd dhol
sipahi. The Pakistan army has, throughout its history, refused to take advice
from politicians, as well as thinking professionals from its own ranks. It has
never paid heed to historians and sometimes ignored even the esteemed religious
scholars it has used to whip up public sentiment for its dirty wars. But the
biggest strategic mistake it has made is that it has not even taken advice from
late Madam Noor Jehan, one of the army’s most ardent fans in Pakistan’s
history. You can probably ignore Dr Eqbal Ahmed’s advice and survive in this
country, but you ignore Madam at your own peril.
Since the
Pakistan army’s high command is dominated by Punjabi-speaking generals, it is
difficult to fathom what it is about this advice that they don’t understand.
Any which way you translate it, the message is loud and clear — and lyrical:
soldiers are not to be bought and sold like a commodity in shops. “Na awaian
takran maar kuray” (That search is futile, like butting your head against a
brick wall), Noor Jehan goes on to rhapsodise.
For decades
the army has not only been shopping for these private puttars in the bazaars,
it has also set up factories to manufacture them. It has, in fact, raised
entire armies of them. When you raise the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish Mohammed,
Sipah-e-Sahaba, Sipah-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Al-Badar Mujahideen,
others encouraged by the thriving marketplace will go ahead and create outfits
like the Anjuman
Tahuffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabuwwat and Anjuman-Tahuffuz-e-Namoos-e-Aiysha.
And it’s not just Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya they want to liberate; they
want to go back in time and seek revenge for a perceived slur that may or may
not have been cast by someone more than thirteen hundred years ago in a country
far, far away.
As if the
army’s sprawling shopping mall of private puttars in Pakistan wasn’t enough, it
has also actively encouraged the import and export of these commodities and
even branched out into providing rest and recreation facilities for the ones
who want a break. The outsourcing of Pakistan’s military strategy has reached a
point where mujahids have their own mujahids to do their job and, inevitably,
at the end of the supply chain are those poor, faceless teenagers with
explosives strapped to their torsos being despatched to blow up other poor
children.
Two days
before the Americans killed Osama bin Laden and took away his bullet-riddled
body, General Kayani addressed army cadets at Kakul. After declaring a victory
of sorts over the militants, he gave our nation a stark choice. And before the
nation could even begin to weigh the pros and cons, he went ahead and decided
for them: we shall never bargain our honour for prosperity. As things stand,
most people in Pakistan have neither honour, nor prosperity. They will readily
settle for merely being able to survive in their little worlds without being
blown up.
The question
people really want to ask General Kayani is that if he and his army officer
colleagues can have both honour and prosperity why can’t we, the people, have
even a tiny bit of both?
The army
and its advocates in the media often worry about Pakistan’s image, as if we are
not suffering from a long-term serious illness, but a seasonal bout of acne
that just needs better skin care. The Pakistan army has, over the years,
cultivated an image of 180 million people with nuclear devices strapped to its
collective body, threatening to take the world down with it. We may not be able
to take the world down with us and the world might defang us or manage to calm
us a bit, but the fact remains that Pakistan as a nation is paying the price
for our generals’ insistence on acting like, in Asma Jahangir’s immortal words,
“duffers.” And they are adding insult to inquiry by demanding medals and golf
resorts for being such consistent duffers for such a long time.
What people
really want to do at this point is to put an arm around our military
commanders’ shoulders, take them aside and whisper in their ears: “Murshid,
marwa na daina.”
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This article was originally published as part
of the cover story in the June 2011 print version of Newsline.
Original Headline: Murshid, Marwa Na Daina
Source: The News Line Magazine
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/pakistan-army-cultivated-image-pakistan/d/123572
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