Not only has Pakistan’s reliance upon Islamist proxies created external security challenges for itself, but also in late 2001 these proxies began to turn against the state following then President and General Pervez Musharraf’s decision to support the US-led war in Afghanistan. Since then, Pakistani terrorists operating under the banner of the Pakistani Taliban have killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Pakistanis (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 2012; Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies 2008, 2011; South Asia Terrorism Portal 2012).3 In addition to waging a bloody campaign against Pakistan’s citizenry, Pakistani Islamist terrorists have assaulted military, intelligence, police, and political actors and institutions (Fair 2011b; Hussain 2010).
In light of all these factors, Pakistan should have come to some accommodation with India long ago. Developing a modus vivendi with India may also have allowed Pakistan to endure Afghanistan as a neighbor rather than to ceaselessly seek to cultivate it as a client state. After all, as the power differential between the two antagonists continues to widen, the longer Pakistan defers this ultimate concession the more costly its eventual concession will be. Indeed, Pakistan’s policy choices and actions do not align well with the scholarly expectation that “strategies that fail to attain a state’s objectives will, in all probability, evolve or be abandoned” (Glenn 2009, 533). Ashley Tellis, a prominent South Asia analyst and consultant to the US government, insightfully opined:
Pakistan has to recognize that it simply cannot match India through whatever stratagem it chooses—it is bound to fail. The sensible thing, then, is for Pakistan to reach the best possible accommodation with India now, while it still can, and shift gears toward a grand strategy centered on economic integration in South Asia—one that would help Pakistan climb out of its morass and allow the army to maintain some modicum of privileges, at least for a while. The alternative is to preside over an increasingly hollow state. (Cohen et al. 2009, emphasis added.)
Because the power differential between India and Pakistan continues to increase, the longer Pakistan defers the inevitable acquiescence, the more costly the eventual concession will be.
The Argument: Explaining Pakistan’s Persistent Revisionism in the Face of Repeated Defeats
Given the ostensible centrality of the Kashmir dispute to Pakistan’s behavior in the region, some analysts (e.g., Rubin and Rashid 2008) believe that the only way to bring peace to India, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan is by resolving the Kashmir dispute. They argue that Pakistan will cease its adventurism in Afghanistan and India and will abandon its dangerous reliance on Islamist militant proxies only when the Kashmir issue is given closure in some way that accommodates Pakistan’s preference. Unfortunately, this appreciation of the problem and the best resolution of it dangerously misstate the underlying structure of Pakistan’s struggle with India. Even if at some point in the past Pakistan’s existential struggle with India could have been mitigated through a mutually agreeable resolution of Kashmir, this is certainly no longer true. In this volume, I show that Pakistan’s revisionism persists in regards to its efforts not only to undermine the territorial status quo in Kashmir but also to undermine India’s position in the region and beyond. Pakistan will suffer any number of military defeats in its efforts to do so, but it will not acquiesce to India. This, for the Pakistan Army, is genuine and total defeat.
Because Pakistan’s apprehensions about India are more ideological than security driven, understanding the nature of this security competition should influence how the international community seeks to manage this dispute. Namely, it is possible that any efforts to appease Pakistan through territorial concessions on Kashmir may actually encourage Pakistan’s anti–status quo policies rather than temper them. This argument, drawing from the work of Glaser (2010), suggests that Pakistan may be a purely greedy state. Glaser defines such greedy states as “fundamentally dissatisfied with the status quo, desiring additional territory even when it is not required for security” (5). Purely greedy states pursue revisionist policies to increase their prestige, to spread their ideology, or to propagate their religion. Whereas efforts to ameliorate the threat perceptions of states concerned, strictly speaking, about their security may be helpful, such appeasement strategies are counterproductive and dangerous for purely greedy states because their “non-security goals result in a fundamental conflict of interests that makes competition the only strategy with which a greedy state can achieve its goals” (ibid.). If Pakistan is such a greedy state determined to pursue its revisionism for ideological and even religious goals, as my research suggests is the case, the world should prepare for a Pakistan that is ever more dangerous and should adjust multilateral and bilateral policy approaches appropriately.
To build these varied arguments, I mobilize a body of data, namely, Pakistan’s own defense literatures. Curiously, this important resource has been poorly exploited to date, with the exception of Cohen (1984). I analyze these texts as well as the contexts of their production, consumption, and circulation to draw out the characteristics of the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army. As I detail in Chapter 2, for purposes of this effort the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army is more or less interchangeable with that of the country because with few notable exceptions the army has set the country’s key foreign and domestic policies. I use Alastair Johnston’s (1995a, 1995b) definition of strategic culture. He describes strategic culture as a system of symbols or discursive tools that help a state form enduring strategic preferences both by shaping how the state evaluates the role and utility of military force in international affairs and by endowing these understandings with an “aura of factuality” that makes these strategic preferences seem self evident and uniquely efficacious (Johnston 1995b, 46).
The strategic culture of the Pakistan Army encompasses the collectivity of its corporate beliefs, values, and norms as well as the accumulating weight of its historical experiences. Taken together, the army’s strategic culture serves as a lens through which the Pakistan Army understands its (domestic and foreign) security environments, formulates appropriate responses to these challenges, and ultimately makes decisions about which options are most suitable to these threats as the army understands them (Rizvi 2002).
Unlike some armies that primarily concern themselves with external security challenges, the Pakistan Army also involves itself in managing domestic affairs of the state. This means that in the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army there is an inherent linkage between internal and external security challenges. This primarily occurs because the Pakistan Army sees itself as responsible for protecting not only Pakistan’s territorial frontiers but also its ideological frontiers. The ideology, as repeatedly stated by virtually every Pakistani army chief, is Islam: the founding logic of the state and the ideology that successive military leaders have used to achieve a degree of national coherence across a multiethnic country and to garner support for the army’s endless conflict with “Hindu” India. Even though the specific interpretations of Islam have shifted over the years, the Pakistan Army embraces protecting the ideology of the state as a core function.
Having read decades of the military’s professional publications and accounts of senior officers, I conclude that the army’s strategic culture shapes the way the Pakistan Army understands the kinds of threats it faces from Afghanistan and India; informs the particular ways that the army understands its principle foe, India; suffuses its conflicts within and beyond Pakistan’s borders with various mobilizations of Islam; and influences the tools that Pakistan has developed to manage its varied security challenges within Pakistan itself and in South Asia. The strategic culture of the Pakistan Army produces a stable ensemble of preferences that has endured for much of the country’s existence: resist India’s rise; restrict its presence and ability to harm Pakistan; and overturn the territorial status quo at all costs. For the Pakistan Army, simply retaining the ability to challenge India is victory. However, to acquiesce is tantamount
not only to defeating the Pakistan Army but also, fundamentally, to eroding the legitimacy of the Pakistani state. In this way, Pakistan has managed to snatch a redefined sense of victory from each of its otherwise defeats in its numerous conflicts and confrontations with India. The evidence that I derive from these publications and the strategic culture I infer from them offer little room for hope that Pakistan will abandon its revisionist goals for several nested reasons.
First and foremost, Pakistan’s army sets and prosecutes major domestic and foreign policies of the Pakistani state. Since the army has controlled the state directly or indirectly for most of its history, it is well positioned to use the state to pursue its own institutional ends. Thus, it seeks to maximize as many of its own corporate interests as possible, even if it must do so at the expense of the state’s interest. Because the army requires the state to enable its own existence, it must make appropriate adjustments along the way to ensure that its policies and preferences do not, in fact, destroy the state. In some general sense, the army has succeeded. However, as I argue here, the army’s preferred policies have had enormous costs for the institution itself and for the state. The army’s past ability to titrate the pursuit of its own interests against the general harm of the state does not necessarily mean that it will continue to be able to do so.
Second, as I argue in this volume, the army has been very effective at ensuring that civilian institutions and even ordinary Pakistanis share the army’s strategic concerns and priorities; thus, the army generally sustains wide support for what it does, even when its preferences impose significant financial costs and opportunity costs upon the state and its people. Consequently, even if civilians manage to seize power from the army, it is not obvious that civilians would immediately pursue different security policies from those of the army.
Third, the army’s concerns vis-à-vis India are not purely or even mostly security driven, as I illustrate herein. Pakistan does point to India’s larger and growing military capability as evidence of India’s intentions toward Pakistan. India’s capabilities do warrant appropriate defensive investments. Curiously, while Pakistan could have framed its demands for Kashmir within the rubrics of water security and defensibility of its terrain, it has not done so with few recent exceptions.4 As noted already, not all of the army’s concerns are expressly tied to the territorial defense of the country. Since the earliest years of the state, Pakistan’s army has assumed the role of protecting Pakistan’s ideological frontiers and maintaining Pakistan’s “Islamic” identity. This along with the army’s commitment to defending it, which I detail in Chapter 4, locks Pakistan into a civilizational battle with India, which the army posits as universally Hindu despite the simple fact that India is a multireligion, multiethnic state. For the army, resisting India’s rise is a necessary condition for the survival of Islamic Pakistan.5
Fourth, because the army’s concerns and preoccupations are ideological as much as military in scope, the Pakistan Army views its struggle with India in existential terms. For Pakistan’s men on horseback, not winning, even repeatedly, is not the same thing as losing. But simply giving up and accepting the status quo and India’s supremacy, is, by definition, defeat. As a former chief of army staff explained to me in 2000, Pakistan’s generals would always prefer to take a calculated risk and be defeated than to do nothing at all. Pakistan’s army will insist on action at almost any cost, even that of presiding over a hollow state. After all, if the Pakistani state were to make such concessions to India, it would no longer be a state worth presiding over. By seeing victory as the ability to continue fighting, Pakistan’s army is able to seize victory even from the jaws of what other observers would deem defeat.
Because the Pakistan Army drives the country’s most disruptive policies, there is an urgent need for scholars, policymakers, and public policy analysts to understand the army’s past and present views of its domestic and external challenges and the evolving ways it has considered dealing with both. As Stephen Cohen (2004, 97) wrote, “For the foreseeable future, the army’s vision of itself, its domestic role, and Pakistan’s strategic environment will be the most important factors shaping Pakistan’s identity.” Curiously, there have been few scholarly efforts to comprehensively understand the Pakistan Army’s appraisal of its strategic environment and its evaluation of the best tools to manage this strategic environment. Some writers have focused on Pakistan’s strategic culture in the context of nuclear weapons (Khan 2012a), while others have authored brief but insightful essays (Lavoy 2006; Rizvi 2002). There have also been important histories of the rise of authoritarianism in Pakistan (Jalal 1990; Rizvi 2000a, 2000b; Siddiqa 2007), accounts of the Pakistan Army as an institution (Cheema 2002; Cloughley 2002; Cohen 1984, 2004), narratives of battlefield encounters (Cloughley 2002; Nawaz 2008a, 2008b), and overviews of its ties to political Islam and Islamist militancy (Haqqani 2005).
These works offer glimpses into the strategic culture of the army, but this is not the primary focus of their authors. In this volume, I aim to inform scholarship about the Pakistan Army by focusing instead on how that institution appreciates and evaluates its actions and how these institutional perceptions are sustained and disseminated across successive cohorts of officers. I attempt to cast some measure of light on the army’s strategic culture and the persistent revisionism that this culture encourages. I will do so principally through an examination of decades of professional military publications, most of which are available at various libraries in the United States; interviews with Pakistan military personnel; and multiple sources of data about army recruitment and public opinion regarding the army and its proposals for ensuring Pakistan’s security. Understanding the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army, I argue, is the key to understanding what, if any, options the international community has for influencing this strategic culture and the strategic preferences it wields. Once I have identified and studied strategic culture, I modify Zionts’ (2006) model to explain states’ pursuit or abandonment of revisionist policies.
Understanding Pakistan’s strategic culture, which is conservative but also evolving, has important implications for our understanding of regional dynamics. This empirical exercise provides further evidentiary support for Sumit Ganguly’s (2001) explanation for the various conflicts between India and Pakistan. Ganguly draws on the work of Van Evera (1999) to argue that, even considering several pre-disposing factors (e.g., divergent ideological commitments, the ongoing territorial dispute over Kashmir, differing views on Partition) as well as specific precipitating and opportunistic events, Pakistan’s confident initiation of several conflicts with India can be ascribed to “false optimism,” particularly insofar as it led to a mis-reading of India’s military strength and will. This derives in some measure from a chauvinist nationalism and related beliefs about the inherent superiority of the Pakistan Army—which is construed as “Muslim” and “Islamic”—over the Indian Army, viewed as “effete” and “Hindu.” Of course the Indian Army also includes ethnic groups that many Pakistani soldiers, following the discredited British colonial paradigm, would consider warrior peoples or “martial races” (e.g., Sikhs, Rajputs). The Pakistan Army has intentionally inculcated this notion of Hindu India within and beyond the army in part to legitimize these reductionist conceptualizations of its nemesis. This volume provides ample textual evidence for the evolution and continuation of Pakistan’s chauvinist nationalism, which is informed by stylized notions of Islam and informed by the accumulating weight of Pakistan’s history.
A study of the strategic culture of a country dominated by civilians would have to focus on civilian institutions. However, when it comes to Pakistan, the army, which for the vast majority of the country’s history has directly and indirectly influenced defense policy toward India and Afghanistan as well as military alliances with the United States and China, among others, is the most appropriate institution to study (Cohen 2004; Schaffer and Schaffer 2011). And because the ideology that the army has cultivated
has deep resonance for Pakistan’s polity as well as for civilian politicians and bureaucrats, even if the army were to one day suffer a loss of power a change in strategy would still be unlikely.
The army’s strategic culture is by no means static, but I show that it has been remarkably conservative and resistant to change since independence. The Pakistan Army inherited some of the ways the British appraised the strategic environment of South Asia as well as several policy instruments to manage that environment and even British perceptions of the peoples of South Asia (e.g., understanding of Pakistan’s western frontier and perceptions of the varied ethnic groups such as Pakhtuns, Baloch, and Punjabis, in particular).6 The Pakistan Army still bears the imprint of British military recruitment policies and the ethnocentrism that undergirded the now nearly defunct notion of martial races. My analysis does not offer much confidence that the army will undergo substantial change in the near future. The United States, India, and others should abandon their hopes for transformation that have often undergirded engagement strategies. The international community should focus its attention on the implications of continuity rather than the minimal prospects for change.
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