Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  With respect to the Pakistan Army, I argue that these epistemic communities are linked to the army through the creative activities of both active and retired military personnel who author personal memoirs, accounts of wars, treatises on Pakistan’s history and policies, and essays for military journals or commercial publications such as Pakistan Defence Journal that are aimed at the military community. Many of these military-based commentators become public intellectuals and prominent voices in Pakistan’s print, radio, and television media that help to shape Pakistani public opinion on a range of issues. When military officers retire, they are frequently granted senior leadership posts within private-sector enterprises but also government ministries. For example, during Musharraf’s tenure, Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, who headed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) between 1993 and 1995, served as Musharraf’s communications minister (2000–2002) and then as education minister (2004–2007). When the country is under an army dispensation, the army dispatches numerous officers to run governmental offices. In 2008, when Gen. Ashfaq Kayani became the army chief, he ordered that army officers would be withdrawn from some 23 civil departments including the Ministry of Education, the Water and Power Development Authority, the National Accountability Bureau, and the National Highway Authority. This order did not affect retired officers who were so ensconced (Masood 2008). Retired and serving officers are also able to exert influence outside of Pakistan by participating in seminars throughout the world, sojourning at prominent think tanks and universities, and authoring books (recent examples include Khan 2012a, 2012b; Matinuddin 2009; Salik 2009; Walker 2006).

  The military cultivates civilians including scholars, journalists, and analysts, providing them selective access to the institution and punishing them—either with physical harm (or the threat of it) to the author or her family members or simply with the denial of future access—should they produce knowledge that harms the interests of the army. Since access is perhaps the most valuable currency among those who wish to be and remain experts on the military, the army uses this implied transaction to produce sympathetic assessments of the armed forces and their actions and goals.18 While it is easy to focus on the coercive ability of the army to shape and influence these epistemic communities, it should be noted that individuals who become part of them have agency and have personal and professional reasons to join them through either active consideration or passive acquiescence. However, remaining outside the circle of favored commentators itself imposes constraints on the ability to garner accurate and recent insights into the institution.

  Pakistani media coverage of the military should also be read within the context of the army’s management of knowledge about the institution and its role in managing security and domestic affairs of the state. While in recent years many commentators have praised Pakistan’s press for its relative freedom, self-censorship is still very common, as is deference to the army’s preferred narratives. The intelligence agencies’ willingness to use lethal methods against intransigent journalists and other domestic critics has repeatedly earned Pakistan the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists (Committee to Protect Journalists 2011).

  As Shuja Nawaz (2008a) explains, Pakistan’s media was a willing participant in incorrect reporting on each of Pakistan’s wars with India. Pakistan’s media reassured Pakistanis that their military was succeeding up until the moment that the various ceasefires, and their terms, could no longer be concealed. Pakistan’s media also depicted India as the aggressor, even when Pakistani actions clearly and directly precipitated the war. As I will show, Pakistan’s defense journals also offer histories of these conflicts that are at odds with scholarly accounts of the same. Pakistani textbooks repeat the same highly stylized narratives (Sabri 2012).

  Pakistan presents an example of how more than six decades of ossified historical inaccuracies and distortion can resist the sanitizing effect of the global information technology revolution and the resulting expansion of access to abundant—if, alas, low-quality—information. The endurance of these inaccurate accounts of Pakistan’s history can be partly attributed to the prevalence of conspiracy theories as a means of framing and understanding events as well as Pakistan’s relationships to those events. Weinbaum (1996) notes the reliance on conspiracy narratives in Pakistan and the resulting suspicions, which are “readily sustained in the absence of full, creditable information. [Conspiracy theories] offer disarmingly simple and not entirely implausible explanations, and no amount of evidence can refute them. … [The] more the evidence seems to disprove the theory, the deeper the conspiracy is conceived to be” (Weinbaum 1996, 649). A full exposition of the role of conspiracy theories in Pakistan is beyond the scope of this volume, but numerous scholars have explored this phenomenon, in Pakistan and elsewhere (see, e.g., Jamil 2011; Wood et al. 2012; Yusuf 2011).

  In this volume I rely heavily on the Pakistan Army’s professional publications, particularly those published either by the army’s general headquarters or Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), which serves as the official publication clearinghouse for the armed forces. These official publications include Pakistan Army Journal, Citadel (the official publication of the Command and Staff College in Quetta), Hilal (an official ISPR publication), Margalla Papers (a key publication of the National Defence University and previously of the National Defence College), Pakistan Defense Review, Defence Journal (before it became a private entity), and Pakistan Army Green Book. Throughout this volume, I offer specific quotations from this literature either because the quote is exemplary of a particular genre of accounts or understanding of an event or concept or because the author of the quote in question has inordinate importance to the institution. For example, if the current army chief offers insights that are novel, I do not discount them because they do not echo views espoused earlier by other officers. If a particular view offered by a specific quote is not representative of the varied writings studied in this research, I note it as an exceptional offering. Thus, unless noted elsewhere, the specific pieces I cite here are representative of writings that dilate on particular themes I discuss or represent the views of seniormost leadership.

  At times the essays in these volumes may strike the reader as being outright noncredible, such as India’s posited commitment to destroying Pakistan, America’s conniving to subjugate Pakistan, and even racist and xenophobic stereotypes perpetuated in their pages. However, it is important to note that these claims—however bizarre—are consistent across times, appear in numerous publications officially sanctioned by the army, and often, as in the case of the Green Books, are prefaced by the army chief himself. Thus, it would be imprudent to dismiss these writings. While these writings do not comprise doctrine per se, they represent an important body of literature in which the army presents to itself the way it understands the world in which it operates. (Unlike the US military, the Pakistan Army does not make public its various doctrinal documents.)

  In addition to these official military publications, I also examine the memoirs of Pakistan’s senior military leadership, the most recent being that of former Chief Pervez Musharraf. It should be noted that these memoirs are not always published with authorization from the army headquarters or ISPR. In some cases, the military officers have published their accounts to clear their name or to dissociate themselves from policies they found objectionable. In other cases, the officers believe that their life journey offers insights and lessons for Pakistanis generally. Even if these officers’ memoirs are not always blessed by the military as an institution, they provide important insights into the military’s strategic culture. I would be remiss if I did not mention that military history as a scholarly genre is virtually absent in Pakistan, despite its numerous conflicts in its relatively short existence. Even when officers discuss the varied wars in their autobiographies, their accounts read as personal essays about what they did and thought during the war in their private capacities as well as in their standing as
men in uniform. These narratives rarely comprise critical historical accounts of the conflicts in question. Matinuddin (1994) offers one reason for this lacuna of Pakistan military history. Speaking specifically about the 1971 war, he notes that there is little interest in writing about defeat. When a fellow officer suggested that he write about this war, Matinuddin at first demurred. He had little interest in expositing an ignominious defeat particularly because doing so would mean “treading on the toes” of senior colleagues with whom he developed personal friendships after retirement (17).19

  I complement this documentary evidence with observations that I have made over more than 15 years of fieldwork in Pakistan, during which I have focused on civil–military affairs and related issues. However, unlike the aforementioned documents, interview subjects actively use interactions with foreigners to shape perceptions about the Pakistan Army and its objectives, needs, actions, and threat perceptions. Military personnel who are authorized to interact with foreigners generally know their briefs very well and do not deviate from script, which casts further aspersions on interview-derived data (Schaffer and Schaffer 2011). In contrast, military publications and officer memoirs reflect an evolving conversation within the institution and the epistemic community in which it is embedded and that it helps nurture. Because the professional defense publications are not intended for a readership beyond Pakistan’s men—and occasionally women—in uniform, they offer the most accurate reflection of how the institution wants observers, both in and out of uniform, to view Pakistan’s domestic and foreign affairs rather than an orchestrated effort to shape international perceptions. They reflect and perpetuate the culture and preferences of the army over time. These documents offer a pristine glimpse, untainted by a desire to influence external audiences, into how the army understands its strategic environment and what options are best to manage it.

  These Pakistani professional military journals differ from US military publications in three important ways. First, during periods of war, US military journals devote significant space to topical discussions of contemporary battles, war-fighting strategies, and subjects that are salient to the conflict at hand (e.g., logistics, recruitment, coalition building, personnel). In contrast, Pakistan’s journals are notable for the absence of such discussions. For example, even though Pakistan was embroiled in the so-called Afghan jihad throughout the decade of the 1980s, the journals are surprisingly silent on this conflict (with a few exceptions, discussed herein). Equally notable is the fact that many of the Pakistan Army journals have not discussed Pakistan’s post-2001 operations in the tribal areas. This is peculiar because Pakistan has launched numerous campaigns in the tribal areas and even in settled areas such as Swat (Jones and Fair 2010a; Nawaz 2011; Tellis 2008). This reflects more generally what Schaffer and Schaffer (2011) note as a general institutional avoidance of self-criticism or efforts to derive lessons learned from past efforts.20

  Second, when these journals do publish accounts of particular battles in wars, they are written as memoirs rather than as critical analyses. These essays tend to focus on the personal relationships that the author formed or the particular emotional experiences that the author underwent during the conflict. More often than not, these memoirs focus on battles in which Pakistan prevailed but within wars that Pakistan lost. This is most true of the 1971 war. Third, there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.

  CHAPTER 3

  Born an Insecure State

  Many of the ways the Pakistan Army sees India and the rest of the world have been deeply shaped by the experience of Partition and the events that led up to Partition. Because the movement for Pakistan was based on Islam and the notion that Muslims and Hindus comprise separate nations, Islam became the ideology of the Pakistani state in a constructed opposition to “Hindu” India. The Pakistan Army, from the earliest days of independence until now, sees itself as the guarantor of both the ideological and territorial frontiers of the state. While some American analysts view the tenacity with which the Pakistan Army and Pakistanis more generally burden themselves with the weight of this fast-receding history, understanding the Pakistan Army and its strategic culture requires taking its experiences and its narratives of those experiences seriously. This is all the more important because Pakistanis—in and out of uniform—continue to identify the flawed process of Partition as the source of Pakistan’s inherent insecurity vis-à-vis India and the region.

  Pakistan’s military histories, school textbooks, and popular cultural productions continue to rehearse the inherent inequities in the processes and personalities that begrudgingly acquiesced to Pakistan’s independence. In this chapter, I chronicle the events of Partition as experienced by the Pakistan Army and the lasting security competition between India and Pakistan that is the noxious fruit of that complicated and bloodied process of untangling the Raj. Here, I briefly recount the history of the independence movement, the mobilization of communal politics, and the ultimate Partition of the subcontinent, with a particular focus on the impact of the division of the armed forces. I conclude with a discussion of the important legacies of this process, for the new state in general and its army in particular.

  Cracking the Raj

  By the end of World War II, decolonization of the Indian subcontinent appeared imminent. After two world wars, Britain was war-weary, and its exchequer was depleted. Colonial India was no longer a profitable concern, as it had become difficult to extract revenue from an increasingly noncompliant subject population. There was little domestic interest in reasserting the Raj, and the United States, along with much of the international community, was pushing for decolonization. In India itself, unrest was increasing, including via various civil disobedience movements and, beginning in 1946, a series of mutinies in the armed forces. Acquiescing to the inevitable, in early 1947, Britain announced that it would transfer power no later than June 1948. In the end, the British accelerated decolonization, announcing that Pakistan and India would emerge as independent states on August 14 and 15, 1947, respectively.

  The British plan for Partition was hastily concocted and ill conceived. Populations in border areas, in anticipation of Partition, mobilized communal militias to undertake mass violence in hopes of cleansing their districts of minorities. The violence continued as millions of people made their way to their adopted homelands. Muslims were attacked by Sikhs and Hindus, while Sikhs and Hindus were attacked by Muslims. The violence was unprecedented in scope and scale: it included savage murders, rapes, abductions, mutilation of corpses, and other horrors. The British utterly failed to prevent the massive communal violence that seized the Punjab and Bengal because their energies were entirely focused on evacuating all British personnel from the subcontinent.1 The two states that emerged from this bloodied birth “necessarily saw each other through the prism of the violence that had taken place and eyed each other warily across the expanses of the ruptured Punjab” (Khan 2007, 142).

  Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the communal violence that preceded and accompanied Partition. Some 12 million were displaced, becoming refugees in their adoptive countries. Partition, along with preceding even
ts that made Partition unavoidable, bequeathed to both states notions of nationhood that were “carved out diametrically, in definition against each other” (Khan 2007, 9). Pakistan, as the smaller and seceding state, had comparatively fewer resources with which to confront these problems. Moreover, Pakistan had several grievances about its territorial award, grievances that persist today. Pakistan believes that it was deprived of key Muslim-majority areas in the Punjab as well as of the Muslim-majority princely state of Kashmir; thus, that Partition was and remains incomplete. As Tinker observed in 1977, while many countries remain embittered over lands lost, Pakistan is one of the few countries “with a sense of bitterness and grievance for territories that have never formed part of its polity” (695).

  Imagining Pakistan

  Pre-partition politics were largely dominated by the Indian National Congress (henceforth the Congress). By the early twentieth century, the Congress expanded its base and developed the machinery of a mass party.2 With local units reaching down into the villages, it finally “attained the character of a popular party engaged in organizing millions in a struggle against the (British) Government and for the realization of self-government along democratic lines” (Greenberg 1942, 172). On December 31, 1929, the Congress, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, first hoisted the flag of an independent India and forthwith issued its demand for Purna Swaraj, or complete independence from the British. Despite various setbacks, such as the imprisonment of its leadership during World War II, the Congress not only maintained but also extended its presence throughout India (Greenberg 1942).