Table 10.2 Punjabis in the Punjab versus Elsewhere
Table 10.3 focuses on the views of two groups of residents of the Punjab: those who are ethnically Punjabi (2,015); and those who are not (493).3 Table 10.4 demonstrates that ethnicity is not the best predictor of a person’s views on these issues; Table 10.5 explores whether ethnicity matters at all (at least as far as the Punjab is concerned). While the differences in the distribution of answers given by Punjabis and non-Punjabis are often statistically significant, the magnitude of these differences is not large for most items. One results stands out: Punjabis in the Punjab are much more likely than their non-Punjabi neighbors to believe that their government is governed by elected representatives and that the government is not at all governed by Islamic principles.
Table 10.3 Punjabis versus Non-Punjabis in Punjab
Table 10.4 Punjabis versus Sindhis in Sindh
Similar analyses of Punjabis versus Sindhis in Sindh (Table 10.4) and Punjabis versus Baloch in Balochistan (Table 10.5) demonstrate that Punjabis respond very differently from either Sindhis (in Sindh) or Baloch (in Balochistan), yet the Punjabis of Balochistan and Sindh also differ from Punjabis in the Punjab. (An analysis comparing Punjabis and Pakhtuns in KP found no statistically significant differences.) Taken together, these data demonstrate that the Pakistan Army, simply by changing its recruitment policies, is bringing in recruits whose views differ from those of their predecessors in an army dominated by recruits from Punjab Province. This is true even if the new recruits from Balochistan are not, in fact, ethnically Baloch. Still, it is difficult to predict how and whether these incoming cohorts will change the values and ideology of the Pakistan Army.
Exogenous Sources of Change?
In addition to these internally derived sources of potential changes, what are the prospects for exogenous sources of change—that is, sources of change that Pakistan cannot directly control? A number of potential scenarios could bring meaningful change to the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army and would motivate the army to attenuate or even abandon its revisionism.
Table 10.5 Punjabis versus Baloch in Balochistan
First and foremost, it is possible that Pakistan will so provoke the international community that the United States, perhaps in concert with India or another ally, retaliates with military force—even degrading, if not destroying, Pakistan’s nuclear assets. (This is the scenario that Pakistan’s army most fears.) This may seem difficult to imagine, given America’s tolerance for Pakistan’s provocations. A US-led military strike is not unthinkable should a Pakistan-based or -backed terrorist group attack against the United States or its allies, or should any terrorist launch such an attack by employing nuclear materials with Pakistan’s nuclear signature (e.g., with nuclear materials associated with Pakistan’s program). The United States will certainly consider such retaliation even if there is no evidence that the Pakistani state sanctioned the attack or facilitated the transfer of nuclear material. It is difficult to imagine that any lesser outrages would provoke such actions by the United States. It is also possible that India may, in response to a devastating terror attack by one of Pakistan’s erstwhile proxies, call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and proceed to deliver it a decisive defeat. However, if 1971 is a guide, a military defeat short of nuclear emasculation is not likely to convince the Pakistan Army that its goals are unreasonable. Moreover, the international community will work assiduously to dampen any conflict to prevent precisely such a scenario.
A second possibility is a natural disaster of such magnitude that the Pakistan Army is unable to respond effectively, undermining its claims to be the guarantor of Pakistan’s security. This is even less likely than the first scenario. The 2005 earthquake and the massive monsoon-related flooding in 2010 both wreaked unimaginable destruction. Many Pakistan watchers were convinced that Pakistan would rise up in outrage after the 2010 floods. But nothing of the sort took place; in fact, the army came out well in both instances, burnishing its image as the most competent institution in Pakistan. And should Pakistan fall victim to a disaster so severe that it renders the army helpless, it is highly unlikely that the other state institutions will perform any better.
A third possibility is that the United States and its partners will forge a coherent plan to invest in Pakistan’s civilian institutions with the explicit goal of slowly undermining the strength of the army. The United States took the first steps on this road with the 2009 Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation, which was designed to encourage investment in Pakistan’s civilian institutions while placing strong conditions on security assistance. The legislation proved a failure, both because the Pakistan Army worked to undermine it and because the United States could not sacrifice its short-term goals in Afghanistan to the long-term goal of a democratic Pakistan at peace with itself and with its neighbors. Thus, endogenous sources of change seem more likely than exogenous ones.
Conclusions: Prospects for Change from Within and Without?
Most prospects for internally or externally driven change in the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army and the behavior it encourages appear rather dim. Should the changes observed in the officer corps recruitment base produce any meaningful change, it will likely do so in future decades. Should a democratic transition occur as some suggest, it would have to be accompanied by profound changes across Pakistani society, which tends to embrace the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture and preferences. Other possible shocks, should they occur at all, could have more precipitous effects on the army’s strategic culture but are themselves even more unlikely precisely because of the presumed calamitous effects they would have on Pakistan. Even a cursory review of Pakistan’s history suggests that it is surprisingly capable of surviving economic crises and natural disasters as well as internal political strife with surprising endurance. Pakistan, it seems, is a very stable instability. With few prospects for substantive change in Pakistan’s strategic culture, in the assessments this culture encourages, or in the behavior it incentivizes, the world should prepare for a Pakistan that is ever more dangerous and ever more committed to its suite of dangerous policies.
CHAPTER 11
The Army’s Strategic Culture and Implications for International Security
Several components of the army’s strategic culture, some of which predate Partition and the emergence of Pakistan, condition the army’s decision-making calculus. Perhaps the most important of these is the two-nation theory, which forms the basis of Pakistan’s ideology. The Pakistan movement’s definition of Muslims as a “nation,” which is distinct from and in opposition to Hindus, caused problems for Pakistan from its first days and continues to pose challenges today. Ironically, Pakistan’s rejection of any separation between mosque and state has been accompanied by an erosion of tolerance towards Pakistan’s diversity: militant groups, many of them the army’s erstwhile clients, have led the call for violence against Ahmediyas, Shias, and even Barelvis, in addition to Christian and Hindus. The state has evidenced no appetite for eliminating these organizations, at least in part because their membership overlaps with groups that still serve the army’s purposes in India and Afghanistan. To abandon the two-nation theory would undermine Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir, something the army is unwilling to do.
Partition, and the bloodshed that ensued, bequeathed to the newly independent Pakistan an incomplete state apparatus, a disproportionate refugee crisis, and a fraction of the resources necessary to manage the enormous challenges the nascent state faced. The process of Partition confirmed the Pakistan movement’s description of India as a begrudging Hindu nation that could not reconcile itself to an independent and strong Muslim neighbor. Despite the passage of time, this xenophobic and outright flawed image of India has not faded.
The army’s arrogation of the responsibility for defending the ideology of Pakistan means that it defines the threat from India in ideational and civilizational as well as military terms. For the army, acquiescing to India is tantamount to accepting
that the two-nation theory is illegitimate or defunct, thus undermining the founding logic of Pakistan itself. No military, political, or diplomatic defeat Pakistan has yet suffered has been adequate to persuade the army to revise its anti–status quo position (not only its claims to Kashmir but also its resistance to India’s hegemonic aspirations in the region and beyond). Pakistan’s defense writers take pride in Pakistan’s role as the sole country with the courage to deny India the hegemonic status it ostensibly craves.
Zionts’ (2006) discussion of unreasonably revisionist states is crucial to understanding Pakistan’s behavior. He defines unreasonable revisionism as failing to revise an anti–status quo position after suffering a clear and devastating defeat. If Pakistan were reasonably revisionist in Zionts’ parlance, Pakistan should have come to an agreement with India in 1971, if not earlier. But this assessment depends on a misapprehension of the Pakistan Army’s understanding of defeat itself. Even after the 1971 war, Pakistan did not view itself as defeated; rather, it saw itself as emerging from the wreckage still capable of challenging India. In the army’s view, Pakistan will be defeated only when it can no longer actively work to deny India’s claims—on Kashmir specifically and on regional ascendancy in general. This is a startling realization, prompting us to ask what sort of defeat it would take for Pakistan to relinquish its revisionism? Would the world stand by as such a defeat was meted out to Pakistan, given the numerous risks for asymmetric retaliation as well as nuclear proliferation? As I discussed in Chapter 10, this is simply an unreasonable expectation.
Equally old and enduring is the army’s compulsion to view Afghanistan through the lens of strategic depth. As discussed in Chapter 5, this concept is not new or even rooted solely in the twenty-first-century state system. In fact, it first appears, as early as the eighteenth century, in British discussions of the threats beyond the northwest frontier of British India. That frontier looms perhaps even larger in the mind of Pakistani strategists, since Pakistan inherited the entire border but only a fraction of the resources with which to manage it. India’s refusal, postpartition, to follow through on its commitment to provide Pakistan with a fair share of the assets of the Raj only buttressed Pakistan’s belief that India seeks to undo it, either independently or in collusion with Afghanistan or, in the past, with Russia. Whereas in earlier decades Pakistan feared an Indian and Russian plot, with the collusion of Afghanistan, to destabilize its western territories, in recent decades its fears center on Indian and Afghan subversion, perhaps with Washington’s tacit approval. This threat perception has mobilized Pakistan to pursue various courses of behavior, alternating between an aggressive forward policy that actively seeks to insert proxies (with Pakistani advisors) into Afghanistan and a close border policy under which Pakistan merely seeks to persuade Afghanistan’s leadership to pursue policies favorable to Pakistan. And it has shaped the army’s belief that the restive populations of Pakistan’s west, such as the Baloch and the Pakhtuns, are ripe for Indian—or, increasingly, American—manipulation.
Pakistan’s army has refined its unsavory images of India through its narratives of India’s behavior in peace and war. It is difficult to believe how many Pakistanis continue to believe that India started every war with Pakistan and that Pakistan outright won each conflict or heroically fought India to a draw (with the exception of the 1971 war), forcing it to concede. But it is dangerous to fail to recognize the popularity of this version of Pakistan’s military history. Collective perceptions of the two nations’ history animate popular support for the army and help to sustain widespread willingness to continue funding the army and its adventurism, even while Pakistan’s economy and democracy wither on the vine.
The army has fashioned equally specific narratives of its relations with China and the United States. Whereas Pakistan Army mouthpieces routinely rehearse a steady stream of—often exaggerated—American failures, they engage in rhetorical contortions in an attempt to explain away China’s shortcomings as an ally. These stylized retellings of its history are an important part of Pakistan’s strategic culture and negotiation strategy: it seeks to build an ever accumulating and ever ossifying wall of perfidies, real and imagined, so that it can extract greater rents from the United States. It augments this strategy with the threat of a reversion to China. The army propagates its fictionalized retelling of its relations with the United States and China not only to make this bargaining strategy more effective but also to manage domestic expectations for its relations with both.
Another consequence of the Pakistan Army’s view of India is its resistance to accepting that Pakistan’s internal security problems may present a greater existential threat than the external challenge posed by India. The army will occasionally acknowledge the severity of the internal threat, and in January 2013 Pakistan watchers were surprised to read news reports claiming that the Pakistan Army had made a much anticipated change in doctrine, for the first time making internal security its top priority. In what should have been a sign that the news was unlikely to be true, the journalists who broke the story cited the Pakistan Army Green Book as their source; the reports were indeed nonsense (Ehsan 2013; for a view discrediting such reports, see Swami 2013).
As demonstrated throughout, the Pakistan Army has long conceded the severity of the internal threats confronting Pakistan. There is no dearth of professional military analysis of the numerous cleavages in Pakistan’s social fabric, whether they be socioeconomic, ethnic, communal, or sectarian. But the literature generally portrays these cleavages as potential rather than active and makes clear that it is India—with other enemies of Pakistan—that exploits dormant tensions and brings them to the surface. By insisting that these cleavages would not otherwise pose a problem, the Pakistan Army is able to retain its conventional focus against India while seemingly attending to the domestic threat.
This is not simply a rhetorical approach but an institutional survival strategy for the Pakistan Army. A core tenet of the army’s strategic culture is that the army, out of all Pakistan’s institutions, is best suited to protect Pakistan’s ideological as well as territorial frontiers. Should relations with India improve, the army would find it more difficult to justify its claim on national resources. Thus, the army is itself the single most likely spoiler of any rapprochement. But the army has also ensured the diffusion of its strategic culture throughout civilian institutions as well as the popular imagination. This too makes an enduring rapprochement with India less probable—but not impossible.
Alas, this exercise will not satisfy those who insist on isolating the effect of strategic culture, the independent variable, from behavior, the dependent variable. In most cases, Pakistan’s strategic culture does translate into a series of behaviors that it encourages and even requires. But the interaction between strategic culture and behavior sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish the two. For example, Pakistan continues to develop its views of India through its engagement in wars and skirmishes, entry into which is driven by these same perceptions. Similarly, Pakistan’s negotiations with the United States both shape and vindicate Pakistan’s core beliefs about its partner. The failure to distinguish cause and effect may be the fault of the current effort or of the ways scholars try to define this dynamic or both.
My research suggests that it would be unwise to expect that the army will move away from these discourses and the behaviors that they not only enable but also encourage. The Pakistan Army is unlikely to give up its attempts to manipulate events in Afghanistan, and it will work to ensure that Pakistan’s civilians do not undermine its interests there. Similarly, the army views India as an existential threat that it must resist; failure to do this is the only defeat the army cannot accept—even if its victory comes at the cost of a hollow state. The army’s tools for pursuing these objectives will likely remain its alliances with the United States and China as well as asymmetric warfare under Pakistan’s ever expanding nuclear umbrella.
Living with Pakistan’s Persistent Revisi
onism?
My research detailed in this volume makes the case that Pakistan’s revisionism is not likely to disappear within any policy-relevant time horizon. The elements of Pakistan’s strategic culture that motivate it to be risk-acceptant, if not actively risk-seeking, in pursuing its revisionist agenda are enduring and are rooted in Pakistan’s history and its social development. This suggests that the United States and others should stop attempting to transform the Pakistan Army, or Pakistan for that matter. It is unlikely that the United States can offer Pakistan any incentive that would be so valuable to Pakistan and its security interests that the army would abandon the varied tools it has developed to manage its security competition with India, much less consider a durable rapprochement. As the past history of US–Pakistan engagement attests amply, conventional weaponry and military training cannot address Pakistan’s neuralgic existential fear of India and its resistance to the prospect of Indian hegemony. Given the army’s narrative of its history with the United States, security guarantees are also unlikely to persuade Pakistan to accept the status quo.
Fighting to the End Page 44
