Reforming the Armed Forces

It is perhaps not surprising that the military regime’s zeal for reform remains limited to civilian sectors. Since October 12, 1999, the military regime has been trying to revamp and restructure almost every state institution with evangelical zeal – the bureaucracy, police, political system, constitution, laws, sports, post office, railways, CBR, etc. The only exceptions are the Armed Forces, although as Admiral Mansoorul Haq’s case demonstrates, the ‘monitors’ themselves need to be monitored and reformed.

Like any institution in a status quo society, the Armed Forces badly need reforms as well. And in a country like Pakistan, only a military regime can undertake this task. A civilian government will, first of all, not be allowed to do it and even if it tried, it would be destabilised.

Making the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report public, sacking Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan or going to India at the invitation of the Indian Prime Minister are easier for a military regime. Civilian governments taking these steps would be defensive, promptly accused of “treason”, “sell-out” or being “anti-national”.

A recent cartoon in an Urdu newspaper aptly summed up this double-standard: a bearded gentleman is asked whether it is ‘halal’ or ‘haram’ for the government of Pakistan to talk to India, and he answers “it is ‘halal’ for the military but ‘haram’ for the civilians”!

Top priority needs to be given to reforms in key areas. First, the issue of accountability and corruption as it extends to the Armed Forces. News reports in the Pakistani press, which have not been denied, have stated that in defence deals in the last 20 years, of approximately $10 billion in purchases of military equipment, almost 10%, i.e., $ 1 billion, has been siphoned off through corruption, commissions and kickbacks. Obviously, the beneficiaries of such largesse would be senior serving or retired personnel. Last July, the Prosecutor General of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) was on record stating that of the “six dubious defence deals” NAB was then supposed to be investigating, “in only one deal, kickbacks worth $147 million were paid”. Admiral Mansoorul Haq’s extradition from the United States is probably a link in the same chain.

The Admiral’s case is somewhat special. He is the first Service chief, a four-star general, to be caught with his “hand in the cookie jar”. He is the first to have been sacked on charges of corruption, and that too by a civilian government. He is the first Pakistani to be extradited from the United States. And he is the first four-star general to face trial in Pakistan on corruption charges, and that too under a military dispensation.

Given the passion for accountability which the military regime has demonstrated mostly in the case of civilians – politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen – in the interests of across-the-board even-handedness, it should make public the results of the NAB investigation into the 6 ‘dubious’ defence deals that were apparently investigated a year ago, as stated by its Prosecutor General. This would also belie those cynics and critics who feel that the Admiral has been made a one-off example, show-cased for public relations purposes, because as a navy man, he represents the weakest military arm.

The second issue of reforming the armed forces is that of transparency in non-combat defence expenditures, which is all the more important given Pakistan’s serious economic crunch with annual growth dipping to an all time low of 2.5%. If civilian budgets are made accountable for the way money is spent or misused, the defence budget too should be subject to public scrutiny. And some aspects of khaki ostentation are no longer congruent with our economic realities, namely, large limousines or spacious mansions and messes.

This transparency should be extended to other areas of policy, which have wider implications. Even though delayed, the military regime made a good beginning by publishing the Hamoodur Rahman Report although its contents showed its military predecessors in a bad light. Similarly, the report prepared by the Command and Staff College, Quetta, still classified but available at its library on the 1965 War should also be made public. These events are part of our history, and people need to know what happened and what went wrong.

The third area of reforming the armed forces is its recruitment policy, which, for the most part, has been a colonial holdover. Recently, in a welcome change, the Pakistan Army’s Adjutant General announced the “first ever rational recruitment policy” aimed at the interior of Sind and Balochistan. The recruitment policies of the armed forces were derived from the British colonial outlook that preferred recruitment from what were termed as “martial races”, a codeword for loyalty to the Crown, which basically meant a few districts of the Punjab and the Frontier provinces.

Bengalis, Sindhis and the Baloch were deliberately excluded, with the result that while the Armed Forces may be national in outlook, ethos and orientation, their composition remains quite lop-sided with over 90% representation to just two provinces. Interestingly, while the Baloch are recruited into the Oman Army, they have token representation in our own Armed Forces. And in over half a century, there has never been a Sindhi general in the Pakistan Army. It is good that the military regime has developed awareness of this problem, and there are serious efforts on this count. Need we recall that one of the major grievances of the Bengalis was that they were systematically denied entry into the Army on the spurious plea that they were “physically not fit” to serve since they were supposed to be short in stature. As one prominent Bengali intellectual remarked, that if height is decreed an index of a ‘martial race’, then, by that reckoning, what about an average Vietnamese being shorter than the average Bengali!

Today, the Bangladesh Army has been the first in South Asia to admit women to its military academy as cadets.

Military recruitment is an important issue, and given the wider role of the armed forces in Pakistan, it has acquired a political dimension as well. It is thus no accident that whenever there is a military regime in Pakistan, the smaller provinces see it as akin to “Punjabi domination”, mainly because of the overwhelming Punjabi presence in the Army. This needs to be changed as part of a conscious and clear policy, which should be enunciated publicly as well.

Finally, a caveat regarding what is definitely a unique feature of the present military regime. This is the first military regime that is not only ruling but also involved in actual governance. That role is evident from the large-scale induction of military personnel in civilian posts, a normal feature of any military regime. More importantly, an organized, widespread Army Monitoring system now serves as an autonomous watchdog over various layers of officialdom, somewhat similar to the role of the Communist Party political commissars that were the ‘eyes and ears’ of any communist system.

A three-fold danger could result from such a situation. First, the “civilianisation” of the military, reflected in different ways, all detrimental to the armed forces: erosion of discipline over time, seeping in of corrupt practices, and a lowering of esteem and espirit de corps as the army interacts intimately with civilians unlike the insularity of the “cantonment culture”. Second, the civil bureaucracy is either supplanted or viewed with suspicion. Third, restructuring Pakistani society without reforming the armed forces could create a new khaki-mufti divide in an already polarised polity. Military reform should be a top priority, because when the civilians return, as they must by 2002, the armed forces status of a “holy cow”, reinforced after October 12, precludes any possibility of attempting reform under the mufti.