The army chief’s statement
December 24th, 2011
So complete is the military’s hold over politics that a mere statement will perhaps not be enough to lower currents tensions in the country’s polity. Still, Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s statement that the army is not plotting a coup against the elected government is welcome and should lead to some reduction in the tension. That it came a day after Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani openly voiced his fears that the moves were being made to send his government packing shows that at least for the moment the army probably will not risk an overt coup. As anti-government as the sentiment among many in the country may be, a military coup is the last thing anyone wants.
That said, even if the army has decided that an overt coup is not plausible right now, there are other ways in which it has in the past interfered with the democratic process. It is an open secret that the military leadership is not happy with President Asif Ali Zardari and they could engineer his resignation while allowing the government to serve out its term. In that context, disavowing a coup is not the same thing as promising to be subservient to a civilian government and to parliament. The government indirectly admitted its weakness when in an affidavit it submitted to the Supreme Court, the ministry of defence said that it had no control over the military. The army chief’s statement does nothing to change that.
In an ideal world, the civilian government would not have to worry about the military, which should be under its control, just like any other institution of the state. However, the fact is that the government will have to wrest control back piece-by-piece. It must begin by standing its ground on Memogate and should demand that if at all the actions of one person are to be investigated, then those of the other, also mentioned in the transcripts, should be probed. Additionally, the PPP needs to be more open about the challenges it faces and not equivocate on issues when it needs to take a stand. In that context, the prime minister’s speech on the floor of the National Assembly on December 22 was most timely and one hopes that the party will now perhaps find its voice which held it in good stead during many years of military dictatorship.
After the Salala probe report
December 24th, 2011
The much-awaited report on the Salala attack by a Nato-Isaf airborne force on November 26 is out and it will not satisfy the Pakistan Army and the Pakistani nation at large. It accepts some blame but links the incident to lack of trust, lack of coordination and ‘first fire’ from the Pakistani side. The report, however, acknowledges that ‘efforts to determine who was firing on the US troops and whether there were friendly Pakistani forces in the area failed because US forces used inaccurate maps, were unaware of Pakistani border post locations and mistakenly provided the wrong location for the troops’. Pakistan did not cooperate with the Pentagon inquiry.
Pentagon’s Brigadier-General Stephen Clark, who led the investigation, however, made it clear that ‘US forces were fired on first and acted in self-defence’. The biggest flaw in the probe is that while it claims that the US forces reacted in self-defence, it is not sure who really fired the first shot. Additionally, ‘US officials gave Pakistan liaison officers the wrong location of the firefight and were told again that no Pakistani troops were in that region’ and ‘US troops did not know that two relatively new and spare Pakistani outposts, reportedly called Volcano and Boulder, were just over the border from the village that was the target of the operation’.
This means that the US will not apologise, Pakistan will get no satisfaction, and the Nato supply line through Pakistan will remain blocked. As it is, Pakistan has almost given its final verdict on the issue saying it will not take a simple apology, although some quarters hoped that some such gesture from Washington would soften the stance of the Pakistan Army and the supplies would be resumed. The reaction to November 26 in Pakistan was intense and consensual, which means that anger rather than realism would propel any further development. The Pakistan Army has been backed by parliament in Islamabad, by the sitting PPP government, the media and the man in the street. This additionally means that any gesture of conciliation towards the US will arouse ghairat (sense of national honour), which is never fulfilled unless it is accompanied by honourable self-damage.
Politicians and clerics have united behind the army’s decision to confront America. The clerics have actually given a call to jihad in Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan, warning the government that if the Nato supply line is reopened, their non-state actors will attack the Nato trucks and set them on fire. The national consensus has thus been joined by the non-state actors, who not long ago were seen attacking innocent Pakistanis ‘to teach Pakistan a lesson for allying itself with America’. The escalation of ‘ghairat’ this time is more intense because of the shame felt at the way the affair of CIA agent Raymond Davis was handled by the government in February-March. After having announced that Davis would be hanged for killing two Pakistanis, the government had buckled and let him off the hook on a blood-money (diyat) payoff.
Unless the GHQ in Rawalpindi relents, the spiral of escalation of hatred will continue and lead to more incidents. TV anchors note that since Pakistan started acting tough, the Americans have backed off from their drone attacks, giving Pakistan the longest reprieve so far. More ominously, they take account of the fact that after Pakistan began taking on America, al Qaeda and its affiliates have stopped their suicide bombings against innocent Pakistanis. This kind of thinking is dangerous since it presumes that the army, finding itself either unwilling or unable to respond to the challenge of al Qaeda’s terrorism, has succumbed to the organisation’s strategy of causing a rift between Pakistan and the US.
According to the latest State Bank midterm report, the national economy is facing a meltdown. This means that, in the coming months, a tsunami of unemployed and hungry people will hit the roads and paralyse the country, making even minimal governance impossible. The non-state actors now backed by the state are actually working for al Qaeda and will be harmful to Pakistan after they have ‘defeated’ the US as they did the late Soviet Union. They tried to kill General Musharraf three times and have attacked the GHQ once.