THE NEWS
Wajahat S Khan
Saturday, September 24, 2011

There are two types of arms in an army: fighting and supporting. Out of the fighting arms – those which bear the brunt of frontline action – Pakistan’s army features three branches: the armoured corps (comprised of tanks), the infantry (foot as well as mechanised troops) and the artillery (constituted by, unsurprisingly, some very big guns).

Effectively, an army officer’s early years are spent learning the basics of the arm he is attached to. For example, before he was a general, General Zia commanded a troop, a squadron, a unit, a brigade and even a division of tanks. Little surprise that he was a bit of a tank (in an insensitive, power-tripped kind of way) himself when it came to eliminating the opposition. Like the forbidding equipment he was trained on as a young officer, Zia had an iron-fist, scorched earth, destroy-it-all approach to his adversaries. Most interestingly, his end – caused by a huge explosion – was also similar to the destruction of a tank. If he had not exploded in mid-air, he most probably would have kept pulverising Pakistan.

Similarly, before he was a ‘commando’ or even the ‘chief executive’, General Musharraf was an artilleryman (or a gunner, as all such soldiers are called). Gunners have a notable reputation in the army. Sure, they see a lot of front-line action, but every soldier knows that gunners are never really in the thick of things. Thanks to their calculators, compasses, maps, and protractors and yes, guns (huge, overcompensating guns), their tertiary, secondary and primary jobs are to scare, badger or blow (respectively) the opposition from miles away. Unfortunately, due to inaccuracy in their calculations, and despite good surveillance and/or intelligence, gunners may end up either missing the enemy, killing civilians and sometimes even their own forces – and because of entrenchment, they rarely ever get to see what’s coming. For those who watch Musharraf the politico, this should all sound very familiar.

Commandos, on the other hand, are snobby know-it-alls who are trained to survive before being trained to kill. Clearly, in retrospect, Mush was more of an artilleryman and less of a commando, but did have a bit of both worlds in him: inherent inaccuracy, combined with a propensity to be a know-it-all, but without any survival instincts.

Musharraf’s artillery regiment is also famous for another, more generous act: when it can no longer – usually thanks to a technological upgrade – use a certain gun, it transfers that weapon to the infantry. For example, mortars were once used by the artillery, but are now deployed by our foot soldiers. Call it a transition of power, or a deathly tradition of hand-me-down, but the gunners and the Queen of Battle (as the infantry is universally referred to) share a special relationship: what is unfit for the artillery, the infantry makes do with.

Pakistan’s ‘Soldier’s Soldier’, General Ashfaq Kayani, is an infantryman, and he is making do with what the artilleryman Musharraf left him with. In his almost 40 years with the army, Kayani has commanded a lot of men (sections, platoons, units, brigades, divisions, even corps and yes, one very, very important directorate), but as an “infantarian”, his early training denied him the steel-blanket security of a tank or the embedded safety of a distant gun position.

Before the motorcades, the MI and SSG details, the trips to Spain, the Time Magazine power rankings, the golf presidencies and the ivory cigarette filters, Kayani was trained to be a foot soldier and face fire: directly and with little protection. That should say something about his martial raisons d’état.

More than armour’s cavaliers, or the keen, lean and mean gunners, (yes, that is what artillerymen are lovingly referred to in the army, though Mush doesn’t qualify for any of those terms these days) Kayani’s early schooling instilled in him the critical doctrine of the fighting arms: at the end of the day, the guns and the tanks might do a lot of damage, but it is the infantryman who always secures an objective. Thus, a good infantryman always has to be his ‘own man’.

And it doesn’t end there. A good infantry officer also has to work harder to protect his men and assets than his armour and artillery colleagues. Why? Because without the hardened protection of armour, and the covered distance of artillery, all bets are off for safety when the infantry’s foot soldiers are deployed. So infantry officers, used to higher fatalities in the field – where they confront danger directly in the eye – have a natural proclivity to be more cautious and protect their own when it comes to battlefield engagements.

That is the tip of the iceberg of what is the Kayani doctrine: Pakistan’s Silent Soldier is naturally more conservative in his cost-benefit analysis of committing troops to battle, thus he can be expected to resort to unconventional tactics where the costs of engagement seem low: espionage, subterfuge, asymmetrical warfare and what the army calls ‘minor ops’. Compounded by his ‘son of the soil’ Jhelum roots, Kayani can also be held to better understand the larger psyche of the army (most of that armed force is constituted of infantry troops).

As for his resume, (DG-ISI, DG-MO, X corps commander, Benazir’s deputy military secretary) it looks like he has always been the right guy in the right place at the right time...But that perfect coincidence begs the question: Was Kayani ‘groomed’ by the Establishment – Pakistan’s Deep State – to be the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, at least for the rest of us?



Email: wajskhan@gmail.com