The Rogue Army That Owns Pakistan

ON APRIL 16, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir delivered a speech to a gather­ing of Pakistanis who had come to Islam­abad from different parts of the world. Even by the standards of the Pakistan army, what Munir said was provocative. The entire syl­labus of ‘Pakistan Studies’—the country’s hagiography—was regurgitated in a few minutes. All the standard tropes, Hindus and Muslims being different, the ability of the Pakistan army to “fix” Baloch rebels, and the survival of Pakistan against all odds were outlined with gusto in the general’s speech. A week later, four terrorists killed 28 tourists in Pahalgam, India.

The link between the two events is unmistakable. The terror­ists, two Pakistanis and two local proxies, are believed to belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist organisation incubated and nurtured by the Pakistani state. LeT has a long history of attacking India as a ‘deniable’ front of the Pakistan army, from the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008 to the Pahalgam strike. The Pakistan army has nurtured other organisations for these tasks as well, for ex­ample Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

In a normal country the army is tasked with a specific goal: defending it against external enemies and, when called upon by the government, to handle internal security challenges as well. In Pakistan, this paradigm broke very early, in 1958, when the army decided to assume the role of the government. As a result, over time, it became the sole arbiter of national life. The result was the militarisation of every aspect of life in Pakistan. From run­ning fertiliser factories to tackling insurgencies and from keeping provinces in check to indulging in “election engineering”, the army has been everywhere. A single organisation to have multiple—and mostly conflicting—objectives is bound to get overwhelmed at some point. Those strains were visible in Munir’s speech.

What triggered it all? One answer is Pakistan’s growing crisis of governability. The country suffers from a spavined federalism where provinces do not have a say even in managing their own affairs in a limited sense of the word. To manage these strains, the army takes decisions and not elected governments, which in any case are a rarity. This leads to even greater strains instead of an equitable equilibrium.

On March 11, Baloch insurgents hijacked the Jaffar Express, a long-distance train that runs between Quetta in Balochistan and Peshawar in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The hijacking took place in the restive Kachhi district of Balochistan. Twenty-one sol­diers and civilians were killed in the incident. Three days later, the authorities detained Mahrang Baloch—the pre-eminent leader of Baloch nationalists—in a bid to squash the incipient movement before it spread further. It was the fifth time that Balochistan had rebelled against the Pakistani capital. From the forced abdica­tion of the Khan of Kalat—the natural ruler of Balochistan—in March 1948 under the watchful eyes of Muhammad Ali Jinnah to General Pervez Musharraf’s infamous statement—“they won’t know what hit them”—Balochistan has been at the receiving end of the Pakistan army. Even after suffering massive losses over the decades, the Baloch have not given up. The army’s standard response is to round up Baloch youngsters, not just in their home­land but in cities like Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad where they go to study. The same approach had informed the army’s actions in East Pakistan, with disastrous consequences.

The approach in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is different. There, the army managed to create a parallel infrastructure of terrorism to trouble, to begin with, the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan. The same template was put in place when the Americans landed in Kabul in 2001. Double-dealing is second nature to Pakistan and it was not surprising that American men, material and goods were allowed to flow through Chaman into Afghanistan even as the insurgent leaders plotted their next moves in Afghanistan while sitting in Quetta, not far from the Afghan border.

In the end, such double dealing spawned the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which became a sworn enemy of its masters. After the ‘liberation’ of Kabul, the new masters of Afghanistan also turned against Pakistan. It was an experiment that had gone bad. Today, Balochistan is out of control and the Pakistan army is unable to wrest control of Parachinar in Kurram district from terrorists. These days, it is normal in Parachinar for members of the besieged Shia Muslim community to be killed while trying to escape the dragnet of terrorists nurtured by the army. The army’s illusion of control has created more problems than what it set out to solve. The more it tries to grasp a province, the more it slips out of its hands like sand.

How did matters come to such a pass? When the army began ‘owning’ Pakistan back in 1958, it behaved as a normal organ­isation with somewhat perverse incentives, as would happen in the same situation anywhere. The army began cornering an ever-rising amount of financial, budgetary and other resources even as provinces began voicing their dissent. To justify these economic choices the army needed an enemy and that was read­ily available in the form of India. But in the wake of the Afghan wars (1979-88 and 2001-21), this scaffolding further refined itself to claim that the army was the “Guardian of Pakistan’s ideological frontiers.” Asim Munir’s speech reflected that reality.

But the problem for the army is the growing gap between its ideological profession and its actual ability to guard those fron­tiers—real and imagined. The Taliban put paid to the illusion of the ideological frontier while India’s responses to the Uri (2016) and Pulwama (2019) misadventures demolished the other illu­sion: if India threw even a stone in Pakistan’s direction, it risked a nuclear retaliation.

It was painful for Pakistan to be made aware of the nuclear limitation barely a year after one of the architects of its nuclear strategy, Khalid Kidwai, former director general of the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), had told a foreign audience that his country had deterred India at all three levels—strategic, operational and tactical—and had “ensured peace” with its eastern neighbour.

Peace would have prevailed had Pakistan not continued to use LeT and JeM to carry out repeated military-style attacks on Indian soil. These, it imagined, gave it “plausible deniability” even as In­dia and Indians writhed in pain from losses inflicted by a rogue state. Truth be told, the ‘nuclear overhang’ over India was more a figment of imagination on the part of a political leadership than a realistic assessment of the military situation. Once the bluff was called, the Pakistan army was left without options.

So it will be in the wake of Pahalgam. And it will not be a repeat of the past.

But are matters so simple? Is the Pakistan army alone to be blamed for what it has done to India? There is a twist in the tale.

About five weeks ago, the brothers of investigative journalist Ahmad Noorani ‘disappeared’ from their home in Islamabad. Noorani, who works for an investigative portal called FactFocus, relocated from Pakistan after his reports became ‘inconvenient’ for the army brass. A petition was filed in the Islamabad High Court but after more than a month, the judge hearing the case, Inam Ameen Minhas, refused to issue a writ of habeas corpus to produce the two in his court. The Pakistani press, for obvious reasons, downplayed the case and its proceedings. But the wails of their mother could not be silenced. Every time she appears in the high court, she returns with tears. All that she has for comfort are a handful of Noorani’s friends who stand by her.

The use of the word ‘disappeared’ in sentences like “he was disappeared” is not just a grammatical perversion but a reflec­tion of deeper subversion in Pakistani society. The cases of Noorani’s brothers, Mahrang Baloch and her colleagues, Ali Wazir, Manzoor Pashteen, and thousands of others reflect the anger against the Pakistan army and the fear. If one were to read articles in the mainstream press about the army and more freewheeling commentary on social media, it would seem that the “institution”—an­other coded word for the army—was deeply unpopular.

That would be an overstatement and a mistake.

The reality in Pakistan is paradoxical and those who have visited the country or have friends there will attest to it. The very people who resent the army’s undemocratic ways are also reflexively anti-Indian and when push comes to shove, they can make their anti-army sentiments disappear in a jiffy (and not in the sense of ‘disappeared’ as it applies to the army). This Janus-faced existence is the deep well of support and sustenance available to the Pakistan army. It knows its people well.

Some of this was visible within hours of the decisions taken by India’s Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). Routine critics of the Paki­stan army turned into shrill anti-India voices, blaming the Indian press for “jingoism”.

It is against this backdrop that Munir’s speech must be evaluated. The army, belea­guered by mounting troubles in Balochistan, inability to regain control over the Parachi­nar region in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and anger and blockades in Sindh over the controversial Cholistan Canal project, pressed the right buttons. And as if by magic, the critics and dissenters began to fall in line. In the days to come, the army will begin to regain the narrative control, if it had lost it in the first place, and soon enough it will go back to business as usual. Those five men in a meadow with dozens of innocent tourists worked wonders for the brass in Rawalpindi.

What can, and more importantly should, India do with Paki­stan? For starters, it must disabuse itself of any notion that Pakistan’s educated citizens, let alone its hoi polloi, are in any way detached from its army. They are chained to the army, willingly and happily. This has lessons for Indian policymakers: ignore any voice that says “geography cannot be wished away” or that “we must build a peace constituency in Pakistan” or, more crudely, dreams of aman ki asha.

The second lesson is that hitting Pakistan (say, by ensuring that the waters of Indian rivers are not available to it) is as good as hit­ting the Pakistan army. The more internally disturbed Pakistan is, the more stretched its army will be. To that extent, the long-term Indian strategy outlined in the CCS decisions is sound. What it needs is time and national will. It also needs the defanging of the constituency that Pakistan has built in India, the one that India could never build (for structural reasons) across the Radcliffe Line. The rest is a matter of military detail.

Asim MunirBalochistanChief of Army Staff Generalhijacked Jaffar ExpressIndia-PakistanPahalgamShehbaz Sharifterror attack