Raiding the challenge

The American special forces raid that got Osama bin Laden has brought into sharp salience several structural problems that beset Pakistan, none of them new but all of them now up for a pressing debate. Consider.

The first issue is a well-known one — namely, the civil-military imbalance. While the military was reeling from the embarrassment of the raid and its implications, the civilian principals were going ahead with the oath-taking of PML-Q ministers inducted in the government to keep it afloat even as it remains largely dysfunctional. The sense was, we don’t know anything, it’s not our domain, and the military is handling it.

There was a mix of indifference and inability, because of lack of capacity, to formulate a response, and just a tinge of schadenfreude at finding the military in a tight spot. What was left unsaid was more important than what was said: The military likes to be in the driver’s seat on foreign and security policies, so let them clean up the mess also.

The irony, however, is that while this moment gives the civilian principals an opportunity to turn it into an episode and extract space for themselves, they are unlikely to do so because secret happiness at the military’s unease does not automatically translate into the ability to proactively take charge of the country’s affairs.

It’s a vicious cycle. The military says it doesn’t want to be upfront but is often pushed into that role because the civilian side of the power configuration simply couldn’t care less. But even factoring in the civilian indifference and lack of capacity, this argument employs dissembling by focusing on the immediate rather than looking at the longer trajectory. After years of keeping the civilians away from monitoring itself, the military cannot now blame them for not having the capacity to deal with foreign and security policies without acknowledging two things — it must accept blame for such lack of capacity in the civilian enclave and it should admit that its organisational biases have helped perpetuate the status quo. While it keeps doing tactical adjustments, its broader definition of security remains largely unchanged.

This leads to another structural problem. How does Pakistan formulate a national response to the current situation? Presently, the sum-total of foreign and security policies is perceived by the majority of people as the military’s response. That perception, grounded in reality, has not helped the country.

The third problem thrown up by the military’s dominance is the subservience of foreign policy to the security policy. This structural anomaly has dogged us since the fifties. One of its results is that Pakistan has always tried to develop a military response to potential threats even as those threats, for the most part, have evolved and often matured because of its military responses. What we see is the spillage and backwash of the same policies that were, and are, supposed to secure Pakistan.

States address threats through a multitude of policies, military and non-military. In fact, where institutions are not out of joint or where the military is not the dominant player, hard and soft components of power supplement each other. While hard power is meant to secure space for the projection of soft power, the latter, a consequence of knowledge-based society and economy, procures for the state the scientific-technological capacity and lucre that adds to the hard power.

By making foreign policy kowtow to security policy, Pakistan has reduced rather than enhanced its options to both address existing threats and prevent new ones from developing. Not only has the Foreign Office steadily lost space to the military-intelligence combine, it has now developed a group of officers, retired and serving, who generally favour military responses to threats instead of developing non-military sets of policies to increase security. This approach has left Pakistan with little room for deft manoeuvring.

The security-dominated approach has also meant little or no emphasis on developing other sectors — trade, economy, education, infrastructure and industrial development, culture etc. The quality of human resource is mind-bogglingly poor. These limitations, each in its own right and all in tandem with each other, throw up internal threats far in excess of any external aggression.

Add to these indices the problem of growing intolerance and proactive and politically-motivated religiosity that wants to capture the state and has an interminable supply of recruits from among the youth bulge and we are talking about a veritable, fast-ticking time bomb. To think that any of these threats can rely on military responses would be to take naïveté to its most naive.

The military leadership says the American attacking force could come in and leave undetected because they used highly advanced technical means. Correct. They also say that a military which survives on a budget of $4.2 billion cannot be expected to match, in a direct contest, a military whose funds are now exceeding $500 billion. True. But there is a reality beyond these stats. The US would not have had to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty if we had not straitjacketed ourselves through policies that are rejected by the entire world, friends and foes alike.

So, this is not just an issue of developing military responses. This ingress should give us some food for thought about how to define security — or more aptly, how to redefine it. That is a challenge Pakistan has been refusing to take on. Given the consequences, the country cannot afford to leave these issues unattended.

Let there be no doubt that a state needs hard power. Nor should this analysis be jumped on as justifying a pacifist approach. The paradox of strategy is captured most incisively by the Roman dictum si vis pacem para bellum — if you want to have peace, prepare [for] war. I hold by this. But my point is related to two other facts: One, preparing for war does not mean fighting one; it means deterring war. Two, such preparation is not just a function of having a strong military but requires a strong nation. And a nation is much more than the military it keeps as a manifestation not just of its hard power but also, crucially, as a symbol of its own consensus and identity.

The Pakistani military has failed singularly in the performance of both functions. It has pursued policies that have diluted deterrence and it has alienated itself from the people of this country. Is the military prepared to sit with the civilians and accept new TORs? Are the civilians prepared to go beyond issuing inane statements and assert themselves?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2011.