Long and short of it

The military just doesn’t get enough credit for their long-term thinking. They are true visionaries, with a proper 100-year plan in place. Forget the here and now, our military leadership has their eyes firmly fixed on the far-flung future. But Sami (you argue), what about the disastrous short-term thinking they exhibited when they offered their camouflaged teats to the Taliban and al Qaeda for suckling? Their refusal to see how getting in bed with monsters is likely to give you monster-herpes has resulted in us being trapped in a long-term abusive relationship with diseased psychotics. To that I say, you poor simplistic fools. What you see as strategic buffoonery by a group of men with more khaki than sense, I recognise as a strategic move in a game of chess that will last for a century.

Case in point: Most analysts agree that the current virulent outbreak of revolutions across the Middle East is caused by a large population of educated youths who are jobless and thus frustrated, and have access to the internet to organise themselves. Our army looks at that and sees the damage a revolution can cause and comes up with a solution so brilliant it deserves an Oscar, Nobel and Lux Style Award for Brilliance. See, Unesco recently released a report stating that 37 per cent of our population is under 15. That is a lot of pimply angst-ridden young people who will, in a few years, stop being distracted by games of mock-suicide bombing and start wondering what the world has to offer them. They can, if properly educated, start seeing that they deserve rights and a decent standard of living. Next thing you know they will be organising flash mobs through the social networking tools of their day and, pretty soon, you have a massive revolution underway. But revolutions can be messy. They can be chaotic, uncontrollable and, worst of all, empowering. The army high command doesn’t want to deal with that problem arising in a decade or so. Their strategy? Take out the one element that could possibly nurture such a revolutionary mindset — education. That is why, the same report reveals, we are being forced to spend seven times more on weapons acquisition for the army than on education. That way, people remain uneducated and thus ignorant of their rights and so no revolutions happen. It is a solution that is as brilliant as Alexander slicing through the Gordian knot. Only, in this case, the knot is our chances at a better future and Alexander is a COAS with a low opinion of the rights of the average Pakistani. Oh and the sword is probably an overpriced but outdated F-16.

But Sami (you say again), if the army isn’t well equipped then how will we defend ourselves against those treacherous Indians who want to invade our country, enslave our people and ban us from playing cricket? My answer is that I am not advocating cutting our entire military budget. No one wants to send our young soldiers into battle, clad in nothing but a towel and wielding sticks. You can actually provide universal primary education with just one-fifth of our military budget. That still leaves enough money to keep General Kayani in cigars for fifteen lifetimes.

But then, if those masses get educated, they just might start demanding luxuries like sanitation and water, resources the new Human Development Index published by the UNDP says that 42.9 per cent of our population still lacks. And no one wants that. A well-fed, well-educated population is more likely to think for themselves. Which means they are quite likely to think the army is wasting their money and killing their progress. In the short and long term.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2011.