Stupidity goes nuclear — II

The executive can’t be expected to read up on nuclear and military strategy, but they can encourage civilians.

Pakistan took a good decision, as early as February 2000, to set up a National Command Authority (NCA) to streamline all aspects of its nuclear-related activities, weaponised and non-weaponised. The NCA, therefore, exercises both executive and administrative functions .

The ECC (Employment Control Committee), initially headed by the president, is now headed by the prime minister (PM) and is the apex body, while the DCC (Development Control Committee) deals with technical, financial and administrative control over all organisations involved with the nuclear programme and also oversees research and development of the strategic weapons programme. The system is three-tiered and the Strategic Plans Division (SPD) acts as the NCA secretariat. There are other details but we don’t require them for our purpose here.

The question is: Despite the PM heading the agency, technically, where does he get input from on what, for instance, the DCC is doing? While the ECC is a higher body, what mechanisms and expertise are available to civilians to determine the viability of a weapon system and the strategic thought underpinning it?

I can say with certainty that the answer is none. An April 19 ISPR press release told us that the president and the prime minister have congratulated the military-scientific complex on the NASR (short range surface-to-surface multi-tube ballistic missile Hatf IX) achievement. Deeply ironic that is and also very troubling. But let me give another example.

Last year, the military decided to do an army-level exercise — though it was to be modularly sequenced — and held a briefing. The directors-general of military training and ISPR, both outstanding officers, were presenting the rationale for Azm-e-Nau III. When I inquired if the civilian government or the minister of defence had any involvement in the decision to hold the exercise, I was told the civilian government was in the loop. What that means is that the government is informed and it lets the army do what the latter wants. In plain, simple terms, that has to, and must, change.

Conspicuous by his absence was also the director-general of the SPD from that briefing, which made me wonder how the military could carry out an exercise without reference to the nuclear overhang under which any conflict would necessarily unfold. This is just one example of compartmentalised decision-making which is downright dangerous and naive.

It is, of course, difficult for civilian governments to bell the military cat. But what adds to the problem is the total lack of capacity and the will to do it. The way successive civilian governments have treated the defence portfolio is a manifestation of this hands-off approach. The think tanks that deal with issues of strategy, whether national security or operational, are all dominated by the military’s thinking and its allies in the Foreign Office. There is no attempt to challenge those paradigms even intellectually.

The president and the prime minister can’t be expected to read up on nuclear strategy or military/operational strategy. But what they can do, and have failed to, is to encourage those civilians who have an interest in these issues and can mount a challenge to the thinking that dominates Islamabad and, in the past, has not redounded to Pakistan’s advantage.

The army and the ISI have long been running their own show; now SPD, which boasts of some very good officers, also seems to be falling into the trap of non-strategic thinking while claiming to handle strategic forces. When I spoke with two former brigadiers, Feroz Hassan Khan and Naeem Salik, both outstanding officers and decidedly the most informed on issues of nuclear strategy, they unanimously considered the decision to move towards TNWs (tactical nuclear weapons) as deeply flawed. In fact, The Express Tribune would do well to get both of them to write on this issue which is terribly important. TNWs is an evil that needs to be nipped in the bud, especially because it seems like the military-scientific combine is developing a Dr Strangelove syndrome.

The lesson in this is to develop a challenge to the military’s claim that it knows what is best for the security of Pakistan. It does not; it should only deal with military/operational strategy formulated under the national security strategy determined by civilian principals. That is where the military’s expertise comes in, though that is another area where civilians need to develop the capacity to monitor what the military does.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 27^th, 2011.