Taking stock of May 1

September 6, 1965 — senior army officers in Pakistan slept as Indian troops rolled towards the Lahore border. Fast-forward and we have senior Pakistani generals apparently asleep while American SEALs launch an operation in Abbottabad. This also happened when the US fired its Tomahawk missiles in the 1990s on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This latest incident drives one lesson home: We cannot pretend to sleep peacefully at night since those whose job it is to guard us seem to be failing.

There are two concerns regarding what happened on May 1, both of which are not heartening. The first issue pertains to the ISPR’s claim that bin Laden’s presence was just a case of intelligence failure. This is extremely worrying, since Abu Farraj alLibbi was captured from Abbottabad in 2003 and Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek in early 2011. So how come the intelligence agencies lost sight of this garrison town? Surely any intelligence agency can make errors of judgement but then there is a process of the government auditing such military incompetence. In Pakistan’s case, there is little possibility of that. In fact, the military is engaged in creating a narrative which is biased in its favour. Three recent publications, Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis State, edited by Maleeha Lodhi, Javed Jabbar’s Pakistan — Unique origins; Unique destiny? and Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country present the military as the only efficient institution of the state. Now we know that this is not the case.

The other concern is: What if this was not a case of failure but a result of the military’s overall bias for appeasing militant non-state actors? These concerns cannot be redressed through simple measures such as someone in the military resigning. This requires a serious audit of what happened. For those who will get jittery at the idea and imagine that this suggestion is some foreign conspiracy, the fact is that organisations only survive through accountability and transparency.

There is a need for questioning the manner in which intelligence agencies conduct their business, for instance. Although the army chief has ordered an inquiry, we know what usually is the outcome of such inquiries. A fair inquiry requires a neutral setting, which means that this is a time for another neutral report like the Hamoodur Rehman Commission report which should inquire into the matter and be bound to declare its results within a certain time frame, and do so publicly. Another necessary step is for the government to initiate another white paper on the working of the defence sector, with the objective of bringing about critical changes in the military. The last time any restructuring was done in the defence sector was during the 1970s when we saw the reaction of a fairly strong ministry of defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staffs Committee (JCSC). Unfortunately, the imposition of the third martial law by Ziaul Haq in 1977 nipped the institutional restructuring in the bud. The JCSC was created in 1976 but the Zia government turned it into a mere post office rather than a critical institution in the military hierarchy. The white paper on defence should be the work of practitioners and experts from the non-government sector.

Furthermore, the government should also think of instituting a performance audit of the military as is done by the American General Accounting Office or by the Canadian Audit department. It is important for the state to develop benchmarks against which to access the military’s performance. It is important to note that the military extracts huge amounts of national resources from the state in the form of the defence budget or perks and privileges for its personnel. We are told that the various housing schemes, grant of agriculture land and other businesses are to ensure quality of services by the armed forces. The May 1 incident raises doubts about the above claim.

It is the first time after 1972 that the civilian government has an opportunity to question the unlimited powers of the defence establishment. There is a need to partner with other political actors, especially the PML-N, which may be keen to reign in the armed forces, to create a mechanism for disciplining the institution. The fact is that if the political forces won’t do it now, they may never get another opportunity again.



Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2011.