A new strategy for a new enemy

The navy has for long been subverted to the army and the air force in terms of funds and Pakistani security paradigm.

Ziaul Haq once said, “whether right or wrong; power in Pakistan will always be wielded by the person who occupies the seat of the chief of the army staff”. He was dead right. Since the incident at PNS Mehran, the Pakistan Navy has received considerable flak. The comments directed at the person of the chief of the naval staff and appearing in a May 25 op-ed piece in this newspaper seemed to go beyond journalism ethics.

The navy’s operational responsibilities extend from the country’s western periphery at Jiwani-Gwadar and east to Karachi and parts of interior Sindh. From the 1,046 kilometres coastline southwards, the job area juts beyond 200 nautical miles into the Arabian Sea, covering a sea expanse that is larger than Balochistan. Since 2002-03, the Pakistan Navy has additionally and unceasingly participated in more than one multinational task force operating in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa, yet we hardly hear or see any projection of the service on the media.

The navy’s budget allocation is a trifling 10-11 per cent or so of the total defence outlay, in which the air force gets roughly 23 per cent and the army claims the lion’s share of over 43 per cent. With the bulk of the population residing in Punjab and the national security narrative being crafted by a single institution, the navy’s contributions remain totally obscure from public view.

Since Ayub Khan first surrendered the country’s sovereignty to the US by offering a U-2 base at Badaber, the navy has struggled for its existence. This inattention first hurt the military command in 1971, when the army needed some action in the Bay of Bengal to liberate it from Indian and Mukti Bahini pressure. The navy learnt about the outbreak of hostilities in the west only through a radio news bulletin.

During Zia’s era, a drive is believed to have been initiated that aimed to mothball the navy. Understandably, the funds so saved were to be diverted to the air force, which was then to take up the additional functions of the navy. In developing response options to India’s provocative ‘cold start’ doctrine, Azm-i-Nau remained a purely army-PAF affair, despite the fact that the Pakistan Navy could play an important role in the south. The fact of the matter is that a transformation is the need of the hour; its starting point is changing our rusty frame of mind. The world has changed; we have a new enemy which does not wear a uniform, lives within us and is amorphous yet ubiquitous.

New tactics require getting into the enemy’s mind and staying two paces ahead of him. This will require completely overhauling of our ‘intelligence’ system and a counter-terror strategy executed through an independently functioning agency, which also coordinates the overall anti-terror effort. We also need to purge radicals and jihadi sympathisers from our ranks and, above all, embark on cleansing the public mind of conspiracy theories. Along with this, the extensive rightist narrative in the media must be drastically curtailed. In not acting, we will only be playing into the hands of our enemies and imperilling the nation’s future.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2011.