New military chief and the challenges

With great changes always come great challenges. As General Qamar Javed Bajwa nears the completion of his extended tenure as chief of Pakistan Army, it is important to reflect on the challenges that the new military chief may face. Ideally, a military chief should come and go after the completion of his tenure but in Pakistan this has not been the case.

Who’s going to take over as military chief is not yet known and many conspiracy theories are doing the rounds and it seems that the entire nation is engaged in this subjective debate. What is objective is the discussion on challenges that the new military chief may face and through that objectivism one may draw some conclusions on how the incoming military chief must proceed with some difficult tasks at hand.

The incoming military chief must realise that Pakistan has only seen four military chiefs in last 24 years. This is four less army chiefs that could have commanded the army i.e. if all army chiefs had retired after their regular service tenure of three years. What difference does this make? Put simply, in the last 27 years the United States had five Presidents. Imagine if we had an extended tenure of President Bush, President Obama or President Trump — would the world be the same? The personalities of all these Presidents had a great effect on the United States foreign policy making and how Washington achieved the core foreign policy objective of achieving national and world security during their tenures. The ambiguity in the meaning of national security is so huge that the beliefs, values, attitude, experience and world view of the decision maker — in this case the President of the United States — count a lot. No wonder we had many US Presidents who when confronted with a problem considered their method as the best method to deal with the problem and they called them their doctrines and so we had the Truman doctrine, Carter doctrine, the Bush doctrine, etc.

In case of Pakistan, national security is a subject that is closely associated not with the President or the Prime Minister of Pakistan but with its military. The personality of the military leader in Pakistan counts as much as the personality of the US President. If American President is central to national security policy making so is the military chief in case of Pakistan.

So, given this background I don’t remember that I ever heard a PM’s or a President’s doctrine in Pakistan but I do remember having heard about our military chief’s doctrine. And so, amongst many things that we will remember Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa for will be his doctrine — the ‘Bajwa doctrine’. Twenty months before the actual date of his retirement (Nov 2019), Gen Bajwa had an informal exchange of views with a select group of journalists. The views he exchanged with these journalists were picked up by the local media and the following day the newspapers flashed those views as ‘Bajwa doctrine’. Three years earlier the purpose and aim of the general’s doctrine as projected by the Pakistani media were: peaceful coexistence with neighbouring countries; border fencing where necessary; and improvement of relations with India and constitutional changes that should create balance and order in society rather than consolidate the hold on power, regardless of whatever happens to society.

As Gen Bajwa comes closer to his retirement date, what we witness is that our relations with our neighbours don’t seem to have changed one bit; they seem to follow the same unfriendly trajectory that was witnessed before the ‘Bajwa doctrine’ came. The border fencing on the western front though completed (with partial exception), but the recent return of terrorism on the western border belt raises the question of the value and efficacy of the fence. To say today that we have balance and order in society is a joke. People are aghast at how it is not their will, aspirations or mandate that matter in who should rule and govern them but how the very process of in-house change was manipulated and engineered to create and install a very unpopular government. And finally, the question of power is the question being most discussed and debated.

Highly disputed and contested constitutional interpretation brought in one government and removed the other from power. The theory of separation of powers — which is embedded and implemented in many constitutions of the world including Pakistan’s and which is credited to Charles Montesquieu, the French judge, historian and political philosopher — was evaded and circumvented to promote power accumulation rather than power separation and sharing. Suddenly, the single most powerful and legitimate authority of crisis resolution in Pakistan was no more playing its historical role in crisis resolution in the country. People look at all this as no more the sudden collapse of institutional role playing but the sheer collapse of entire political system and governance in the country.

The new man in the saddle will have to take a deliberate view of what ails our society and our country. It is unfair to say that the absolute power doesn’t rest with the military and if it does then the incoming military chief must realise that there is no ‘singular genius’ — military or political — that can lead the way of national recovery and redemption. The Americans say that our system is designed by the geniuses and thus it can even be run by an idiot. So, even when they have Presidents whose doctrines aren’t good enough the system creates such checks and balances that it prevents the society and nation from perennial damage and hurt.

The new military chief, like all military chiefs, will be in the service of the government of the day. But when it comes to extending and furthering the interests of the military as an institution it is hoped that the new military chief will consider and further the interests of the state and not the interests of any government because those interests may be only politically motivated and it is not the business of the military to indulge in politics.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2022.

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