Our civil-military contradictions

The Pakistan Army was gunning for Ambassador Husain Haqqani and has finally gotten rid of him. The quarrel had actually emanated from the mismatch of PPP-army views on how to conduct Pakistan’s external relations. The new ambassador should have been Salman Bashir, representing the pro-army Foreign Office professional diplomats, but the person chosen is Sherry Rehman, another journalist-politician with whom the army should have no cavil because of her recently expressed views on foreign policy. The media says ‘the affair Husain Haqqani’ is not yet over. While the government may have been deliberating how to proceed in the matter, the PML-N has jumped the gun and gone to the Supreme Court. It is expected that the honourable court, already seized with the review petition by the government against the NRO verdict, which aims at unseating President Zardari, will decide how facts presented in the memogate scandal can be substantiated one way or another.

The PPP government is hounded not only by the Pakistan Army but by adverse developments on many other fronts. The PML-N has gone to court ostensibly to find out who has betrayed the state of Pakistan, but the truth is that its real objective is to get the government pulled down in short order. It has emerged from being a ‘friendly opposition’ to a vicious no-quarters-given party, recalling the vendettas of the 1990s which favoured the third party, the Pakistan Army. Ironies are piled up thick.

The PML-N now says it treasures the Pakistan Army and will do anything to save it from being dishonoured by the PPP. It vows that Pakistan’s survival and Pakistani nationalism rest on the Pakistan Army and defending it is the only national interest the state should pursue. Not long ago, the PML-N had got into trouble with the same army over foreign policy and then over the Kargil war, and had to see its leadership suffer exile in consequence of that civil-military contradiction. The other irony is that the Supreme Court, which is now the ‘first independent court in history’ in the eyes of the PML-N, was once considered partisan by it and actually physically attacked. The terminal irony is that the PPP thinks the court partisan in the same way.

In Pakistan, the Pakistan Army is supreme. No one denies it and the expression of this view repeatedly in the media doesn’t disturb the army too much. It is witnessing an enhancement of this supremacy in the denouement of the memogate case and knows that political infighting in Pakistan is expected to intensify in the coming days, ensuring its longevity. It also knows that the PPP is more unreservedly supportive of its policies because it is under pressure from domestic politics, abysmal governance and the crippling spread of terrorism among the national network of religious-jihadi organisations.

Because of the Pakistan Army dominance, further consolidated by universal popular support, no inquiry will really be effective. If a judicial commission is formed — which is on the cards because the PML-N will not repose trust in any in-house inquiry committees — it will tread like the other commissions: a patient favouring one leg. Commissions where the findings could have brought pressure on the Pakistan Army — take the two investigating the death of Osama bin Laden and journalist Saleem Shahzad — are loaded in favour of one side for everyone to see. Will the army follow the spoor of memogate further and try to net President Zardari himself, which is what everyone including the Supreme Court wants? Given the situation, it might content itself by accepting the immolation of Husain Haqqani and go no further. His replacement, Sherry Rehman, has already provided, through her Jinnah Institute, the broadest possible intellectual support to the Pakistan Army’s view of foreign policy, especially as it applies to Afghanistan and terrorism.

Other important areas — like trade with India — are expected to slide down to the back-burner without the army telling the PPP government to back off from it. The current moment finds the army stronger than at any time in the past; it also finds the state at its weakest with its political system voluntarily drained of all representative sinew through pro-army joint parliamentary declarations.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 25^th, 2011.