The Colour Khaki

Now each day is fair and balmy,
Everywhere you look, the army.
Ustad Daman (1959)

On 19 September 2001, General Pervaiz Musharraf went on TV to inform the people of Pakistan that their country would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States in its bombardment of Afghanistan. Visibly pale, blinking and sweating, he looked like a man who had just signed his own death warrant. The installation of the Taliban regime in Kabul had been the Pakistan Army’s only foreign-policy success. In 1978, the US had famously turned to the country’s military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq when it needed a proxy to manage its jihad against the radical pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. In what followed, the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence became an army within an army, with much of its budget supplied directly from Washington. It was the ISI that supervised the Taliban’s sweep to power during Benazir Bhutto’s premiership of the mid-nineties; that controlled the infiltration of skilled saboteurs and assassins into Indian-held Kashmir; and that maintained a direct connexion with Osama bin Laden. Zia’s successors could congratulate themselves that their new province in the north-west almost made up for the defection of Bangladesh in 1971.

Now it was time to unravel the gains of the victory: the Taliban protectorate had to be dismantled and bin Laden captured, ‘dead or alive’. But having played such a frontline role in installing fundamentalism in Afghanistan, would the Pakistan Army and the ISI accept the reverse command from their foreign masters, and put themselves in the forefront of the brutal attempt to root it out? Musharraf was clearly nervous but the US Defence Intelligence Agency had not erred. In the final analysis, Pakistan’s generals have always remained loyal to the institution that produced them—and to its international backers—rather than to abstract ideas like democracy, Islam or even Pakistan.

The country’s fifty-five year history has been a series of lengthy duels between general and politician, with civil servants acting as seconds for both sides. Statistics reveal the winner: while elected representatives have run the country for fifteen years, and unaccountable bureaucrats and their tame front men for eleven, the Army has been in power for twenty-nine—leading some to suggest that the green-and-white national flag might be re-coloured khaki.footnote¹ It is a dismal record, but the Pakistan high command has never tolerated interference from civilian politicians for too long. The last elected leader to believe he had the Army firmly under his control, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had to be disabused of the notion. In 1977, on the orders of General Zia—an erstwhile favourite whom Bhutto had promoted over the heads of five, more deserving, superior officers—the prime minister was removed from power and hanged two years later.footnote²

After Zia’s sudden death in 1988, power alternated between Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (1988–90; 1993–96) and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League (1990–93; 1997–99). By 1998 it looked as if Nawaz Sharif—probably the country’s most venal politician—was forgetting the lessons of Bhutto’s fall. The rickety economy was facing collapse as the Southeast Asian financial crisis swept the region, exacerbated by US sanctions imposed after the 1998 Indo-Pak nuclear tests (Clinton later intervened to soften these on the grounds of US national-security interests). The Chief of Army Staff, General Karamat, called for a National Security Council to be set up to take charge of the situation, with the Army playing a major role. Nawaz Sharif sacked him in October 1998 and installed Musharraf as COAS instead.

Six months later, under Musharraf’s command, the Pakistan Army launched its Kargil offensive, capturing strategic heights in Indian-held Kashmir. Nawaz Sharif came under immediate US pressure and, in July 1999, ordered the troops to withdraw—snatching diplomatic defeat from the jaws of military victory, in the eyes of the high command. Nawaz Sharif, clearly counting on Washington’s support, tried to instigate moves against Musharraf within the Army, while complaining in public that he had not been consulted about the Kargil move. The following October, while Musharraf was on a visit to Sri Lanka, Pakistan TV announced that the COAS had been sacked. Flying home, his plane was denied permission to land. Either while circling Pakistan airspace with dwindling fuel supplies, or after his final touch-down, Musharraf gave the order for Nawaz Sharif to be put under arrest. Announcing that he had been ‘compelled to act, to prevent the further destabilization of the military’, Musharraf suspended parliament and the constitution, appointed himself the country’s ‘Chief Executive’ and established a governing National Security Council. (The Clinton administration ensured a smoother fate for Nawaz Sharif than Bhutto had endured, whisking him out of prison to enjoy a comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia.)

Initially, there was some rejoicing both at home and abroad at the Pakistan Army’s fourth coup in as many decades. To the popular delight at getting rid of Nawaz Sharif was added the innovation of a military take-over in the face of apparent White House displeasure. This, coupled with the pseudo-modernist rhetoric of the new ruler, encouraged a wave of amnesia. It was as if the institution that had dominated the country’s political life for so many decades had ceased to exist—or undergone a miraculous transformation. Liberal pundits in New York and Lahore lost their bearings, while in the London Review of Books Anatol Lieven decribed Musharraf’s administration as being ‘the most progressive Pakistan has had in a generation’.footnote³ The bulk of the citizens were more sceptical—indifferent to the fate of their politicians, and with few illusions as to the character or role of the Army.