Name: Abdur Rehman

Roll No: 032

Section: BBA, B
Civil Military relationships in Pakistan
The civil-military relations form an essential strand of national security
strategy. In peace, they affect the internal stability of a nation state; in
war, they influence the outcome. In the developed countries the military
is mostly busy in participation of formulation of national security policy.
However, in the developing countries, particularly those with a colonial
past, the military have long maintained a substantive role in domestic
politics. That is, the military have either overthrown the legally
constituted governments, or overly influenced decision-making at national
levels. Same is the case in Pakistan.

Historical context
The evolution of the civil-military relations in Pakistan was affected by
many factors that were unique to the developing world. The political and
administration infrastructures of Pakistan have to be built from the
scratch is one these factors. Like Indian Army, Pakistan army originated
from the British Indian army. However, unlike India, the civil military
relations in Pakistan evolved along the deadly different path. That is why
Pakistan witness frequent military interventions; at least three of them
were overt. Thus, since independence in 1947, Pakistan has experienced
30 years of military rule (1958 to 1971, 1977 to 1988 and 1999 to 2008);
even when not in government the military has constantly sought to
centralise and consolidate political power, and the military (notably
military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)) exerts
significant overt and covert control over the civilian authorities in both
domestic and foreign affairs. Given Pakistan’s volatile relationship with
India, centred on the decades-long conflict for control of Kashmir,
Pakistan has always been a ‘security state’, and the national military has
historically been a key player in the geopolitical arena. However,
information on Pakistan’s armed forces is very limited, and interaction
with Western civilian and military institutions is heavily controlled. The
climate of secrecy within the Pakistan military and its associated security
services directly and indirectly affects civil–military coordination and
presents humanitarian actors with a highly complicated operational
environment.

The role of the military in Pakistani society

Pakistan’s military has multiple roles: preparing for and responding to
natural disasters, contributing military personnel to UN missions (Pakistan
has a long history of contributing troops and police to UN peacekeeping
operations and has consistently been in the top three of contributor
nations.), under special circumstances maintaining law and order and
defending Pakistan’s borders and conducting security operations, counter-
insurgency or counter-terrorism operations. Pakistan’s volatile
relationship with India has ensured that the military has been well-
resourced.
The armed forces consist of the Army (550,000), Navy (22,000) and Air
Force (70,000), totalling 642,000 military personnel in active service.
Paramilitary forces number 304,000, and there is a reserve force
complement of 500,000.
The Army is structured using the traditional British two-tier hierarchy of
officers and enlisted ranks, a legacy of colonial rule. Officer ranks follow
British military naming conventions, the lowest being Second Lieutenant
and the highest Field Marshal. In addition, there are three ranks of Junior
Commissioned Officer: Naib Subedar, Subedar and Subedar-Major. Non-
Commissioned Officer (NCO) ranks range from Solider at the lowest
echelon to Battalion Havildar Major at the highest. Officers are
predominantly drawn from Pakistan’s middle classes; indeed, employment
as an officer is the predominant profession of the middle and,
increasingly, lower-middle classes. Selection is highly competitive, but
once recruited members of the military and their families enjoy extensive
support, including medical care at well-equipped facilities and a patronage
network. According to Lieven (2011), the military forms a separate ‘giant
kinship group’ that ‘sees itself as a breed apart, and devotes great effort
to inculcating in new recruits the feeling that they belong to a military
family different from (and vastly superior to) Pakistani civilian society’.
Regionally, the northwest Punjab and KP and Punjabi and Pashtun/Pathan
ethnicities respectively have provided the majority of military recruits,
particularly for the Army (Lieven, 2011). Moves are being made to make
the military a more national institution; recruitment initiatives have
focused on Sindhi, Muhajir and Baloch in an effort to increase their
numbers in the forces, and new cantonments have been built in Sindh
and Baluchistan. What effect this is having on the ethnic make-up of the
forces is impossible to say as statistics are not made available.
Preparing for disaster response has long been part of military training.
When called on to support civil authorities, military assistance has
predominantly been channelled into less secure areas, with civilian actors
responding in the more accessible locations. The military provides relief
and rescue, logistical support, engineering expertise, emergency health
provision and basic reconstruction of infrastructure. The armed forces also
have a disaster preparedness role, for example by coordinating with the
civil authorities in maintaining water channels, in joint inspections of flood
defences and participation in pre-monsoon coordination meetings. In
relation to complex emergencies, the Army feels that it has a legitimate
interest not only in responding to terrorism but also in rebuilding after
security operations. Given Pakistan’s longstanding commitment and
experience as one of the principal contributors of troops and police to UN
peacekeeping operations, it is conceivable that the security services
consider themselves to be the best organisation to address both disaster
and conflict. The experience and expertise the Pakistan military brings is
recognized by the humanitarian community, and the Army is considered
to be a significant player, with the ability to provide personnel, logistics
and key skills in response to disasters. A cross-section of respondents
were either comfortable with the military role in disaster response, or felt
that the armed forces were obliged to act due to the high level of state
funds and government resources they received.
The Army’s counter-insurgency operations against Taliban militants began
in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2001, and continue
today at various points along the Afghan–Pakistan border (the Durand
Line). Pakistan’s counter-insurgency strategy has been described as
‘engage, destroy, and negotiate’, the inverse of the ‘clear, hold, build’
strategies of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)/NATO
military forces in Afghanistan (Zaidi, 2010). Local populations are
evacuated before overwhelming force and heavy firepower is used to
attack militants headon; this is followed by the negotiation of a ceasefire.
Collateral damage, mass internal displacement and the destruction of
infrastructure have been the result.
A lack of reconciliation and reconstruction initiatives following these
offensives has exacerbated the conflict and generated increasingly
negative opinions of military activities among local populations.
Western governments, especially the US, have been supportive of
Pakistan’s counter-insurgency operations. Foreign aid for disaster
response operations, most notably from the US, has been used to
promote stability and gain local and national support for international
counter-terrorism and stabilisation objectives. This has had an impact on
the provision of humanitarian aid, with the Pakistan military controlling
and, in some cases, blocking aid flows. As discussed in the sections that
follow, the response to the 2005 earthquake was seen as a large-scale
‘hearts and minds’ opportunity by national and international military
forces, to improve local perceptions of military forces and their respective
governments.2 An essential objective from the national military
perspective was to decrease local opposition to security operations in the
mountainous region of South Waziristan on the Afghan–Pakistan border.
For the US, the response was seen as a way to reduce vitriolic anti-
American sentiment amongst local populations, which had been
compounded by drone attacks against Taliban militants. With the
international drawdown
from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014, Pakistan is facing increasing
pressure to reform its security strategy. In an attempt to stem insurgency
and unrest during the transition, it is likely that Pakistan will step up
counter-insurgency operations along the border, with significant
implications for the humanitarian response in this highly troubled region.

Why Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan have Always been on a

Bumpy Road?
The most basic precondition of a true democratic setup is a healthy civil-
military relationship. In all democratic countries, an elected civilian
government enjoys full control over the military. However, in Pakistan,
control over governance has oscillated between the two; a decade of
civilian supremacy followed by a decade of military rule. The reasons for
this periodic shuffling are incompetent political leadership, weak political
parties and institutions, rising power of civil-military bureaucracy, serious
security threats to the country and frequent use of military in aid of civil
power.

In the early days of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam clearly articulated the role of

the military in the following words: “Do not forget that the armed forces
are the servants of the people. You do not make national policy; it is we,
the civilians, who decide these issues and it is your duty to carry out
these tasks with which you are entrusted.”

Leadership Void
Soon after independence, in 1948, the Father of the Nation and the first
Governor-General, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, passed away.
Thus, a leadership void was created after just one year of the country's
establishment. The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, who
was Quaid's right-hand lieutenant, was also assassinated in 1951. About
the rest of the leadership lot, the Quaid had ruefully remarked that “he
had false coins in his pocket.”

Delayed Finalisation of Constitution

Similarly, in 1954, there were nine members of the Prime Minister's
cabinet, who were not members of the Parliament, including Commander-
in-Chief General Muhammad Ayyub Khan. Moreover, Pakistan took nine
long years to finalise its first constitution that was enforced on 23 March
1956. This inordinate delay allowed the Governor-General to continue
with his authoritarian rule. This all was happening at a time when the
country direly needed healthy democratic traditions. In addition, the first
general elections in the country, which were due in 1951, were held after
a lapse of almost quarter of a century, in 1970. This further strengthened
the non-democratic and authoritarian tendencies providing space to civil
and military bureaucracies to assume a dominant position in governance.

Weak Political Parties

For any healthy constitutional and political system to function smoothly,
strong and well-entrenched political parties are essential. Unfortunately,
political parties in Pakistan have failed to develop into strong vehicles of
national political will. The main reason is that most of our leaders
belonged to feudal and capitalist classes and were thus, by their very
nature, inimical to a democratic polity. Their incompetence and constant
wrangling for power led to ceaseless infighting. For instance, as early as
1953, a clash between the leadership of the Punjab and the central
government led to the imposition of Martial Law in Lahore, the provincial
capital.

Weak Institutions
After independence, Pakistan had to start from scratch. There was no
established parliament, no civil secretariat, no supreme court, no central
bank, and no organised armed forces. There was a paucity of competent
parliamentarians. The proportion of the Indian Civil Service officers who
opted for Pakistan was small. The same was true of the higher judiciary.
Unlike other institutions, the proportion of Muslims in the Indian Army
was comparatively substantial, i.e., 33 per cent. This is also one of the
reasons why the armed forces of Pakistan assumed greater importance
right in the beginning and were better established than other institutions
of the state.

Rising Power of Civil-Military Bureaucracy

Due to lack of basic infrastructure, Pakistan had to make new beginning in
all spheres. But the low level of literacy made this task very difficult. The
country needed competent and a determined leadership to build and
nurture democratic institutions. But such a leadership was hard to come
by in a rural society in which the political, social and economic life was
dominated by the landed aristocracy. The feudal leadership of political
parties was not capable of dealing with the multifarious problems faced by
the country. It depended heavily on the civil and military bureaucracy.
The result was the bureaucratic elite became disproportionately assertive,
steadily increasing their power at the expense of the political elite. For
instance, a civil bureaucrat Governor-General of Pakistan, Ghulam
Muhammad (1951-55), dissolved the National Assembly in 1954 and the
Federal Court justified and validated his unconstitutional act on the basis
of the “law of necessity.”

Wrangling for Power

The first President of Pakistan, Iskandar Mirza, relied on the military to
ensure state's integrity when the PML President, Qayyum Khan,
threatened direct action and the Khan of Kalat declared his secession
from Pakistan. In order to deal with the disturbed situation, Mirza took
extreme step; he abrogated the Constitution, dissolved the legislative
assemblies, dismissed the central and provincial governments, banned all
political parties and postponed general elections indefinitely. He also
declared Martial Law and appointed General Ayyub as the Chief Martial
Law Administrator (CMLA), who in turn removed Iskandar Mirza on
October 27, 1958 and himself became the President. Thus began the era
of military-dominated governance.

Military's Sway over Political Setup

After seven years of instability (1951-58), in which as many as seven
prime ministers rose and fell, the military regime put the country on the
path of economic and political stability. Hamid Khan, a renowned lawyer,
writes in “Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan”, “Ayyub’s term
of office [1958-69] was the golden era for the bureaucracy, which
exercised its powers, unbridled by any political interference.”
Again, after the restoration of democratic governance during 1988-99,
four governments were dissolved by the President of Pakistan invoking
Article 58 (2)(b). On 12 October 1999, the military once again ousted the
elected government and Pakistan was again under their despotic rule.

Civil Dependence on Army

From the very beginning, the Army remained involved in civil
administration. In 1947, it was the Army that was asked to establish civil
secretariat in Karachi. They vacated their barracks, renovated them to
house the secretariat and the staff coming from Delhi. It was the Army
which largely contributed to safeguarding the movement of several
refugee convoys carrying millions of refugees from East Punjab as well as
establishing their camps at Lahore. In short, the army was frequently
called in aid of civil authorities in all-natural disasters, emergencies and
other civil functions.

Present Situation
Presently, however, the situation is different. Pakistan's political
leadership is more mature and political parties are better established. The
country has developed a middle class, an active civil society, a vibrant
media and an independent judiciary. Whenever required, Parliament is
getting to brief on security matters from the Services Chiefs and decisions
are taken through consensus. Although military enjoys autonomy in its
internal affairs, somewhat healthy civil-military relations exist. The Army
is more deeply involved now than a decade ago in support of activities for
the civilian government: law-and-order tasks; relief and rescue operations
after natural disasters; the use of its organisational and technological
resources for public welfare projects; greater induction of its personnel in
civilian institutions; anti-terrorist activities; and containing narcotics
trafficking.
A National Action Plan (NAP) was jointly formulated by the political parties
and the armed forces to win the war in the cities. Speaking to Russian
magazine Sputnik, DG ISPR conceded that only a part of the plan has so
far been implemented while the rest remains stalled due to ‘political
challenges. There is a need to correctly define the political challenges. The
major challenge is the pressure from the religion-political parties which
are strongly opposed to any government regulation or external oversight
of the madrassas. They also reject any revision of the mainstream
educational curricula to remove hate material and introduce tolerance.
The army has to support the government in blocking the two major
sources of the spread of extremist ideas.
There has to be full cooperation between the army and the civilian
governments at the centre and the provinces. Similarly, Rangers and
Police, and military and civilian intelligence agencies must work together
rather than work at cross purposes. Terrorists will have a field day if a tug
of war was to ensue between governments led by the mainstream parties
and the establishment or if there is disregard for civilian institutions by
the military-controlled intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The civilian institutions have to play a major role in the war against urban
terrorism. What one sees happening vis-a-vis the delay in setting up of
NACTA indicates a trend which is not healthy. The arrest of a policeman
by Rangers after raiding a police station and his subsequent release is
also an indication of the malaise. One also does not expect military
commanders to issue statements with political implications.

The Way Forward

Presently, civil-military relations do not seem as healthy and cordial as
they should be. There are apprehensions on both sides. The government's
tacit support to Geo in ISI bashing case has increased the tensions
between the two pillars of the state. Apparently, army and the
government are poles apart on the issue of operation against Taliban.
It is imperative that in the larger interest of the country both these
institutions join hands to save Pakistan from the monster of terrorism and
steer the country out of multifaceted crises which are adversely affecting
Pakistan and its citizens. It is often said that Pakistan is in a state of war
and no war can be won when there is disunity among the state
institutions.
1. Laws and clear constitutional provisions should be put in place that
define the chain of command and civilian authority over the military.
Although apparently a piece of paper, this provision establishes the
legitimacy for any action to resist any encroachment by the military.
2. Bring a change in culture, values and acceptability among the masses
that civilian rule is possible and should be put in place. This enculturation
would be possible through a committed media and impartial press.
3. Structures and processes should be put in place, detailing who will
command. Fourth, openness and transparency or freedom of information
is vital so that everything is open to the public and civilian leadership.
4. Let the military budgets or expenditures be controlled by civilian
authorities. No doubt the civilians linked to this process should be
thoroughly scrutinised for their integrity.