Pakistan’s Wars: An Alternative History (Folio Books 2022) by Tariq Rahman examines Pakistan’s career of war-fighting from a new angle unfamiliar to the country. Born in Bareilly, India in 1949, Rahman’s father served as the head of the mathematics department at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, Abbottabad. Educated at Burn Hall School, he joined the Army as an armored corps officer in 1971, only to resign in 1978 as “a conscientious objector” to military action in East Pakistan, a gesture recognized by Bangladesh, which conferred upon him a civil award in 2013. He obtained three master’s degrees after securing a British Council scholarship in 1979 that later enabled him to obtain Master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Sheffield in England in 1985, his first Ph.D. being in literature.
Pakistan, a small country, has fought several wars, most of its own choosing, against India since Partition in 1947. Most of these wars—the Kashmir war (1947-48), the 1965 war, the Kargil war (1999), and the ongoing low intensity guerrilla operations from 1989 till date—were fought over Kashmir. There was also a major civil war, which saw the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, but here the major antagonist was India. Pakistan has also fought with the militant Taliban operating on the Pak-Afghan border intermittently from 2005 onwards. Rahman’s book is not a military or war history in the sense that it does not analyze any battles; nor is it a nationalist history in the sense that it does not justify Pakistan’s historical narrative. Instead, it looks at the nature of the decision-making process in Pakistan in the wars under consideration. How did military personnel, their families, and other citizen of Pakistan experience these conflicts? More importantly, how do certain individuals—even when they have legal authority to take decisions—act in a heterodox and deviant manner, almost like rogue elements, in pursuit of conflict, bypassing the civilian cabinet and Parliament even when they exist, and even trusting the military itself on a “need to know” basis. This kind of decision-making is facilitated in a political culture of authoritarianism, lack of civilian control over the military, and a dysfunctional democracy. Moreover, such excessively secretive decisions are rarely analyzed critically due to deniability, and do not provide corrective antidotes to such decision-making in future.
Domination by the Army
While both civilians and military officers have opted for war in Pakistan’s history, it is the military’s domination that has created the kind of political culture in which such decisions are not questioned, discussed, or examined by stakeholders beforehand. Hence, one must understand the world view, values and assumptions of the military institution in Pakistan, and what explains its political ascendancy. In Pakistan, writes Rahman, decision-making about wars is actually the decision-making of cliques, and sometimes even of individuals and intelligence agencies of the military, which deviate from the institution in significant ways. It is inordinately risky and akin to gambling but cannot be called a decision of the Pakistani state and institutions such as the cabinet, Parliament, and other stakeholders. In the past, these cliques have comprised senior military officers, or even just one—Gen. Yahya Khan (1917-80) and General Ziaul Haq (1924-88)—making it clear civilians rarely take such decisions.
Wars started by civilians
Pakistan’s very first war with India—the Kashmir war of 1947-48—was initiated by civilians. Then-Governor General of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted to order the army to fight India on Oct. 27, 1947, but commander-in-chief Gen. Sir Douglas Gracey (1894-1964) was reluctant and Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884- 81) persuaded Jinnah to withdraw his orders. Then-prime minister Liaquat AJi Khan supported this war, with NWFP chief minister Abdul Qayyum Khan (1901-81) the main planner of the tribal invasion of Kashmir. Similarly, in 1965, foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928-79) and foreign secretary Aziz Ahmed (1906-82) persuaded Field Marshal Ayub Khan (1907-84) to allow one of his generals—Maj. Gen. Akhtar Malik—to undertake the dangerous operations (Gibraltar and Grand Slam) that forced India to defend Kashmir by attacking Lahore and Sialkot.
In India, then-prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904-66) took the decision to attack Pakistan in 1965 despite the army chief’s hesitancy. This, however, was a defensive measure. More ominously, civilians could also precipitate a military disaster by unnecessary aggression. None other than India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, blundered into his perilous “forward policy” on the advice of both his civilian and military functionaries, establishing military posts in areas claimed by China. This resulted in Chinese attacks on Indian positions on Sept. 20, 1962. By Nov. 19 the Indian army was helpless to withstand further onslaught, and by Nov. 21, the Chinese announced a ceasefire having established control up to its 1960 claim in Ladakh. Even Indira Gandhi chose aggressive war against Pakistan and succeeded. So it is not true that civilian governments in power are necessarily peaceful and reluctant to take risks. This is especially true of opposition politicians, media, and intellectuals, who sometimes clamor for the riskiest options rather than the safest ones in the name of national honor and loss of face. Nehru, for instance, was under strong pressure by his opposition and the hawks in the media about China’s claims on what India regarded as its own territory from 1959 till 1962.
Understanding the military mind
Nonetheless, as most of Pakistan’s wars have taken place under military rule or when the military was dominant in questions pertaining to war, it is necessary to understand the military mind. U.S. scholar Christine Fair, writing in Fighting to the End, has discussed the risk-taking behavior of the Pakistan Army, describing it as “strategic culture.”
Pakistan, like India, developed what Sanjay Joshi calls a “fractured modernity that is selective borrowing from abroad adapting and retaining indigenous ways of being.” Among the components to be retained was religion; it was, after all, one of the most vocative symbols of the Pakistan movement through statements about the state being Islamic—where Islam would be used for governance and the organization of public life—or Muslim—merely one with a majority Muslim population.
Farzana Shaikh, a British social scientist of Pakistani origin, argues that this problematic understanding of identity—Islamic or Muslim—is the cause of Pakistan’s drift towards militarization. The military, always a part of the ruling elite, was interested in using Islam as a symbol to motivate the rank and file and deny fissiparous tendencies which, like the civilian bureaucracy, it considered anti-Pakistan. This identity, in the military’s point of view, was necessarily anti-India which, too, made motivation for war easier. While there are many generative causes of state formation, war-making is, undeniably, a major generative cause. Frequent warfare or the danger of it can make states opt for creating armies. These may give birth to a garrison state, justified by eternal threats, but equally capable of stifling constitutional elements. The colonial state extracted wealth and used it to strengthen it since it made such extraction possible in the first instance. Thus, activist Hamza Alavi argued that Pakistan is an ‘overdeveloped’ state in which the bureaucracy and the military are more powerful than the indigenous bourgeoisie and the feudal classes. Indeed, the political situation in Pakistan, according to Alavi, centers around the role of the bureaucratic-military hierarchy. The bureaucracy, while remaining a part of the politically dominant oligarchy, lost power to the Army in due course.
French academic Christophe Jaffrelot, in his comprehensive history of Pakistan, calls the country a paradox on account of its instability and resilience. This instability is manifested by the country having three wars, three constitutions, and three coups in 67 years. He goes on to argue that after a rise in power of the judiciary in 2007, a convergence of political and military elites in reaction—especially after the PTI government came to power in 2018—saw it lose authority, with the establishment— predominantly the Army—emerging stronger than ever. The structural instability of the Pakistani state, according to Jaffrelot, is around three sources of tension: the unitary state versus ethnicity; authoritarianism and democracy; and different conceptions of Islam. The power of the dominant components of the state, however, appearing neutral always in the ‘national interest’ and, hence, eminently suited to take decisions about war and peace. This came to be accepted by large sections of the public in Pakistan as the legitimate role of the military.
Middle class support of the military
Political scientists point out that the middle class in India has made class alliances “in order to compel its own political inclusion,” and this has resulted in the promotion of “broad-based democratization.” Pakistani political scientist Mohammad Waseem, however, argues that the pendulum of political initiative in Pakistan has been shifting between the elite as representative of the middle and political classes. The political class is delegitimized in middle-class eyes, as it is tainted with corruption and ‘feudal’ highhandedness. Thus, sums up Waseem, this class ‘is committed to modernity sans democracy’ because in the latter, the political class and the masses come to the fore. This makes the Pakistani middle class different from the Indian one so far as its desired regime type is concerned.
Nonetheless, the middle classes in the neighboring nations are both nationalistic and have a romance with nuclear weapons. In India, according to Pranab Bardhan, it is one of the ‘dominant proprietary classes’, which ‘constituted the ruling elite’. This is because this class has human capital in the form of education, skills, and technical expertise, which makes it the reservoir of the officer corps of the military, the bureaucracy, academia, the professionals, and the media—the very lobbies which create myths. It is proud of its achievements and education but, goes the argument, it feels ignored and belittled by ‘the West’—more used as a rhetorical anticolonial ‘Other’ than a physical or cultural region—and keen to amass the regalia of great powers to find ‘its place under the sun. Thus, reasons Sankaran Krishna, the “Indian middle class desires respect, status, attention and appreciation” from the world and nuclear status gave it precisely that.