Sikander Amani

Kayani has publicly and repeatedly stated that the Pakistan Army supports the country’s democratic institutions. On the other hand, it appears to still hold enough clout to dictate its wishes to the government. Civilian oversight is still weak and largely ineffective

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? asked Juvenal, the Roman satirist. Who will watch the watchmen? What institutional mechanisms can we set up to ensure that the one institution that has a quasi-monopoly of force — the army — does not use it to overpower the rule of law and elected civilians? The recent coup d’état in Niger is a classic: some selfless and “non-partisan” officers magnanimously take power in order to save the nation from the clutches of corrupt and inept politicians, promise (in the solemnest terms and with the straightest face) elections in a very near future, find some delightfully antiphrastic title such as “Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy” (that is the Nigerian one), organise some hilariously flawed referendum to legitimise their rule, proceed to kill a few treacherous politicians, repress idiot dissidents and quell most civil liberties, which are but a Western imperialist concept anyway. Sounds familiar? Yep. Pakistan has had its fair share of such self-sacrificing saviours. The American comedian George Carlin once joked that “military intelligence is an oxymoron”. Oh, what blasphemous words. The military is endowed with divine intelligence, which makes them far superior to us plebeian civilian masses and our elected representatives, dumb believers in democracy, human rights and in right rather than might.

Okay, okay, in all fairness, Pakistan figures among the countries that have undergone a democratic transition recently, and the army is officially back in the barracks — for now. It is interesting though to take a look at the quality of this transition, in order to envisage the possibility of its reversal. Three scholars, Cottey, Edmunds and Forster, have established a range of indicators to explain the different stages of progress that states have reached in their civil-military transitions. Unfortunately, how Pakistan fares on all of them is not necessarily conducive to much optimism.

The first element is historical legacy, i.e. the depth of the military’s entanglement with the authoritarian order that preceded the democratic transition. Pakistan has been ruled by military regimes for about half of its short 63 years existence, and the army remains the most powerful institution in the country. (Aitzaz Ahsan has given a very insightful analysis as to “why Pakistan is not a democracy” in Divided by Democracy.)

The second parameter is the extent to which military forces support the democratic form of state organisation. Kayani has publicly and repeatedly stated that the Pakistan Army supports the country’s democratic institutions. Cool. On the other hand, it appears to still hold enough clout to dictate its wishes to the government (e.g. in the Mumbai case, where the visit of the ISI director general was abruptly cancelled, allegedly at the behest of the big boss). Civilian oversight is still weak and largely ineffective.

The third is the quality of civilian governance. Err, no comment on that one.

The fourth factor is international support for military reform. This point is under contention. Though the international community (read: the only ones who matter, the Americans) has paid lip-service to democracy in Pakistan, they have long supported the Pakistan Army as the only institution truly able to take on al Qaeda, especially under the Bush administration, and until recently they did not demand much in the direction of military reform. Steve Coll convincingly argues that “the Pakistani Army has learned over many years to leverage its grievances, dysfunction, bad choices, and perpetual dangers to extract from the US the financial and military support that it believes it requires”.

The fifth element is the quality of institutional reform. How solid is the reform process? The good news here is the strengthening of the judiciary in Pakistan, which has historically been subservient to the executive but has shown some indisputable signs of independence in recent years. This bodes well for the future. But otherwise, institutional reform is feeble, or non-existent, and Pakistan still cannot rely on sufficiently strong institutional mechanisms to ward off possible military interference in politics in the future.

The last element is what the authors call the “military culture”, as either a catalysing or an obstructing factor in the democratic transition. In Pakistan, such military culture is decidedly not in favour of handing the reins back to the civilians. Military business is still thriving; the army has extensive operational and strategic autonomy, and entertains a deep sense of entitlement. More than that, the mindset of military officers remains steeped in a rigid concept of India-centric national security, based on a siege mentality that fuels the increasingly untenable distinction between “good” and “bad” Taliban. Perhaps, after all, the Pakistani army’s problem might be more of epistemic than of political or military nature. It is a remarkable fact that the army’s top brass has steadfastly held on to beliefs and analytical frameworks (India, strategic depth, coddling our buddies the Taliban in order to secure a voice in neighbouring Afghanistan, etc.), in spite of them having so obviously proved to be obsolete — and dangerous for Pakistan’s own national security. Such a phenomenon, called “cognitive dissonance”, was made famous by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, who studied the bizarre fact that doomsday cults seem to thrive at the very moment when their predictions are proved false. And it is a most remarkable feature of the human psyche that we prefer to hold on to our beliefs, even when contradicted repeatedly by facts, even when proved hazardous, rather than modify the theory. We would rather disregard the facts or find some irrational explanation rather than face the reality that the belief is wrong, especially when it is at the core of our identity and self-perception. This cognitive deficiency is blatant in the Pakistan army — it is as if its very being will be jeopardised in case of a new definition of national security and national threats.

Many commentators have seen the recent wave of arrests of Taliban leaders, and that of Mullah Baradar in particular, as a sign of a deep shift in the mindset of the army, not just with regards to national security, but also to its gradual acceptance of the supremacy of civilian power. Let’s hope so. We have tried the saving-the-nation-white-knight-in-shiny-armour thing and frankly, we have grown tired of it.

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at sikander.amani@gmail.com