[Reader-list] Taliban is the future

[S. Jabbar]

The military’s ideology
By Ayesha Siddiqa 
Friday, 25 Sep, 2009


PAKISTAN observers often wonder what the Pakistan military’s primary
ideology is. Is it a secular institution or one which is high on religious
values? Since the military is considered the strongest institution of the
Pakistani state, the question becomes critical in determining what direction
the country will take or how its armed forces will fight the war on terror.

One particular perspective is that the military is essentially a secular
institution which got transformed temporarily under Gen Ziaul Haq, who made
sure that his officers had a religious grounding. He had allowed the
tableeghi jamaat to penetrate the armed forces and introduced a religiously
conservative current in society. Subsequently, the Zia era was blamed for
the continued links between certain military personnel and the Taliban
post-9/11.

Later, it was argued that Gen Pervez Musharraf put the military back on the
secular track by weeding out religious-minded, senior officers replacing
them with others who were socially acceptable to the international
community. In fact, senior officers now claim that the military is highly
professional and secular. This is correct in that ‘secular’ in this case
means that the army is not driven purely by religious instincts in pursuing
its goals. But then ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are not the right terms to
describe the organisation.

Indeed, if one is searching for the correct term, it would be
pragmatic-nationalist. This means that instead of sticking to one ideology
the institution can shift between a couple or more ideologies at the same
time. So, when it was convenient to turn religiously ideological during the
1980s it could do so. Even Gen Zia was not solely driven by his personal
inclination to support the Afghan ‘jihad’; the geo-strategic and
geopolitical environment was important in the framing of decisions. There
was no dichotomy between pursuing jihad and having a strategic alignment
with the US even then.

Zia also found religious ideology handy in pursuing other military-strategic
goals. Deploying non-state actors was financially, politically and
militarily cost-effective. Hence, all generals maintained links with the
jihadis despite the fact that they were different from Zia.

The pragmatist-nationalist character of the military also explains why it
was able to swiftly shift between ideologies, especially after it had to
undergo a change in the wake of 9/11. This also means that maintaining links
with the different jihadi organisations, as explained by Arif Jamal in
Shadow War: the Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, does not necessarily
depend on having a religious ideology.

The author’s interesting conclusion is that even seemingly ‘secular’
generals like the present chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, could pursue the same
policy as the generals during the 1990s. Jamal claims that a lot of jihadi
organisations were thrilled to hear of the appointment of Gen Kayani as the
new chief and many reopened their offices in 2008. He also argues that
several meetings were arranged between the various Afghan Taliban groups and
the Kashmiri jihadis in 2007 by the ISI to help them with a strategy to stop
Indian help from reaching Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul and placing
more sleeper cells in India for possible activation at later dates.

This argument explains the character of the Pakistan Army and its use of
religion or at least one aspect of it, namely jihad, for its strategic
advantage. There is nothing odd in the argument since the military was part
of what was described by Hamza Alavi as the Muslim salariat class, which
used religion to motivate a movement for an independent state.

The fact is that this class was always linked to the use of religious
ideology. It might not want to adopt a Saudi model for state-making, though
the Pakistani state has gradually moved closer to Saudi Arabia, but religion
has always remained central to the fulfilment of the strategic goals of the
salariat, which later evolved into the ruling elite.

This basically meant that while the Islamic norms of social justice might
not be adopted, religious identity would be used in some form to meet
political and military-strategic objectives. Jamal’s argument is that like
all such plans that generate opportunity costs, the jihadis of today, who
seem to be challenging the Pakistani state, are inadvertently a product of a
specific plan to fight the war in Kashmir.

The camps where Ajmal Qasab and others were trained by the Lashkar-i-Taiba
to carry out the Mumbai attacks, the author claims, were set up by the ISI
to win the war in Kashmir. Even if the attack was not ordered by the
intelligence agency, it indicates a situation where the jihadis trained for
a particular purpose might have used their training to carry out attacks on
their own or gone beyond the brief.

Obviously, the military always had to use religion as a motivating factor
from the time when Col Akhtar Malik planned the first offensive to capture
Kashmir in 1947/48 to the 1980s and 1990s when, according to Jamal, a lot of
new jihadi organisations were established. Gen Ayub Khan adopted a similar
approach while planning the historic but failed Operation Gibraltar in 1965.
However, the military was not the only force which used the above-mentioned
approach.

Even seemingly liberal-secular leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto favoured the
policy of using non-state actors to the country’s perceived military
advantage. For instance, Bhutto personally came to congratulate the
hijackers of an Indian Airlines flight in January 1971. It is important to
remember that the use of non-state actors was part of a larger package of
mixing religion with state strategy.

In adopting this approach Bhutto might have not been too far off from Ziaul
Haq who, as Jamal argues, developed an alignment with the Jamaat-i-Islami to
support the Afghan jihad and to use that as a cover for strengthening the
army’s war in Kashmir.

The country’s ruling elite and the military have traditionally used a
particular aspect of religion to gain strategic dividends. While they can
conveniently claim to have retained their secularism and saved one
organisation from turning ideological, a similar claim might not be made for
society at large. The proliferation of ‘jihad’ in mainland Pakistan is but
the opportunity cost of strategy.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.




> From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:49:29 -0800 (PST)
> To: Sarai Reader-list <reader-list at sarai.net>, yasir ~يا سر
> <yasir.media at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Taliban is the future
> 
> Dear Yasir
 
Not 'writing from across the border'. So no 'border-glasses'. On
> the contrary, mine might be broader-glasses.  
 
I would like to believe
> that I have greater objectivity regarding both Pakistan and India as compared
> to most who are living in either country.   
 
This comment of yours was
> interesting - " foreign entities and money incl china, russia, US, saudi,
> india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each others' regional agendas in
> the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata"
 
Have heard that mouthed
> very often in/on Pakistani Media. You forgot to mention Iran (especially wrt
> Balochistan).
 
These days one often hears Pakistanis claiming that TTP (
> Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) is borne/reared/nurtured/promoted/financed by
> India.
 
Kshmendra


--- On Tue, 3/9/10, yasir ~يا سر <yasir.media at gmail.com>
> wrote:


From: yasir ~يا سر <yasir.media at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list]
> Taliban is the future
To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date:
> Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 9:12 PM


1. Hamid Gul is a cold warrior, with an
> islamist pov. always interesting to
hear. yet he and his views have been
> marginalized in pk. let us us say it is
the end of the zia era.

2. pk and afg
> are very different entities. while taliban are making a quiet
come back in
> afg, even they themselves are not supporting the pk-taliban as
this would sour
> their relations with pk. besides the pk-talibs are either
being massacred or
> disappearing to resurface at some point later, the moment
in northwest-pk. so
> this can be dicey for that region only ie fata. there is
no such problem for
> the rest of the country. foreign entities and money incl
china, russia, US,
> saudi, india, are all stoking the fires to thwart each
others' regional
> agendas in the border regions of baluchistan and nwfp/fata
- a fact of life at
> the moment. but the country seems to have regained some
agency of itself with
> upsurge in popular sentiment and pressure on govt
since the lawyers movement
> and the last elections. a good point for
negotiations with india for instance,
> to streamline our own common regional
agendas, which are overdue since at
> least partition, actually much before...

3. pk-taliban or their views, in
> fact islamist views are definitely on the
margin in pk at the moment. so i
> totally disagree with KK (who is writing
fron across the border wearing
> border-glasses), and agree with pawan, that
the common enemy are the islamists
> in afg/pk/and hardly so (ie totally
overblown) in india, where too, just like
> us, they love to make a circus out
of it. lets hope the common bonds are
> stronger than the hate, of which there
has been enough.

best,
> y
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> 
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