| December 19, 2002 | Thursday | Shawwal 14, 1423 |
Musharraf on victory without war
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting ... To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”— Sun Tzu (500 BC)
The cabinet formation in Balochistan is complete and portfolios have been distributed, with the MMA getting the lion’s share though being a junior partner in the Balochistan government. It has definitely left some heart burning among the ruling party MPAs, who are left in a lurch, at least for the time being. The MMA has got seven portfolios, all financially sound administrative departments, i.e., planning and development, communication and works, irrigation and power, local government and rural development, health, education, agriculture, labour and manpower, with the additional charge of information and IT, public health engineering, food, Haj and Auqaf.
With a conservative estimate, the MMA-controlled departments will be managing more than 90 per cent of the total provincial budget and all federal allocations, including international assistance. Most of the allocations aimed at revitalizing provincial economy are made in these departments.
The senior partner, the PML, will be holding the portfolios of mines and mineral development, excise and taxation, forest, wildlife and environment, services and general administration.
Three ministers have been drawn from National Alliance and the lone MPA of BNDP got the sensitive home and tribal affairs department. The other ministries are finance and revenue, which have gone to the National Alliance.
Initially, the provincial government planned to induct a much bigger ministry and induct more than 25 ministers in the first go. But the chief minister did not get necessary clearance when he visited Islamabad and called on both the president and prime minister when he briefed them about the political developments in this province.
Jam Yousuf, by nature is a person accommodating all the people of divergent views and opinion. He did try to make a large cabinet representing all groups. The president reportedly vetoed his idea and advised him to form a smaller cabinet for efficient handling of the administrative and other problems.
The previous military government undertook a long exercise in merging many departments with the objective of reducing the number of administrative departments significantly. The army monitoring teams managed to unearth thousands of ghost employees who drew their salary and never performed any duties. They were all employed in remote areas. Thus the provincial exchequer managed to make a saving of Rs two billion a year by relieving the ghost employees. Now the MMA will definitely try to reverse the previous course.
Prior to that, the defunct PML-N government appointed all treasury members as ministers. Since the partyless elections in 1985 it was an tradition that every member of the treasury benches should draw salaries and privileges from the public exchequer. Naturally, all those who have joined the treasury benches now are expecting the perks drawn by a minister. They consider it a matter of right for supporting the government and every member expects the replay of those old acts, including ministerial salaries and perks.
Besides, there is a clear grouping within the ruling party with every group complaining discrimination in the distributing of ministries. A Muslim League stalwart who belatedly switched over his loyalties from the PML-N to PML-Q is currently leading the disgruntled MPAs from the treasury benches. He gave interviews and spoke to newsmen frankly protesting against the unjust distribution of portfolios between the MMA and PML-Q. The leaders are insisting that its MPAs be given better portfolios. The women MPAs who were elected on reserved seats also complain that they were neither given representation in the cabinet nor they were consulted in ministry formation. Ms Parveen Magsi spoke as the representative of the women MPAs belonging to the treasury benches claims that they were not consulted at any stage.
The opposition is waiting in the wings to organize forays on the government once the ministers start using their powers. There is every possibility that the MMA will bear the brunt from the opposition, as the PML is no more than the elitist club in Balochistan thus having a limited mass base or street power to fight back. Since the MMA has the major share in the present government, it will definitely defend its policies by launching counter attacks using its massive street power.
On the other hand, Jam Yousuf has successfully mustered the support of the JWP. Though in the opposition, the JWP will not take part in any political move to dislodge the government, said Haji Jumma Bugti, the JWP parliamentary party. He thought it would destabilize democracy by ousting the Jam government. Despite strong opposition from the Centre, Jam Yousuf is determined to expand his Cabinet accommodating more MPAs from his Muslim League. It is possible that he will also give a bigger representation to the MMA.
In view of the MMA, the present geo-strategic situation the alliance has to be broadly accommodated in Balochistan government.
It will also serve a counter-weight to the nationalist forces. The government values its support against the nationalists using the MMA as a shield. The establishment is heavily depending on the MMA and for its political support in case of need. It is largely felt that sooner or later, the MMA will come in conflict with the government over the FBI operation in Balochistan.
General Pervez Musharraf’s strategy to humble the enemy without a war may well be a leaf out of the great Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War. More than a mere motivational address at his own regimental (regiment of artillery) re-union, it calls for a comprehensive analysis as part of our emerging military doctrine based on peace with honour.
The three India-Pakistan wars of 1948-49, 1965 and 1971 and one covert fight over Kargil in 1999 proved the futility of active and violent engagements in achieving desired political ends. It is now time for the two neighbours to put their heads together, work out the cost-benefit ratio of war and shift their sights from the battlefield to the negotiating table.
It is gratifying to hear Pakistan’s supreme commander, a thoroughbred commando and a gunner, talk of victory without a war, even if a good deal of his speech was overstretched and overly interpreted as part of an essentially pep talk before his officers and jawans.
Musharraf’s observation reflects a perceptive shift (call it a wish if you will) from the patent folly of war to an emerging vision of a subcontinent without an impending threat of war.
The almost year-long India-Pakistan military stand-off following the massing of the Indian troops since December last year was the longest, potentially, more ominous and materially more expensive than anything like that in the past.
India tried to take advantage of the unfortunate (and as yet exactly non-attributable) last December’s attack on its parliament house by confronting Pakistan with a massive military threat. Never before was India known to have deployed its army, navy and the air force in such a big strength and at high alert as between December 2001 and December 2002. Pakistan refused to succumb to the pressure, thus “defeating the enemy without a war.”
Having achieved nothing, the Indian army was forced to start withdrawal of its troops from our borders in October this year. However, it has not completed its pull-out yet, partly because of its own design to reactivate a war-like situation whenever it might so choose and partly because of the delay caused by the heavily-mined operational area.
Regardless of the question as to which one of the two might have been more at fault in inducing and prolonging a war-like situation, the fact remains that Musharraf never reneged on his initiative to make lasting peace with India. One such initiative was even close to a no-war pact.
India’s prolonged troop deployment along the Pakistan borders made little military sense.
“No country”, wrote Sun Tzu, “has ever benefited from a protracted war.” This would be even truer of a war-like deployment of military men and materials ending in a stalemate. In his forward to Samuel B. Griffith’s translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, critically examines Karl Von Clausewitz’s (9th century German military philosopher) dictum of the theory and practice of ‘total war beyond all bounds of sense’.
Clausewitz, the so-called ‘Mehdi of Mass Massacre’, initially defined war as “an act of violence pushed to its extreme.” Yet, subsequently, he qualified this assertion by the admission that “the political object, as the original motive of the war, should be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made.” Moreover, his eventual conclusion was that to pursue the logical extreme entailed that “the means would lose all relation to the end.”
It is now for the Indian political and military leaders to think and decide for themselves whether or not their year-long face-off vis-a-vis Pakistan might have been an exercise in futility wherein the ‘means’ or the force deployed lost ‘all relations to the end’. Furthermore, force deployed without being actually used at some stage, sooner or later, is an inexcusable waste of the force doing little credit to those making a show of it.
War is not just a display of superior mettle, valour and martial prowess. It is the gravest challenge a state or a people may face. Sun Tzu realized that two-and a-half millenniums ago. War, he wrote, was “a matter of vital importance to the state.” It demanded study and analysis: most importantly, “a rational basis for the planning and conduct of military operations.”
In the words of his translator, Griffith, “Sun Tzu was not primarily interested in evolving strategies and transitory techniques (tactics).” He believed that the “skillful strategist should be able to subdue the enemy’s army without engaging it and take his cities without laying siege to them, and to overthrow his state without bloodying swords.”
Here Sun Tzu’s may well be interpreted as making a case for outright, physical conquest and occupation of the enemy’s state without bloodshed. However, that would ill-accord with the present day theory and practice of war. Even in its most malignant form today’s war would be to humiliate and subdue the enemy without making a physical conquest (for example the Indian army’s invasion of East Pakistan forcing Pakistan armed forces to surrender).
In its relatively more benign (that is if war could be benign at all) form, a war would be to undermine the will of the rival state and its military forces to fight back. Here India would have little to congratulate itself for in its design to undermine the will of the Pakistan armed forces and the people in standing up to the Indian challenge without ‘bloodying swords’.
In the words of General Musharraf: “The Indian Army is now going back from the borders with their morale at their lowest ebb. There are reports in the Indian media about mutiny by jawans against seniors in many of their units.”
The question now is, must the two countries continue to waste their precious material and manpower resource in periodic military demarche and senseless confrontation, instead of making and reaping rich peace dividends in terms of developing their criminally-neglected economies and social sectors?
The writer is a retired army brigadier