“Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

— George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796.

IT WILL be apt to say that like the British empire a hundred years ago, the sun never sets on American military today. American soldiers are operating, openly or otherwise, in more than 100 countries, performing a host of functions. Apart from traditional combat, they are demining landmines, fighting terrorism or running counter-terror training camps, battling drug trafficking, providing humanitarian disaster relief, assisting in disarmament and even performing administrative duties as in the post-Saddam Iraq.

The spectacular rise in US military might in the last decade and the multifarious functions the US military is being called upon to perform has led to an increase in its power and influence that has not attracted the attention it deserves. In order to maintain its dominance in the world, the US now spends as much on its military as all the countries of the world combined spend on their armed forces. America’s annual defence budget now almost touches the 400 billion dollar figure. Washington is outspending on defence its biggest rivals by about 300 billion dollars annually.

By opting to fight almost single-handedly the recent Iraq war, the Pentagon has sent a clear message to the world: America has got rid of the Vietnam syndrome and will no longer shrink from using its armed forces anywhere in the world because its high technology has ensured that it will no longer be mired in any war of attrition. As the Iraq war has shown, American combat casualties in future wars will be minimal since there will be minimal American soldiers fighting on the ground. In the Iraq war, the primary combatants on the American side were not the soldiers but the machines and the former were simply backing up those machines.

As Huck Gutman recently pointed out in this space, the real American combatants were people sitting in front of computers and video screens, a thousand or more kilometers away, instructing machines to deliver destructive payloads at targets selected by still other machines.

Pentagon’s claim of the accuracy of its precision weaponry also turned out to be largely valid. Despite the fact that the US military dropped an unimaginable tonnage of bombs on Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, and hundreds of destructive missiles hit military targets in the midst of civilian districts, civilian casualties were minimal and the urban infrastructure remained by and large unharmed and intact. The war was mechanized to an extent never seen before in human history.

A comparison of US casualties in the Iraq war with US combat deaths in other wars will underline the significance of latest American military technology graphically. According to Encyclopedia Americana and the American War Library, in World War I one in 15 US troops was killed or wounded; in World War II, the ratio increased a little being I in 14. The casualty rate rose to 1 in 12 in the Korean War (the total American combat deaths being 33,629), but it fell to 1 in 16 in the Vietnam War (total combat deaths being 58,152). Preceded by a month-long heavy bombing, it fell dramatically to 1 in 760 in the 1991 Gulf War, but only 1 in 1,100 was killed or wounded in the recently fought Iraq war.

The reason for this was that the coalition forces were at a distance from the real theatre of war. Smart bombs fired from long distances reduced the number of bombing missions as well as the number of ground attacks necessary for the infantry which traditionally suffers the largest number of combat casualties. The high American technology has rendered the human element less and less important on the front line.

The recent Iraq war has served to further enhance the power and influence of US military and the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld has emerged as the most powerful defence secretary since the Vietnam war. His strategy on Iraq, much criticized during the preparatory period, has paid off. Before the war he was accused of micromanaging the war strategy. He had called for a small, agile force and fought off pressure from his generals for half a million troops.

The easy victory has vindicated his strategy and increased his prestige and influence. He firmly believes that since war is an act of politics by violent means, the secretary of defence must be actively involved with war plans. He will be remembered as a Pentagon chief who reasserted political control over military planners.

However, a fallout of the Iraq war has meant a corresponding decline in the influence of the State Department. After the end of the Iraq war, an influential Republican politician and a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich publicly demanded the revamping of Colin Powell’s office. He argued that the State Department was bent upon losing the advantages the US military had gained on the ground. “The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success,” he told the neo-conservatives’ think tank American Enterprise Institute. A vivid account of the growing influence and power of the American military has been provided by the Washington Post specialist on Pentagon, Dana Priest, in a timely new book that has caused a stir in Western media and influential circles. Published early this year, the book is titled : “The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military”.

According to the author, America’s military forces around the world are run by five men, who as regional commanders of US armed forces, are now among the world’s most powerful men. The Iraq war was fought by General Tommy Franks, C-in-C of the Central Command which includes the Middle East and Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. General Franks’s predecessor was Anthony Zinni who, according to Dana Priest, wielded considerable power and was not afraid to show it. At a conference in Bahrain, while several American ambassadors “wandered the hotel lobby alone and unnoticed and slept in regular-sized rooms”, Ms Priest writes, General Zinni had an expensive suite and his staff occupied an entire wing of the hotel, quickly running up a bill of $450,000.

During the 1990s, the State Department’s budget was cut down, and congressional parsimony forced the closure of several consulates, cultural centres and libraries. But in the same period the headquarters of the C-in-Cs have grown to more than twice their cold war size, the book reports.

An alarming development, according to the author, has been the shift in the making of US foreign policy — from suits to uniforms — that has largely gone unnoticed. Ms Priest, who travelled to 19 countries to observe the American military in operation, cites many examples to strengthen her arguments, but only one will suffice for our purpose.

In 2000, military interests came into conflict with the US ambassador in Indonesia, Robert Gelbard who opposed a planned visit to Jakarta by Admiral Dennis Blair, then head of the Pacific command, who took a strategic decision to resume military aid programme to that country. That programme had been suspended by the Clinton administration because of Indonesia’s human rights abuses.

Despite time-honoured ambassadorial prerogative to control which officials of other agencies will visit the country of his accreditation, admiral Blair’s visit to Indonesia went ahead. The Admiral, with a permanent liaison office in Washington, colonels working for him at the Pentagon and a staff of up to 1,000 at his Hawaii headquarters, simply swamped the poor ambassador who had a small overworked staff in Jakarta.

There is sufficient evidence about the growing influence and power of the American military. The pertinent question that comes to mind is :what will be the long-term implications for the United States as well as the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, if the foreign policy of the sole superpower continues to be dominated by military interests?

The writer is a former ambassador.

“WE don’t want the vision of the Taliban. They were narrow-minded people who lacked tolerance. We want a progressive and civilized Islamic society” — General Musharraf

The general is right on target on this. Almost every rational citizen of this country shares his passion for a forward-looking and progressive Pakistan. No one in their sane mind would even dream of supporting a Taliban-style government, which, as the general rightly pointed out, constitutes a threat to civil liberties and sends out wrong signals about Pakistan.

But then isn’t it a bit strange that the very mentors of the Taliban are currently the general’s political allies in Balochistan? Why has he decided to lash out at the mullahs now when their bigotry has not prevented him from bending over backwards to strike a deal with them on the LFO? Since it came to power over six months ago, the MMA government in the NWFP has done little else but to dismantle, brick by brick, the trappings of a healthy, tolerant society. Where was the “liberal” Musharraf all this time?

The general’s sudden sadness over “Talibanization” is rather mystifying. In the past, he has openly and repeatedly belied his putative distaste for religious hardliners by declaring jihadi militias as the country’s “first line of defence” against any war with India. Besides, actions speak louder than words. If General Musharraf (and the military) really are as dead set against religious extremism as he claims, then why are jihadi groups and their leaders still openly preaching hatred against his American allies and recruiting for jihad?

Why have banned outfits been allowed to resurface under different names? Why was Maulana Azam Tariq allowed to contest the October elections despite several pending murder charges against him? Why have the same “narrow-minded” Taliban been allowed sanctuary in Pakistan as they wage violent attacks inside Afghanistan? And let’s not forget the military’s futile pleading with the Americans after 9/11 to give the ‘moderate’ Taliban a chance.

So what is this ruckus really all about? For Pakistan’s rulers, denouncing extremism is an essential ingredient of their ‘Coming to America’ speeches. For President Musharraf, things have hardly turned out as he had hoped they would before his departure for the United States. While the Lahore High Court’s dubious legitimation of his uniformed presidency may have come as a sigh of relief, the political stalemate shows no signs of abating. Why not ratchet up the rhetoric to assuage international concerns and boost the military’s moderate credentials with Washington? Once he gets a pat on the back, a re-baptized Musharraf can dictate the garrison’s terms to its political detractors: he can either renew the military’s alliance of expediency with the MMA or make an explicit break.

If the mullahs stand their ground, he can dispose of the sham the military has erected in the name of real democracy. If he can seal a deal with them, the convenient excuse of the MMA’s democratic mandate can then be brought forward to gloss over the minor inconvenience of the Taliban-brand of Islamization (Shariat, Hisba Acts, and so forth) — suitably amended for international consumption, of course. If this military-mullah nexus persists, Pakistan will remain a democratic facade remote controlled by the military. As democratic institutionalization takes another prolonged hiatus, extremists and their causes will only flourish further.

How should the international community respond? Should the growing political appeal of the clergy translate into continued international support for the military’s hold over state power? Not at all. The international community has no reason to fear a democratic Pakistan. The phenomenal rise of the religious right is partly a manifestation of the fundamental problem facing Pakistan since independence, namely, the absence of viable democratic institutions that could aggregate interests, regulate political conflicts and allow the ventilation of grievances. If anything, Washington’s virtual blank cheque to General Musharraf in the wake of 9/11 had only emboldened him to bludgeon his civilian opposition.

With the moderate political parties thus marginalized, the MMA’s electoral success was a foregone conclusion. Arguably, its electoral clout is still a political aberration. The PPP and PML-N still command popular public support. On a level playing field, they might still give the religious parties a run for their money. But these assumptions might not last very long especially if the military continues to sideline these moderate, secular political forces.

There is no doubt that attempts to impose democratic change from outside has serious limitations. But in the absence of a decisive domestic challenge to the military’s continuing political dominance, any meaningful pressure for democratization is also most likely to come from external sources. The Pakistan military derives its institutional preponderance in no small part from the political, diplomatic and economic support given it by the United States throughout the country’s history. External linkages have been crucial to the ability of military rulers to prolong their stay in power. Musharraf’s case is no different.

US policies in the Middle East hardly inspire confidence in the often overstated American commitment to political democracy. The Bush administration’s need for a reliable strategic ally in Pakistan far outweighs any concerns about democracy that could sever Washington’s time-tested linkages with the traditional structures of power. But indications are that the utility of backing the present set-up in Pakistan is under question in some official US quarters. American commanders in Afghanistan are not amused with Islamabad’s alleged role in propping up the Taliban in what they see as a renewed campaign to destabilize the Karzai administration. Analysts say the MMA’s Taliban-like policies have sparked concerns about minority rights, women’s issues and civil liberties within US Congress and the State Department.

The United States, and the rest of the international community, must use its leverage with the generals before it is too late. Behind all the tough talk, the military is still making overtures to the mullahs. For dealing with its more moderate adversaries, coercion is still the preferred option. But crippled by his inability to crack either side, the country’s military ruler is once again using the “mad mullah” threat to seek carte blanche American approval for an extended lease of life. Washington must call this bluff, linking further American assistance to meaningful democratic reforms. Musharraf and his cohorts must be persuaded to show flexibility and make good on their promise to transfer ‘real’ power to elected politicians.

The grossly disfigured democratic system in place is incapable of checking the rising tide of fanaticism and militancy in Pakistan. Loud, self-serving incantations of liberal piety are no defence either. Fighting these threats effectively will require decisive state action besides a long-term investment in participatory and representative institutions. The lines in the battle between tolerance and bigotry in Pakistan have already been clearly drawn. Unless the secular, mainstream parties and their leaderships are urgently rehabilitated, liberalism will lose the battle before it even begins.