BEFORE leaving for New York to address the UN General Assembly President Karzai promulgated a decree under which a number of Panjsheri deputy ministers were replaced by Pushtun, Hazara and Uzbek officials. This change in the ethnic composition of the top echelons of the ministry of defence was, after an initial period of hesitation, deemed sufficient by the UN and the Japanese to permit them to go ahead with the $200 million programme for the demobilizing, disarming and reintegration (DDR) of the 100,000 strong Afghan militia forces maintained by the warlords.

This disarming, the Afghan government, the ISAF, the NGOs, the donor agencies and somewhat more reluctantly the Americans were agreed, was an essential prerequisite for the restoration of stability and for taking the further steps needed to bring democracy to Afghanistan. The programme, it was said, would start on October 24 when 1000 militia men in Kunduz would be disarmed.

President Karzai announced while he was in New York that a draft constitution had been prepared and would be made public within two weeks. This public release has yet to happen but copies were obtained by some journalists, and according to the Washington Post, the 39-page document which contains 182 articles “manages to balance the competing demands of a confused post-war society that is struggling to chart a course between Islamic and secular values, domestic tradition and international norms, immediate political needs and permanent legal standards” and is a “politically balanced charter that provides for both a president and prime minister, protects minority rights while bowing to majority wishes, and acknowledges the primacy of Islamic values in Afghan life without making Islamic law paramount.”.

The UN Security Council unanimously approved this Monday a proposal made by NATO members to enable ISAF to operate beyond Kabul. It has also been announced that the first deployment outside Kabul will be of up to 450 German forces, operating on slightly more security-oriented lines than other provincial reconstruction teams, in the relatively peaceful northern city of Kunduz. The Germans have suggested that they visualize this and other ISAF deployments planned for the future, to cover cities like Herat and Kandahar, as designed to create islands of security which, in addition to facilitating reconstruction work, will also provide the needed security for the registration of voters and the holding of the national elections currently scheduled for June.

On Sunday the Afghan minister for justice announced that a new law, the text of which is yet to be released, was being promulgated which would ban anyone having armed forces behind him from participating in politics. This would mean that people like Marshal Fahim, the defence minister and the de-facto leader of the Panjsheris, General Dostum, the deputy defence minister and leader of the Uzbek Jumbish-i- Milli, Atta Mohammad, Fahim’s ally in the traditionally Uzbek dominated area around Farah and Mazar-i-Sharif and Dostum’s most formidable military rival, would all be ineligible for contesting the forthcoming elections.

The Karzai government has banned the publication of a newspaper, the Armaan-i-Milli and has explained that it has done so because there are 265 newspapers in a country where less than 35 per cent of the population can read. The Armaan-i-Milli was being funded by the ministry of defence or, in other words, the Panjsheri group. Earlier in June another newspaper the “Aftab” was banned for articles that were deemed un-Islamic by Marshal Fahim and his group.

Armitage’s visit to Kandahar and Kabul, primarily designed to indicate America’s long-term and firm commitment to Afghanistan sparked rumours that he had met the former Taliban foreign minister Mutawakil Wakil who it was said had been released from custody. Karzai and the newly appointed US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad both, however, denied the story of Mutawakil’s release. Khalilzad went further in another interview denying that there had been any official contact with the Taliban while acknowledging that there may have been some reaching out among Afghan leaders on both sides.

Other reports however suggest that there have been “deniable meetings” not only by the CIA but also by the FBI officials with some Taliban leaders. Denials notwithstanding the feeling therefore persists that both Karzai and the Americans are trying to get some support from “moderate Taliban” in a bid to shore up Karzai’s position and to secure a reduction in the Taliban attacks which have led to more than 300 deaths in Afghanistan since August this year.

Can these “positive developments” be taken as indicative of the fact that Afghanistan is at long last advancing towards enduring peace and stability? Unfortunately not.

The DDR was hesitantly accepted by the UN because there is an apprehension that the changes in the ministry of defence have not substantially affected the degree of power exercised in the ministry by the Panjsheris. This ministry will have a decisive role to play in DDR. A team of 70 officers and soldiers trained by the ministry will gather data about the arms and military personnel in each district and it will be on this data, subject to verification by a team of prominent persons — five from the district and two from the province — that the programme will proceed.

Since the ministry and the fledgling Afghan national army personnel are largely Panjsheri there is a genuine fear that this data collection will be skewed to leave out of the disarmament programme allies of the Panjsheris. Unless some more impartial mechanism is found no Uzbek, Hazaras, Badakshani Tajik or Pushtun warlord is going to surrender arms.

The programme, moreover, is going to be modest to start with. The first phase will call for the disarming of a 1000 persons in Kunduz and similar pilot programmes will be carried out in some more districts before a large scale demobilization is attempted. It will, even if all goes as planned, take two years to complete.

Elections have been scheduled for June ‘04 but so far the UN office entrusted with the task of preparations has received only $23.5 million of the $78.2 million budgeted for the project. This, according to the UN officials, is enough to start the registration process in the cities but not enough to allow expansion into the rural areas.

Secondly in the absence of security it seems highly unlikely that expatriate or Afghan employees of the UN will be prepared to undertake registration in such conflict ridden areas as South and South-east Afghanistan or even the areas in the north where an uneasy truce has been negotiated by the UN and Karzai’s interior minister between Dostum and Atta Mohammad.

The expansion of the ISAF’s mandate is welcome but in substance not enough. The fact is that not only are the NATO members psychologically reluctant to commit troops to Afghanistan but they are also constrained by physical limitations. Until the troops currently deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo are freed up, Germany, as one example, feels that it does not have the manpower to enlarge its contribution to the ISAF in Afghanistan. In the absence of such deployment there is little prospect of the warlords giving up their power bases.

Already there is a talk that the elections would need to be postponed. Equally importantly one can be sure that there will be a strong division between the Panjsheris and Karzai once the new election law is promulgated. There will also be, by my reckoning an effort on the part of the Panjsheris to ensure that the proposed constitution safeguards in one way or the other their current political dominance. Will the Americans be prepared to back Karzai in full measure?

The American pro-Panjsheri bias is perhaps beginning to change and may be accelerated by the assumption of greater responsibility by the White House for day-to-day policy in Iraq and Afghanistan but with the neo-conservatives in Washington still being powerful and still having a strong anti-Pushtun prejudice this change may be less drastic than is needed.

The delay in the publishing of the Constitution, for instance suggests that there are some behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings being attempted to placate the Panjsheris. Similarly it seems that the ban on military commanders’ participation in elections will not be accepted by the Panjsheris and may have been floated by Karzai without full American approval.

Pakistan should assume that while good initiatives have been taken they will not bear immediate fruit and instability and turbulence will continue to characterize the Afghan political, military and economic scene. As an almost inevitable corollary there will be a heightened emphasis on the Taliban “infiltration” from Pakistan and an effort to attribute all Afghanistan’s ills to Pakistani machinations. What should Pakistan do?

First, Pakistan must recognize that what is being attempted through the constitution, the election law, the ISAF expansion etc, is meant to restore the equity in power sharing the absence of which has been the principal grievance of the Pushtuns and the principal reason for the support the Taliban have garnered. Helping the process along is in Pakistan’s interest.

Second, Pakistan must do what it can to seal the border with Afghanistan. This is required as much for Pakistan’s own economic (smuggling) and human (narcotics trafficking) as it is for helping Karzai cope with Afghanistan’s other problems.

Third, it must intensify ongoing efforts to persuade the moderate Taliban on Pakistan’s soil to make peace with Karzai and the Americans. If this is to succeed, the extremist Taliban must be isolated and their access to Pakistani mosques and madressahs for political sloganeering or more nefarious purposes forbidden. Strong dissuasive action would also be needed against such Pakistani politicians and religious leaders as are encouraging the belief that it is only a matter of time before the Americans are driven out of Afghanistan and that the Taliban will once again rule in Afghanistan. They must be persuaded that hard headed realism must prevail rather than the cuckoo-land sort of thinking that led us to believe that the Americans would be defeated in Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

THE dichotomy in Pakistan’s state and society is amply manifested in the takeover of civilian positions in the public sector by men in uniform. The militarization of civil society has emerged in the last two decades further widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

True, this phenomenon has existed for a long time — after all, Ayub Khan, a serving military officer, became defence minister in Mohammed Ali Bogra’s cabinet in 1953. But what is significant today is the magnitude the problem has assumed. Previously, when a handful of retired military personnel would gain entry into the civilian sector it was regarded as an aberration. But times have changed.

During the 1999-2002 period, 1027 army, navy and air force personnel — retired and serving — were inducted into the administration and corporations on posts meant for civilians. Although 400 of these appointments were cancelled quietly in October 2002 — either the contracts were terminated or the officers reverted to the armed forces — this can hardly be dismissed as a one-time development.

According to information released by the Cabinet Division, it seems the floodgates were opened in October 1999 when General Musharraf took over the reins of the government. This propensity of the khakis to encroach upon the civilian sector is being accepted as the norm. This is the outcome of the military’s growing inroad into politics. When the president of the country can be a man in uniform, one could well ask, then why not the heads of departments, ambassadors, and so on?

Why is this practice being increasingly resented? There are two reasons for it. First, it is seen as a method of making the military’s presence in the power structure more visible and consolidating its hold on every sector of public life. Secondly, as the size of the economic cake shrinks, those denied a share in it find it difficult to swallow what they perceive as injustice to them. The trend began under General Ziaul Haq when 211 armed forces officers were inducted in the Central Superior Services in 1980-85. Compare this to the whopping number now under discussion.

The reaction of the civilian officers is understandable. Many of them have to work hard to pass examinations and undergo special (at times rigorous) training to qualify for the job to which they are posted. When these are taken away from them and handed out on a silver platter to men who were originally recruited and trained for a job of an entirely different nature, the civilians naturally feel cheated. It is significant that the Cabinet Division has also mentioned that at the time of the induction of the 1000 plus army men there were nearly 700 “unabsorbed surplus civilian employees” in the government cadre.

All this has had a very demoralizing effect on the members of the administration and has created a military-civilian divide which is most undesirable. Moreover, the economic implications of such measures cannot be overlooked. While this approach has affected the quality of governance it has also inflated the budgetary expenditure on administration.

A number of factors have contributed to the spiralling expenditure on administration such as inflation, pay rise, routine increments, pensions. But over-staffing is also a key element in this scenario. The following figures from the federal budget on administration are quite revealing:

1999-2000 Rs19.4 billion

2000-2001 Rs50.7 billion

(this year military pensions were included in the civilian accounts)

2001-2002 Rs51.1 billion

2002-2003 Rs55.1 billion

2003-2004 Rs58.5 billion

With such large numbers of armed forces officers — both serving and retired — available for secondment to civilian duties one wonders at the rationale underlying the recruitment policy of the three forces. Their strength has expanded rapidly in recent years. But they have also become top-heavy. As a result there is the growing pressure to take care of the senior ranks by providing them with lucrative jobs especially when most of them cannot be retained in active service for too long a period and retire at a younger age than their civilian colleagues, given their service structure.

By providing them with employment, the military leadership has managed to create a growing constituency whose allegiance is assured. Awarded not just jobs but also land grants, contracts, industrial permits, etc the servicemen act as anchors of stability in the system.

Large chunks of retired servicemen have been made quiescent by giving the armed forces a large share in the economy through the foundations which have been set up (Fauji, Bahria and Shaheen). They have virtually emerged as big industrial/commercial empires with assets and investments said to be to the tune of at least $5 billion. They provide 18,000 jobs to the retired and serving servicemen and constitute a substantial part of the national economy by operating over 40 enterprises ranging from airlines, banks, industries, security services, leasing companies to bakeries.

According to senior defence analyst, Dr Ayesha Siddiqua, many of these ventures are suffering losses that are covered by financial injections from the defence budget or other public sector enterprises. In her paper, “Soldiers in business” she writes that this practice opens up opportunities for corruption as these enterprises are exempted from accountability.

Other projects which were set up essentially to serve the needs of the armed forces but have grown are the National Logistics Cell, the Frontier Works Organization and the Army Welfare Trust. With the patronage and injection of funds of the government, these agencies have expanded into the civilian economy and have squeezed out the private competitors. At times the government’s own enterprises have suffered. For instance the NLC has actually hit the Pakistan Railways by diverting its freight to the road.

Another method to keep the servicemen happy has been to concentrate on facilities for health and education provided to them. It is not strange that the best schools, universities, hospitals and housing in the public sector are the ones operated by the armed forces for the servicemen to meet their needs for education for their children, health care and houses for their family. This would have been welcomed generally — and one must remember that many of these facilities trickle down to the civilians too — but for the fact that the social sectors in Pakistan are doing so badly for the common man.

All this has serious political implications. The infiltration of the servicemen into the civilian administration amounts to tightening the military’s grip on the power structure. The army’s presence in politics is already a controversial issue. But when members of the armed forces begin to control key posts in the administration the army’s hold on society as a whole becomes stronger. Furthermore, the division between the haves and the have-nots tends to deepen as a neo-military class enjoying better privileges comes to the fore. This militarization of the country’s administration will eventually destroy the traditions espoused by civil society.

More importantly, this branching out into civilian and economic life could tarnish the image of the armed forces. Not only will this distract the forces from what is their real job and which they alone can perform with efficiency — namely, the defence of the country. It will also damage their professionalism.