THE letter by a group of men and a woman calling for the disengagement of the military from politics is a significant development. The significance of the move does not arise from the contents of the letter, which are fairly mundane. Rather, it arises from the fact that most of the signatories to the letter have earned their distinction by having served on important political positions in military governments.

Understandably, their concerns are not born out of principled angst regarding the violation of the sanctity of the Constitution or of ensuring rule of law based government and polity. Rather, their apprehensions appear to be driven by increasing signs even to those who are close to the corridors of power that the politico-institutional edifice holding the country together is under serious stress.

Unfortunately, the letter is not likely to cause anyone in the President House or in GHQ to sit up and take notice; partly because the group of signatories does not command the required moral stature and, partly, on account of the hackneyed contents of the letter. The fact is that General Musharraf’s occupancy of the positions of president as well as Army Chief of Staff is merely the facade of a set of symptoms and not the cause of the myriad of political problems that Pakistan faces.

The fact is that the country, having freed itself from British colonialism in 1947, has now fallen into the chasm of cantonment colonialism. The fact is that Pakistan has become a praetorian state. This is the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed.

The military’s first foray into politics commenced in 1954 with the appointment of General Ayub Khan as defence minister in the unelected government of Mohammed Ali (Bogra). Since then there has been no turning back. The military has mounted coups and subverted the constitutional process on four occasions in less than 50 years. Its penchant for political power is not without a purpose. When the British colonised South Asia, their objective was to extract surpluses from the local economies to support the development of the metropolis — Great Britain.

As part of the strategy of colonial control, the British acquired — by fiat — large tracts of land running into several hundred square miles for setting up cantonments, establishing military farms, laying railway lines, etc. The governmental machinery and governing institutions were organised with the twin aims of control and revenue extraction.

Even when elected governments were allowed in the provinces, the viceroy reigned supreme. He was only answerable to London and he ensured that the provincial governments, even though elected, did not function in any way contrary to the agenda of the British government. The colonising British prospered to ‘First World’ standards and the colonised South Asians sank into ‘Third World’ penury. The exceptions among the latter were those who chose to betray their people and collaborate with the colonisers. They emerged as the native elite.

Today, the military has emerged as the new coloniser and the colonial framework is back in place. The cantonment is the new metropolis and the civilians have been pushed back to the status of the ‘natives’. The army chief has emerged as the viceroy, reigns supreme and is answerable only to Washington. An elected parliament and government has been allowed, but is constrained to ensure that they do not function in any way contrary to the agenda of the cantonment.

Governance decisions are made according to the will of the military rather than the will of the people. Once again, there are elements among the native civilian elite who chose to betray their people and collaborate with the new colonisers. The colonising military metropolis and the collaborating civilian elite have prospered to ‘First World’ standards and the remaining ‘natives’ have remained in ‘Third World’ penury.

Over the half century since 1954 — except the five and a half years from December end 1971 to early July 1977 — the military has dominated the political and economic decision-making process in the country. New modes of surplus extraction have been developed. An exclusive military corporate empire, with a vast outreach in the economy, has emerged.

The army is the largest land owner in the country. To the vast landholdings has been added a range of industries, trading houses, banking, leasing and insurance companies, transport entities, and housing estates that are epitomes of luxury. Military foundations, a la Fauji Foundation and Army Welfare Trust, run about 55 industrial and commercial enterprises. The National Logistics Cell commands a near monopoly in bulk road transport cargo movements.

Highway construction and highway toll collection are among the many commercial activities that are now largely the domain of the military. Military officers now head organisations in sectors like power generation, communications, highway construction, steel production, etc. There is even a conglomerate of military colleges and universities and hospitals and medical centres. Other universities are often headed by military officers. Retired military officers have emerged in private businesses ranging from urban transport to home security. Private firms too employ retired military officers as public relations officers to benefit from the military’s clout in government.

The Defence Housing Authorities are the largest real estate enterprises in the country, headed by the local corps commanders. That even one minute of the corps commanders’ professional time, paid for by taxpayers money, is devoted to anything other than matters relating to the defence of the country is absolutely unacceptable. And peddling real estate certainly does not in the remotest sense form part of the country’s defence.

The emergence of the praetorian state has been accompanied by a ‘softening’ of the national state apparatus. There has appeared an interface between the military and private interests, with the latter comprising local business houses, some of which are now owned by military families, and multinational corporations, including international financial institutions. Recent events point to the dangerous fact that the state has become increasingly subservient to private interests.

During the last six months alone, there have been three major scandals. The sugar scandal prompted the National Accountability Bureau to launch an investigation, but it was abandoned on the grounds that ‘it is likely to destabilise the industry!’ The government demand that foreign oil firms return excess profits worth billions of rupees on account of failure to pass on the benefits of international oil price reductions to consumers fell silent after the companies threatened to withdraw from operations in the country. And the investigation into stock market manipulations has turned into a hounding exercise against the very individuals who are supposed to reveal the truth.

Under the circumstances, the military’s close involvement in the domain of commerce, industry and finance should ring alarm bells. Herewith, there are lessons from history. Between 150 to 200 years ago, when the British were making inroads into the realm of the crumbling Mughal empire, royal dignitaries, princes and palace officials — charged with the protection of the empire — tended instead to negotiate with the British for the protection of their individual jagirs, allowances and other privileges. A similar situation was witnessed when the British were attempting to take over Sindh.

In Pakistan today, a situation exists whereby military officials have constitutionally assigned responsibility for unconditionally defending the country, have forcibly taken over responsibility for political decision-making, and have developed significant and extensive business interests as well — institutionally through military-owned companies as well as privately. The conflicts of interest are multi-layered and, in addition to causing allocational inefficiencies, could also pose an element of risk to national interests.

Allocational inefficiencies can occur if military corporate entities are able to corner markets on the strength of their preferential access to decision-making forums rather than on the strength of their cost efficiency. This practice is actually widespread and the economic costs to the country are certainly not insignificant. Even the now pervasive practice of appointing military personnel on civilian positions constitutes a contribution to economic inefficiency.

When military officers, trained in the arts of war through an expensive training process, are put to managing real estate, water supply systems, steel mills, fertiliser factories, etc., the result is waste of military resources. Whether those trained in the arts of war are efficient industrial or commercial managers is also a moot point. Clearly, a praetorian state is a contradiction in terms of the objectives of developing a modern state, competing in a globalised economy.

The element of risk to national interests is more subtle. The opening up of the economy has led to several Pakistani companies teaming up with foreign firms to acquire or set up operations in the country. This is true of military corporate entities as well. For example, Defence Housing Authority has set up joint ventures with foreign firms in the realm of real estate development. Other deals could be in more strategic sectors. It is quite likely that a situation may arise where a venture may be problematic with respect to the country’s national economic or political interests. A conflict of interest may arise if the military officials manning the corporate entity command preferential access to military colleagues in the ministries vetting the venture.

The experience of the scandals of the last six months indicates that the state agenda can be compromised. And national interests demand that conflicting commercial considerations do not in any way encumber the military’s ability to maintain a strong defence for the country. The imperative of a strong defence stands heightened today, given the strains on the eastern as well as the western fronts and threats of hot pursuit from across the borders.

The subject about whether the president should be a man in uniform is basic from a constitutional point of view and of paramount importance in the context of a rule of law-based polity. Also vitally important are issues of an independent election commission and free and fair elections. However, these matters now follow from the determination of the fundamental question as to whether Pakistan is to be a praetorian or a democratic state. If it is to be the latter, then the military corporate empire will have to be done away with as a necessary condition for a national interest-based democratic order to prevail.

THE military crisis in the Horn of Africa is deepening. In the wake of Islamic Courts’ ascendancy in most of south Somalia and the adjacent regions, Ethiopia recently justified its military intervention in Somalia to counter the advance of the Islamic militia as an extension of America’s post-September 11 doctrine of ‘preventive wars’: war to pre-empt imminent terror attacks and to prevent potential conflict.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told the BBC that his country was acting in “self-defence against the resurgent jihadists in Mogadishu”.

Zenawi also raised the spectre of Islamic terrorism and the fear of future conflicts in the region, as he explained the presence of his forces in many Somali towns, including Baidoa, the seat of the faltering but internationally backed transitional government. The Islamic Courts had till then posed no direct threat to his country, though they have a history of conflict with Ethiopia and had links with the perennially restive Ogaden Muslim region in Ethiopia. In fact, representatives of the Courts were participating in an Arab League-sponsored dialogue in Khartoum with the wobbly interim government when Ethiopia stationed its troops inside Somalia.

The Ethiopian government is thus following the precedent of military pre-emption set by its patrons in Washington. The mere perception of threat, not a threat itself, warrants military action. As an ally in the war on terrorism, Addis Ababa deems itself entitled to forestall any Islamic threat. And, if needed, Ethiopia will use its military muscle to quell the nascent administration of the Courts, as it had done in the mid-1990s when the Islamic forces led by Hasan Dahir Aweys had staged an uprising.

The militia of Islamic Courts, on the other hand, continues to gain ground as well as political legitimacy in the country. Recently 19 ministers of the feeble interim government resigned. The resigning ministers want the Ethiopia-sponsored warlord president, Abdullahi Yusuf, to restart the stalled intra-Somali dialogue and conclude a power-sharing settlement with the Islamic Courts.

Interim Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi was saved from a vote of no-confidence only because a cabinet minister was shot dead in Baidoa after Friday prayers and the vote was postponed. A shaken Gedi accused not only the militia of Islamic Courts for the minister’s murder. He also blamed Egypt, Libya and even Iran of fomenting terrorism in Somalia.

Except for the puppet transitional government, all Somali factions seem united against foreign forces. Somaliland, an autonomous Somali region and an oasis of stability in the fractious and fragmented country, opposes any foreign military presence, especially that of Ethiopia. Though no friends of the Islamic Courts, a Somaliland official has described the Ethiopian intervention as a “humanitarian catastrophe”.

A trend of defections by warlord militias to join the Islamic Courts is also spreading in Somalia. More clan-based Shariah courts are appearing even in areas not directly controlled by the Mogadishu-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Courts. And it is with the leaders of the Courts that the international agencies and UN emissaries are negotiating modes and mechanisms of providing humanitarian relief, and security and for a future dialogue.

At the same time, the Islamic militia is beefing up its defences and weapon capability. Surrounded by unfriendly neighbours and faced with stubborn warlords, the Islamic militia is getting support from Eritrea, the archrival of Ethiopia. Eritrea does not share a border with Somalia and has to airlift supplies into Mogadishu.

Some days ago, at least three cargo flights — the first planes to touch down at Mogadishu airport since the defeat of the US-backed warlords in June — carried weapons, uniforms and, as Addis Ababa alleges, Eritrean army personnel, to strengthen the Islamic forces. Still sulking from a war with Ethiopia, which ended with a boundary agreement in 2000, Eritrea continues to have border disputes with its bigger neighbour. A conflict by proxy in Somalia, as a continuation of Eritrea’s rivalry with Ethiopia, is on and could even lead to a revival of direct hostilities.

The Bush administration has not yet given a licence to Ethiopia to intervene and conduct pre-emptive military operations in Somalia, as was done in the case of Israel in the context of the Middle East. The State Department prefers to pursue multilateral diplomacy through the Somali Contact Group and through its East African allies in the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Yet, Washington’s intentions vis-a-vis the Union of Islamic Courts are clear. It sees them as part of the global jihadi movement, harbouring Al Qaeda suspects, aligned with Osama bin Laden, and keeps a vigilant eye on them from its base in neighbouring Djibouti.

A diplomatic solution to this simmering crisis remains doubtful. The United States — and therefore its regional allies and the UN — insist on recognising and protecting the discredited interim set-up. Even as American Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs Jendayi Frazer urged all protagonists in the conflict, especially Ethiopia and Eritrea, to observe restraint she backed the unpopular interim government made up of retreating warlords. “If the (transitional) government is undermined,” Frazer warned recently, “it will set the Somali people back many, many years and probably ensure a future of chaos.”

An Ethiopian official also told the VOA that Frazaer’s call for restraint was not meant for Ethiopia. “In the first place, she didn’t ask for restraint to be applied by Ethiopia,” Simon Bereket, an aide to Zenawi, said: “She only asked that we stay cool in this situation, and that’s normal suggestion from a friendly state. I think this was a normal advice in a tense situation.”

The argument that Ethiopian troops are in Somalia on the request of the Baidoa-based government does not, however, cover the illegality of the Ethiopian action. Which is why Prime Minister Zenawi has resorted to using the same language that the United States spoke before invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and which Israel now employs as it bombards Lebanon into ruins: ‘self-defence against jihadists’. A helpless but spectacular casualty of this post-September 11 military doctrine is international law and opinion.

John Feffer of the International Relations Centre, NM, calls the states advocating and conducting preemptive wars to avoid attacks as the “new axis of intervention”. This axis, he argues, targets not only sovereign states like Iraq and Afghanistan and non-state actors like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Courts in Somalia. “With the... Israeli attacks against Red Cross vehicles and a clearly marked UN observation post in Lebanon,” Feffer notes, “the real target of the axis of intervention becomes clear: the institutions of international law. By resorting to military force... both Israel and the United States have undermined the United Nations and key global agreements such as the Geneva Conventions.”

It remains to be seen whether Ethiopia will sign on this larger agenda by introducing the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes to the Horn of Africa. Signs are that it will, pushing the region into crisis of instability and starting wars without end.

PEOPLE walk the dusty, broken roads in scorching summer heat, taking shelter in the basements of empty buildings. In Gaza and Lebanon, in the refugee camps of Khan Younis, Rafah and Jabaliya, in Tyre and Beirut, in Nabatiyeh and Sidon, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children seek refuge.

As they flee, they risk the indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped. Ambulances are struck, humanitarian relief convoys are struck, UN observers are struck. Warning leaflets are dropped from the sky urging people to abandon their homes, just as they were in 1996, 1982, 1978, 1967 and 1948. The ultimately impossible decision in Gaza and Lebanon today is: where does a refugee go?

In Beirut, in July 1982, after surviving a bomb that destroyed a seven-floor apartment block next door to me, burying alive more than 40 people taking refuge in its cellar, some of us began to sleep on the roof; there is no refuge from this terror, there is only resistance. Fifteen of the 37 children killed in Qana on Sunday were disabled; their families could take them no further north, according to the Lebanese MP Bahia Hariri.

From June to August 1982, Israeli aircraft flying over Lebanon dropped “smart bombs” on children’s hospitals in Shatila camp, Gaza hospital, Acre hospital and 11 of the country’s orphanages, killing dozens of disabled children. They had nowhere else to shelter. The roofs had been painted with huge white crosses visible from the sky.

That war did not give Israel the security it claims to seek, and nor will this one. In 1948 Palestinians fled after hearing news of the massacres in villages by Haganah forces and receiving leaflets dropped from the sky telling them to run for their lives. This week their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are being killed with impunity in the refugee camps of Gaza, where they are trapped.

Last Friday alone more than 30 Palestinians were killed, with no international condemnation and barely a mention in the press. In Qana they were also trapped. “We couldn’t get out of our neighbourhood because there are only two roads leading out and the Israelis bombed them both several days ago,” said Mohammad Shalhoub, a disabled 41-year-old survivor.

The US and Britain are claiming that no ceasefire is possible until there is an international force that will implement United Nations resolution 1559. Yet the Lebanese prime minister issued a seven-point plan in Rome last week, consistent with international law and agreed by all elected parties in Lebanon (including Hezbollah), that had as its first requirement an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. It is implementation of the dozens of UN resolutions that Israel has flouted for more than 50 years with protection from the US — and now from Britain — that will stop this conflict.

The capture of a soldier from an occupying army in Gaza, and of two soldiers on the Lebanese border by local resistance, in an attempt to force the release of thousands of illegally detained Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, should have been dealt with by Israel in the framework of the laws of war and with a proportional response. Instead, by launching this massive attack, Israel has destroyed the social and economic infrastructure of a sovereign nation, Lebanon, just as it is destroying the infrastructure of a democratically elected administration in occupied Palestine.

It is producing generations of refugees who will also resist. Power stations, bridges, key manufacturing and food factories in Lebanon are ruined, the entire industrial estate of Gaza pulverised. The ancient city centre of Nablus has been demolished. Whole villages in south Lebanon and sections of refugee camps in Gaza have been obliterated. These too are war crimes. If Britain will not stop Israel, nor condemn it, then under the Geneva conventions it is complicit in those crimes.

Before seeking the implementation of UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah, Britain must seek with more sincerity the implementation of UN security council resolutions 242 and 338, which demand the immediate withdrawal of Israel from lands illegally occupied in the 1967 war, including the Golan Heights, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza.

There is hardly a statesman or citizen in the world today who cannot see that it will take outside intervention to stop Israel inflicting this terror. Calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and working towards the implementation of all UN resolutions addressing this conflict, will restore to the international community — and Britain in particular — the legitimacy it has squandered by allowing months of war crimes to go by, witnessed but uncondemned and unconstrained.— Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer teaches politics and international relations at Oxford University.