June 16, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 30, 1428

LONDON, June 15: The International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) held the book launch of my latest publication, ‘Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy’, last Wedneday. The event had been scheduled at least a couple of months ago and coordinated with the arrival of the book in the international market.

Personally, I found it to be a gratifying experience to present my publication in front of an audience which was familiar with comparative political and general social science literature and could understand that my book was not a political pornography but an academic work. The audience included people who had experience of similar military capital in Vietnam, Thailand and other countries and could argue on the dynamics of the political economy of national security.

There were others in the audience as well who had brought with them written questions dictated by the ‘angels’ with the objective of forcing me to confess that the book was intended to mar the image of the armed forces in Pakistan. Amongst the audience were also the functionaries of the state who were keen to find faults with my analysis and draw my attention towards the professionalism of the military and the fact that I had not provided any data to substantiate my claim regarding the negative implications of Milbus (military business) on military’s professionalism in Pakistan.

I have never claimed my book or any of earlier writings to be perfect. A scientific proposition cannot be perfect. In social science, in particular, theoretical frameworks and research works are meant to probe an issue from a certain perspective with the hope that counter arguments would perhaps help in finding new answers and in exploring other facets of an issue.

The issue, hence, is not of bias but of a certain perspective which can always be challenged through another work or a counter argument. For instance, those who believe, unlike me, that a military’s involvement at any level with commercial ventures or multiple roles including politics does not influence its overall performance would have to produce alternative evidence to claim that engagement in multiple roles does not dilute the core function of an organisation. A military performing multiple roles would be similar to a heart surgeon trying to become a nuclear scientist or a soldier.

Similarly, I have an issue with those who believe that debating the role which a military ought to perform is sacrilege. All institutions of the state can be exposed to analysis, especially when the primary objective is to see if there is a possibility of finding better alternatives for them. I really wish that some military personnel from Pakistan would have attended the launch to open up the debate on an important issue.

The book launch in London has solicited various kinds of comments from certain quarters. There are suggestions from some people that the launch at the IISS was an international conspiracy to malign Pakistan due to which certain people were not allowed to the session.

The fact is that about 16 people had to be turned down because they had registered late for the event and could not be accommodated, including some of my own friends.

Furthermore, the academicians present in the audience, as I had expected, were more interested in probing the theoretical aspects. In fact, a day before the launch I had a long discussion with Pakistan’s prominent historian, Ayesha Jalal, who had pulled me up for not mentioning in my literature survey some of the historians who had worked on the colonial military institutions. Surely, there are many other things as well which I must have missed out in my analysis, but then this work could be improved by producing other scholarly works unless academic research is a zero-sum game in Pakistan.