Former chief of the ISI, General Hamid Gul, who recently passed away, epitomised the way the Pakistan military began to see itself from the 1980s onwards. Influenced by ideological and strategic dynamics of the right-wing insurgency that Pakistan facilitated (during the General Zia dictatorship) against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, Gul remained to be a staunch advocate of the ideological mindset that was cultivated during the conflict.

This mindset, apart from being programmed into young insurgents, also proliferated across some influential sections of the Pakistan military. That’s why even after Zia’s demise in 1988 and Gul’s ouster as intelligence chief in 1989, a number of top ranking officers continued to be identified with this ideology, despite the fact that General Parvez Musharraf (who took over power in 1999), attempted to somewhat reverse the trend.

Recently, the new army chief, General Raheel Sharif, is attempting the same, trying to promote a more temperate outlook within the armed forces; or a point of view that can free the state’s war against religious militancy from any confusion that can arise within a soldier’s mind about an enemy that overtly uses religious symbolism and rhetoric.

General Raheel’s command is clearly signaling a shift on multiple fronts, gradually steering the military’s ideological narrative from the right to a more centrist disposition. It’s still a volatile undertaking because it is attempting to phase out a narrative that emerged in the 1980s and was then allowed to compound for various ‘strategic’ and political reasons.

Over the last three decades, fears of radical tendencies emerging from within the military have almost always had to do with some sections in the institution holding deep-seated intransigent thinking that was first refined during the initial Afghan conflict. But this wasn’t always the case. Because before the 1980s the radical tendencies in the same institution usually came in from the left.

Two men typify this bygone tendency the most: Major-General Akbar Khan and Major Ishaq Muhammad.

As a Brigadier, Akbar had directly led both regular and irregular Pakistani forces against the Indian military during the first Pakistan-India conflict (over Kashmir) in 1948. Field Martial Ayub Khan in his 1967 autobiography, Friends, Not Masters describes Akbar as an impulsive but brave soul and an ‘ambitious Young Turk’.

Remembering the quasi-communist coup attempt in 1951

Ayub who was made the army chief in 1950, and would then go on to head the country’s first military regime (from 1958 till 1969), wrote in his book that he was warned about Akbar by the outgoing military chief, General David Gracey.

Gracey described Akbar to be an ambitious man who was highly impressed by leaders such as Turkey’s secular nationalist, Kamal Ataturk, and had been extremely critical of the way Pakistan’s 1948 war with India had been handled by the country’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.

It was this that saw Akbar fraternising with a group of ideologues and intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). He planned to pull off a coup d’etat (with the help of a few army and police officers) against the Liaquat regime whom he accused of being a ‘stooge of the British.’

Hassan Zaheer in his 1998 book, The Times and Trial of The Rawalpindi Conspiracy, suggests that the plan was to arrest the top brass of the country’s political and opposing military leadership and use the CPP’s organisational skills to set-up a regime on the radical-nationalist model used by Ataturk in Turkey.

However, the coup attempt was nipped in the bud by the army when a police officer who was part of the conspiracy spilled the beans. The conspirators were arrested and sent to prison. These included Akbar Khan and his wife; some military and police officers; and leading members of the CPP, including famous Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

After his release in the late 1950s, Akbar Khan became a fervent critic of the Ayub Khan regime despite the fact that, ironically, Ayub too was flexing himself to be a Pakistani Ataturk of sorts.

Akbar Khan joined Z.A. Bhutto’s left-leaning PPP in 1970 and formed an outfit called the Red Guards, a militia of left-wing youth who were charged to ‘defend PPP rallies from attacks from right-wing groups’.

In December 1971 when Bhutto rose to become President, he made Akbar Chief of National Security. He also advised the Bhutto regime during its controversial operation against Baloch insurgents after a Baloch insurrection erupted in the mountains of Balochistan in 1973.

After the fall of the Bhutto regime to a coup d’etat (July 1977), Akbar went into hiding and then briefly into exile.

On his return to Pakistan, he quit politics and became a recluse. He passed away in 1993 at the age of 81, forgotten by the changing tides of history. His death was only briefly reported in the press.

Another co-conspirator of Akbar Khan’s ambitious plan to topple the Liaquat regime was Major Ishaq Muhammad. Ishaq, an ardent fan of Chinese revolutionary, Mao Tse Tung, was one of the links between Akbar Khan and the Communist Party of Pakistan.

Captain Zafarullah Poashni, who too was arrested, wrote in his book, Zindagi Zinda Dili Ka Naam Hai (2014), that Ishaq was ‘a hothead’ who was inspired by the views on Marxism of CPP men such as Sajjad Zaheer and Faiz.

After Ishaq was released from jail in 1957, he joined the left-wing National Awami Party (NAP) and became an opponent of the Ayub regime.

Ayub was being attacked by NAP from the left (and later by the PPP), and by the religious parties from the right, as he held on to a modernist-centrist position.

In 1967 NAP broke into two factions. The pro-Soviet faction was headed by Pakhtun nationalist leader, Wali Khan and Baloch politician Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo, while the pro-China faction was headed by the Bengali peasant leader, Maulana Bhashani.

Though a self-claimed Maoist, Ishaq sided with the Wali faction, but in 1968 he broke away and with Afzal Bangash formed his own faction, the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) Bangish and Ishaq led a group of MKP cadres and students to the hills of Hashtnagar in the Khayber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province to organise the peasants and prepare them for an armed uprising against the Khans (members of KP’s landed elite).

Between 1968 and 1974, MKP (along with the peasants) fought pitched battles against the police and the private militias of the Khans and occupied vast tracts of land until the movement was crushed in 1974.

Ishaq had a falling out with Bangash and decided to move the movement to rural Punjab. He eventually tied it to a movement for the recognition and revitalisation of the Punjabi language. He saw this particular movement as a revolutionary maneuver to empower impoverished peasants of rural Punjab.

Ishaq was jailed six times. The last time he was arrested was in 1981 when he was leading a movement against Zia’s dictatorship.

This time he suffered a stroke in jail and was paralysed. He passed away six months later. By then the ideological complexion of the military he had once been a soldier of was being radically changed, and the leftist tendencies that he was so much in awe of had already begun to gradually wither away.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 20th, 2015

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