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THE Pakistan cricket team has just begun its tour of England, and I wonder if their fitness level has benefited from their recent training camp.
This is especially relevant on this summer outing as army trainers helped to raise our players’ physical condition in Abbottabad. While we will soon find out if it actually improved performance, we can reflect on yet another civilian function handed over to the military.
Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with professional fitness instructors — in or out of uniform — getting our players into shape. But this use of military expertise must be unique to our cricket team. So why have our coaches abdicated their responsibility for instilling fitness in our team?
Inefficient politicians have provided space to the military.
Could it be that our players — never a very disciplined bunch — don’t take them seriously? Another issue is that as Shahryar Khan, the cricket board chief, has informed us, very few of our cricket stars are educated, and cannot therefore understand the instructions from the foreign coaches appointed to drill them.
But the broader point here is the use of the army to perform tasks civilians should be doing. Time and time again, it has been called in for internal security duties when the police ought to be solely responsible for law and order. But at least this is understandable, given how poorly our police force is trained, led and equipped.
What is less comprehensible is the use of highly trained troops to read electricity meters as happened in the late 1990s under Nawaz Sharif. Not trusting Wapda’s meter readers who often were not permitted to enter the factories, farms and homes of the rich and powerful, the government launched a campaign to collect electricity dues by using soldiers to check meters.
And election duties often see large numbers of army units deployed across the country to prevent rigging as opposition parties do not trust the police to be fair. Even worse, at times of political crises — and the Lord knows we have our fair share of those — the cry goes up from opposition politicians for the ‘third umpire’ to step in.
We often complain of the army’s numerous interventions and our repeated bouts of military rule. But we conveniently forget that all too often, generals have been invited to step in by self-serving politicians who hope that these coups will benefit them, and crush their opponents. And generally speaking, they get a few crumbs thrown at them from the ruling junta’s high table.
So when we talk about civilian-military relations — or civ-mil in current jargon — we should remember the role unprincipled politicians and inefficient leaders play in providing space to the military. This is not to suggest that ambitious generals do not manipulate venal politicians into being their puppets, or that the ISI does not exploit their weaknesses — no shortage of those, either — to further its murky agenda.
For their part, soldiers are convinced that it is their superior organisational skills that make them so much more effective than their civilian counterparts. Thus, they run housing schemes, factories and farms across the country. They forget the huge advantage they enjoy in receiving licences, permissions and financing.
When my batch mates and I started our civil service career nearly 50 years ago, we were attached to various army units for two months. In his wisdom, some general had decided that a dose of military discipline would make us better bureaucrats. So I duly went off on exercises with the 28th Punjab Battalion that was then based in Quetta.
In the evenings at the army mess where I had a room, I would read books I had borrowed from the base library; often, young officers would ask me if I was preparing for an exam. While my shooting skills improved on the rifle range, I don’t think I learned anything of value. But I did get an insight into the insularity of military life. For one, our commanding officer, a reasonably bright lieutenant-colonel, was convinced that one Muslim soldier was equal to 10 of his Hindu foes.
The prevailing sentiment in military messes across the country appears to be that all politicians are corrupt, and that all civil servants are both crooked and inefficient. I am told that a play is regularly performed at the Kakul military academy depicting a dashing young army officer deputed to civilian duties in a crisis displacing the bumbling bureaucrat, and quickly sorting out the mess.
But look deeper, and you see the reality beneath these self-serving myths. In all the bouts of military rule we have lived through, nothing has improved. Our dictators could not even make the trains run on time, or our taxis to charge by their meters. And for all the talk of one Muslim soldier being equal to 10 Hindus, we have lost each of the wars we have fought with India.
At the end of the day, soldiers and civilians alike are the products of the same rotten system.
Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2016
