| May 05, 2007 | Saturday | Rabi-us-Sani 17, 1428 |
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A tale of two armies
WHEN Musharraf visited Turkey for two days recently, he must have secretly wished he could have stayed longer. Not only did he spend his formative years at school in Ankara, a prolonged visit would have allowed him to stay away from the difficulties he is facing in Pakistan. And even though he is responsible for many of them, it is still nice to be able to get away from one’s problems.
When Musharraf met General Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of staff of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF), I wonder what the two generals talked about. Both are being annoyed by troublesome politicians, and both command armies that have intervened often in political affairs. But here’s where the similarities end.
While the Turkish army sees itself as the guardian of the Kemalist vision of secularism, its Pakistani counterpart is increasingly confused over its role. While its stated position at one point was that it was the defender of Pakistan’s ‘ideological frontier’, it now reflects the beliefs of its current chief. When Zia was in command, he moulded the army to reflect his fundamentalist mindset. Now, the army is struggling to come to terms with both Musharraf’s relatively liberal outlook as well as the American demand to roll back religious extremism.
A basic difference between the two armed forces is that in Turkey, the institution commands enormous respect among a wide cross-section of society. One reason is that the country still has compulsory military service, so just about every adult male Turk has served in the armed forces for at least two years. This experience has given most Turks great pride in the TAF.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has never had a system of conscription, mainly because large numbers continue to volunteer to serve. In certain backward regions of the country, this is still a highly desirable career. For educated, upper-middle-class Pakistanis, the military was an attractive option until the late sixties. However, as more opportunities began opening up in the private sector, the military and the civil service dropped down the list of priorities for the best and the brightest.
This class shift in the induction pattern of the military has been well documented in Stephen Cohen’s definitive book ‘The Pakistan Army’. This transformation has resulted in making the armed forces more conservative, reflecting the outlook of (mostly Punjabi) lower middle-class Pakistani families.
The educational levels have also fallen. Where once young gentlemen cadets in the military academies were often privately educated in English-medium schools, now the majority are the products of a mediocre state system.I have a certain limited insight into these changes because as a young civil servant in 1970, I was required to put in two months with an infantry battalion as part of my training.
I stayed in a military mess in Quetta for my ‘army attachment’, and was constantly struck by the intellectual limitations of the officers with whom I spent most of my waking hours. While reading in the mess in the evenings, I would be often interrupted by young officers curious to know what exam I was preparing for. Even more depressing was the fact that our commanding officer earnestly repeated the mantra of ‘one Muslim soldier being equal to 10 Hindus’. In just over a year, our army learned the hollowness of this boast the hard way on the battlefields of East Pakistan and Punjab.
One result of this homogeneous induction base is that there is no cross-fertilisation of ideas and views. Had a wider cross-section of Pakistani society been represented at training academies and in the barracks, the institutional ethos of the army might have evolved beyond its current level. While no army tolerates dissent in its ranks, a greater awareness of regional and social diversity might have benefited both our officer corps and the whole country.
These factors have combined over time to drive a wedge between the army and the civilians of Pakistan. With its roots in certain relatively small regions of the country, soldiers view the rest of the nation with suspicion and contempt.
Civilians, seeing the army take over and rule over them time and again, have begun considering it a colonial force that exploits the country for its own benefit. The ‘them versus us’ attitude is strengthened by the flagrant misuse of power the officer corps constantly indulges in.
One result of this increasing antagonism is the growing chorus of criticism of the army we see in the media. In these attitudes, the contrast with the popularity the Turkish armed forces enjoy could not be starker. On a recent visit to Turkey, I asked Ali, my host’s son, why there was no clamour for ending conscription. After all, the Soviet Union, Turkey’s biggest threat, had collapsed years ago, so what was the justification in supporting a million-strong TAF at an annual cost of $ 11 billion.Ali is a very bright young man with a degree from an excellent American university.
I expected him to be anti-army, especially as the Turkish army has toppled four civilian governments in the last four decades. But he was a bit taken aback by my questions, saying only that the army was seen as a ‘national institution’ that continued to be popular across all of Turkey.
But I suspect that with its latest foray into political matters, it will be viewed by religiously conservative Turks – a growing majority – as an anti-democratic institution. By trying to block a nominee of the mildly Islamic Justice and Development Party from becoming the next president, the army might end up polarising the country. General Buyukanit would do well to remember what happened when the Algerian army tried to annul the election of Islamic parties in 1990.
So perhaps the Turkish and Pakistan armies are not so very different after all. Both are engaged in trying to thwart the popular will. While our army is directly involved as a political player, its Turkish counterpart has been issuing statements from GHQ: its last political intervention in 1997 amounted to a ‘coup by communiqué’. The ruling party collapsed after a public threat from the military, and the present decision to call for fresh elections is the result of yet another warning shot across the government’s bow.
All in all, I’m sure the two generals had much to talk about in Ankara recently.
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