LONDON, June 13: Dr Ayesha Siddiqa launched her controversial book ‘Military Inc.’ here on Wednesday at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). She said that perhaps her language was so poor that some of her critics had read more than what she had written and some others could not grasp what she wanted to convey.

The sarcasm was not lost on the audience who responded by a thunderous applause. She said her book was purely an academic exercise and she had at length discuss the idea of military in business all over the world and had used Pakistan as a case study, “I would have been accused of being presumptuous if I had used the case studies of other countries.”

She said she had no problem with ‘Milbus’, the term she uses for military in business when it is purely for the welfare of the military personnel, but according to her, there were a number of other objectives which she found very difficult to defend.

According to her Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan are countries where the military uses its economic power to acquire political predominance and with the help of this political predominance it further expands its economic interest closing all doors to truly democratic forces to emerge and in the process undermines its own professionalism.

In this, she said, the ruling elite, big business and top civil bureaucracy also colluded with the army as they also benefited from this client and crony style arrangement.

She said in countries like Afghanistan and some in Africa, this economic predominance of the army in both politics and the economy gave rise to war lords.

She said there were many criteria on which to judge the professionalism of an army, “some would say it would depend on how many wars it had won, but other would say how good it is in the drill at the parade ground and some even would claim its performance in UN peace keeping exercises as the right criteria”.

She said her book was not for the masses but for the academicians and she desired an academic debate on her findings rather than attempts to reject it.