LONDON, Oct 9: Former head of Inter-Services Intelligence Asad Durrani has blamed particular army chiefs rather than the institution for military takeovers in Pakistan.

Delivering a lecture on Tuesday at the International Institute of Strategic Studies on the reasons for frequent military coups, Mr Durrani said the institution had never intervened itself because it had been invited by politicians, there was a political vacuum or to save its corporate interests.

He said the military would never intervene unless fully assured that there would not be any mass public resentment against such an action.

Giving the examples of Gen Aslam Beg, Gen Asif Nawaz and Gen Jehangir Karamat, he said that the situation was ripe for all those chiefs of army staff to take over but they resisted the temptation.

He said there was no political vacuum when Gen Ziaul Haq and Gen Pervez Musharraf intervened, “rather there was a lot of politics in the country on both occasions.”

He said if the army were to come in on the invitation of politicians, then it would always be in power.

According to Gen Durrani, military interventions had never posed any problems for their chiefs because the institution followed the leaders without a whimper and the courts always gave legitimacy to the coups using the doctrine of necessity or citing their success. “But the problem starts when the coup leaders look around for political legitimacy.”

This urge for political legitimacy forced the coup leader to recruit pliable political leaders who then became a burden and did not let him formulate a decent exit strategy, he said. And it became something like riding a tiger for the coup leader, he said.

“In order to keep politicians on his side, the coup leader starts manipulating the elections as most of his allies would never have won an election or have lost their acceptance among their voters by the time,” he said.

Mr Durrani said the army should never have gone against the tribes in the tribal areas and now he thought it had become a no-win situation.