FOR all its many and splendiferous strengths, one of the problems with the Pakistan army is the pervasive lack of imagination in its upper reaches. The bravery, often against daunting odds, of the ordinary soldier and young officer and the closed mind of the superior commander: this is the story of the Pakistan army.
The military engagements which are the pride of the Pakistan army have been company or battalion-level encounters in which grit and raw courage have made all the difference between defeat and victory. The higher direction of war, by contrast, has been a record of unrelieved failure. Grand Slam, Gibraltar, that clown Niazi's tactics in East Pakistan, the illusions that marched up the Kargil heights: one is left wondering about the kind of thinking which must have gone into the making of these disasters.
Partly this is because of the Pakistani climate. Our young officers, like young Russian beauties, are amongst the most promising in the world. When they reach the plot and house-acquiring stage something happens to them. They become soft and cautious around the waist.
But partly it is a question of inheritance. The Pakistan army is not a successor to the hordes of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. It is a direct descendant of the British Indian army and to a large extent has been touched by the plodding qualities of the British fighting tradition. The British qualities are pluck and tenacity and, Shakespeare and other poets notwithstanding, not those of imagination. For four hundred years, it is true, Britannia ruled the waves but that was because of a panache and skill on water that Britain's generals were seldom able to demonstrate on land. Which accounts for the fact that Britain's greatest heroes are seamen: Raleigh, Drake and the incomparable Nelson.
Brilliant soldiers have been the exception in British history: the great Duke of Marlborough in his wars against the French, Arthur Wellesley (the later Duke of Wellington) in his Spanish campaign against Napoleon and, possibly, Field Marshal Wavell in his North African campaign against the Italian army, although being against the Italians, takes away something from Wavell's achievement. Trench and static warfare specialists have been the norm: Kitcheners, Haigs and Montgomerys fighting wars the way the British play their football, with all the finesse of a bull attacking a brick wall.
The upper echelons of the Pakistan army have not remained untouched by this spiritual legacy. The two serious wars the army has fought, in 1965 and '71, were dogged affairs, marked by bravery and tenacity on both sides but little strategic panache or daring. Indians may hold the East Pakistan campaign to be a brilliant operation but then this amounts to extracting glory from a biased battlefield in which all the advantages lay on one side. Moreover, against that clown Niazi it would have been easy for any Indian general to put on rouge and look like General Heinz Guderian.
The trouble is that if the General Staff (a term which I use as a broad metaphor) has shown little imagination in war it has shown precious little in peace. Stepping into the political arena it cannot help, partly out of habit, partly because of the glorious ineptitude of Pakistan's politicians. But once in the political arena it shows all the imagination of a horse with blinders on its eyes going round and round a Persian well.
Every conqueror who comes marching into the political arena thinks he is inventing first principles. No fallacy is greater than this. Do the present masters of the political scene really think they are breaking virgin soil? Accountability, the corruption of politicians, cleansing the bureaucracy, grass-roots democracy, the army being the answer to every problem: a weary nation has heard all this before. The faces are new, the ideas being peddled (if ideas these half-baked notions can be called) are as old as that mother of all coup d'etats: the one mounted by Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan in 1958.
And what is the consequence? Nothing is working. Every initiative proclaimed with a loud blast of trumpets - including, let it be noted, the tax survey drive - has run into the sand. The country is at a standstill, rooted to the same spot, the national horizon lined with uncertainty.
What a wasting of opportunity. Without quarrelling with what led up to October 12, the army command after seizing power had a golden opportunity to give the nation a fresh start. Nine months down the road, it should be obvious even to the most committed partisan that the opportunity has been blown. For a simple reason. The higher direction of politics, which is what the circumstances required, is proving to be, yet again, not the army's cup of tea. General Musharraf and his colleagues should have been riding and masterminding events. Instead, they are being buffeted by them.
How many of this government's initiatives have not run into the sand? It is not as if Umar Sailya (who, thanks to the government's mishandling of the tax issue, has become a household name in Pakistan) or the clerics of the bearded brigade who put the government to flight over the anti-blasphemy law are too much for the Pakistan army. Not at all. But what is to be done if the army command is bent upon pitching its strength into the wrong battles, dissipating its energy, losing sight of the larger picture, spreading frustration both within its own bailiwick and the country at large? The army deserves better and so does the nation.
How long would it have taken a military commander who knew his mind (an all-important proviso) to knock heads together, carry out a swift political purge (so as to get rid of the Sharifs and the Bhuttos), pin the Nishan-i-Pakistan on President Tarar's chest before dining him out and sending him home, become president himself with the power to run foreign policy and appoint the service chiefs, towards this end amend the Constitution - the 1973 Constitution being the world's most resilient and elastic document - and then from amongst the depressing lot which constitutes our political elite choose a Muhammad Khan Junejo to get on with the urgent business of restoring this shell-shocked Republic to normal life?
Victory comes not only to the brave but to the swift. Daunting as this agenda looks it is the slash-and-cut work of a single hectic fortnight, no more. But provided the Napoleon in question knows his mind. Provided he has imbibed the lessons of military interventions past. Provided he has not acquired a taste for the trappings of power. Provided he has the good of the nation at heart. A long list of provisos but not difficult to meet. Provided, furthermore, that the titans of the present order concentrate on the task at hand and not extraneous things. What call for one of these titans to take over cricket, for another to conquer the commanding heights of hockey? Sends the wrong signals about the spare time at their disposal. Devotees of trench warfare or not, even the Kitcheners would be nonplussed.
The Supreme Court gives a political timeframe of three years and the generals heartily approve. Wars we cannot fight for more than seventeen days, this being the subcontinental record since 1947, but political planning we like to take into the indefinite future (a three years' timeframe in Pakistan being a very uncertain affair).
An objection I often encounter is that criticism is not enough; solutions must also be offered as if there was a switch out there pulling which would give us the right taxation policy or the correct approach to agriculture. Pakistan's foremost problem is to get the broad picture right. Details are important but their time will come thereafter. Even economic policy comes to nothing if politics is in a mess, something which trained economists, especially the fly-by-night kind inflicted from abroad, find difficult to understand.
Generals and politicians will have to come together to agree on a political framework which gives the country stability. For this they will have to recognize their interdependence. Generals will have to find some cure for the delusion that they are the answer to the problems of the universe. Politicians will have to stop pretending that politics in Pakistan, for the foreseeable future, can be wholly autonomous from the military. With or without military rule, Pakistan has a strong authoritarian tradition, rolling back which will require the highest sagacity. On this, and not chest-thumping or empty boasts, depends the future of Pakistani democracy.