PAKISTAN having all but abandoned its traditional stance on Kashmir, and confidence-building gimmicks all the rage between India and Pakistan, you might think the time had come to cut defence spending and divert resources to social needs.
But you would be wrong. For even as Pakistan gives peace a dubious facelift by making it look like appeasement, nothing on the horizon suggests we are about to enter the age of miracles.
If anything, the military’s appetite for shining hardware remains as strong as ever. The navy has a long list of equipment it wants from the US. The army has its own needs. But to beat everything is the PAF’s proposed shopping list of 75 F-16s — each at about forty million dollars. Multiply 75 by 40 and the answer is three billion dollars. Cool, as any teenager might say.
Barely able to suppress his delight (the photo with the interview in a national newspaper says it all) Air Chief Marshal Kaleem Saadat declares this would give the air force “deterrence value”. Against whom? One is tempted to ask. Not India, surely, with whom we are frantically building more flaky bridges of peace than we can safely handle. Afghanistan, Iran, the republic of Uzbekistan?
“Deterrence value” makes sense when counterpoised against a target, or a clear threat. Pakistan having decided that the essence of its India policy should be turning the other cheek regardless of Indian filibustering on Baglihar, Kishanganga, Siachen, Sir Creek and Kashmir, against which likely intruders will our F-16s take to the skies? Or are we talking of “deterrence” for its own sake, for no definable purpose, just to spread a feel-good mood in the air force?
Sure, we flirt with the notion of being a beleaguered republic. Fine, apart from anything else, it plays to our sense of self-importance. Even gives us a martyr complex. But for the picture to be convincing, it should be accompanied by some idea of the hordes at the gate: beleaguered by what or whom?
President Musharraf, however, has chucked the doctrine of external threat overboard, insisting, as he has more than once, that the enemy lies within. By which he presumably means Al Qaeda, religious extremism, the MMA when it is not cooperative (when it is, it is taken off the list), and all those political elements not under the umbrella of the Q League. External threats, he says, no longer exist because of his successful foreign policy. How do F-16s strike at the enemy within?
Indian rigidity can still rekindle Pakistani scepticism. If the ‘composite dialogue’ leads to no progress on the dispute over the Baglihar Dam, the Kishanganga water project or the standoff at Siachen — the world’s highest battlefield the scene of the world’s most stupid conflict — the mood in Pakistan could turn sour.
Even so, war is no longer a theme taken seriously by anyone in Pakistan. Not after Kargil, the high command’s last temptation, the fatal outcome of which serves as permanent damper on military adventurism. Not after September 11 when, in line with American priorities, the military had to shift focus from east to west, from the Indian to the Afghan border.
Nor should one forget the ‘cultural revolution’ sweeping the armed forces whereby real estate prices and prospects of life after retirement provide more engaging fields of study than, say, the theories of Karl von Clausewitz. War has no place in this mental landscape.
As for India, it need not contemplate the grim prospect of war when all its expectations of Pakistan are being met gratis, free of cost and free of effort, Gen Musharraf’s one-sided peace offensive surpassing Indian hopes and calculations. No wonder, from vilified hawk and the butt of tasteless jokes (as in Narendra Modi’s “Mian Musharraf”), he is today India’s favourite Pakistani.
Which only makes the question more insistent: why the F-16s, to guard against which threat? China, vying for superpower status, has no F-16s in its inventory. Iran, threatened by the United States and Israel, doesn’t have them. Poland and the UAE, to name but two countries feeding the US military-industrial complex, do. Fine company we are in.
Is Poland threatened by a fresh German invasion? As for the UAE, F-16s are of no use to it when its security is guaranteed by America’s unwritten pact with the Arab world: Arab oil in return for American protection against internal revolt and external aggression. The Arab countries are incapable of defending themselves against anything, least of all Israel, the dagger planted in their midst. Expensive military hardware is only a sop to Arab vanity, serving no military purpose whatsoever.
The Arabs at least have the money to service their vanity (although it is useful to remember that their wealth is not what it used to be in the 1970s and 1980s). We don’t have the same luxury. Putting some money into the health and education of the nation will do more for national security than so many F-16s.
Don’t we remember why we went down the nuclear path? We said the A-bomb would make national security foolproof, arming us against all eventualities. Well, since we have the bomb, why is defence expenditure still so high? Why are the social sectors starved? Why is talk of “poverty alleviation” such a joke?
The peace warriors of the bhangra brigade who are convinced real peace cannot break out unless a touch of Bollywood is brought to Indo-Pak relations — startling love songs and rain-drenched dance sequences — base their position on a fallacy: that soft borders, by undercutting the rationale for a huge military, will curb the spirit of Pakistani militarism, loosen the military’s grip on power and, in time, lead to the strengthening of democracy.
The fallacy lies in this: the military no longer looms large in Pakistan because of Kashmir or India; it does so in response to the need to safeguard its privileged position in national life.
A reduction in the number of two- and three- star generals, no civilian jobs for the “boys”, brigadiers and major-generals twiddling their thumbs after retirement, Fauji Foundation going out of business and ceasing to be the behemoth it is, defence housing authorities ceasing to multiply? Grim possibilities scarcely to be contemplated, let alone endured.
So like any bureaucratic organism, existence and expansion for their own sake, unrelated to any objective need or external threat. The quest for F-16s merely proves this point.
Nor is this an isolated phenomenon. Power-grabbing oligarchies wherever found have a life of their own. What are the defining characteristics of Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia, three pillars of the world of Islam? Corrupt, authoritarian and dominated, in one way or the other, by the apparatus of national security. None of these countries faces any external threat. Egypt did once upon a time but that was before the era of appeasement.
We can have chocolate borders with India tomorrow but this won’t for a moment stop the military from appropriating the bulk of national resources. So let’s bury this illusion once and for all that soft borders will lead to a peace dividend, money for schools and hospitals, butter before guns. Not on your life.
Indeed, free from the distraction of having to worry about India, or carry the burden of Kashmir, Pakistan’s permanent ruling class will have all the time in the world to play the game it relishes and at which, by now, it has come to excel: preserving its power as the supreme arbiter of national life and, towards this end, making idiots of the political parties.