CONFRONTED with a rising chorus of calls to cut wasteful defence expenditure — emphasis on ‘wasteful’ — the Pakistan government goes ahead and signs a billion dollar deal with Sweden for the purchase of six SAAB early warning aircraft.
It could be forgiven if this deal had been signed before calamity struck our northern mountains. But, no, it was signed in mid-October, a good seven days after the biggest quake in Pakistan’s history. Hand it to the powers that be for brilliant sense of timing.
Calls for cuts in defence spending, even when the case for doing so is rationally argued, are not calculated to amuse any military establishment. But this is a matter of balancing priorities. What’s the more pressing need at present, funds for earthquake relief or a billion dollars down the drain for an early warning system perhaps of great utility in its own right but which at the moment looks silly and unnecessary?
If we are dismayed by the tepid response of the international community to our need for relief assistance, we would sound more convincing if we had our own priorities right.
General-President Musharraf is touchy on the subject. According to a news report, “...when asked about any possibility of cutting the defence budget (as a response to) the Oct 8 earthquake, General Musharraf’s temperature rose perceptibly. He rejected outright any cuts in the defence budget, arguing that the earthquake and security were two different things. ‘We cannot jeopardize one for the other’.”
Perhaps he is missing the point. The growing chorus of calls is not for indiscriminate defence cuts which leave the country vulnerable but for avoiding ‘unnecessary’ spending. Most Pakistanis would probably consider the Swedish deal unnecessary at this juncture, which also raises questions about Sweden’s role in this affair. Didn’t the Swedish government have the sense to realize that such a deal at such a time would lead to a public outcry?
If only this was the only deal of its kind. No such luck as the Pakistan government is still pledged to buy about 70 F-16s from the US at a price tag of around five billion dollars each. The accepted figure for kickbacks in such deals is 15 per cent (600 million dollars). But even if we are to be charitable and put kickbacks at five per cent, it still comes to 200 million dollars. These would be staggering sums at any time; in the context of the earthquake, they are positively obscene.
Along with the kickbackers, the other party keen on this deal is the Bush White House. The US Air Force not placing any more orders for F-16s, Lockheed Martin would have had to close its F-16 plant in Texas (Bush’s home state), and in the process lay off close to 5,000 workers, but for the Pakistani order.
It’s safe to guess therefore that our American friends wouldn’t be too pleased if we have second thoughts about this deal. But then we should be looking to our interests, not George Bush’s. We can’t afford the F-16s. At a time of budding rapprochement with India, we don’t really need them. But more importantly, against the backdrop of the earthquake, the rationale for having them can be explained neither to God nor to man.
Of all the services in Pakistan, the PAF still has the fairest name, this despite former Air Chief Marshal Anwar Shamim and the shenanigans of one or two others of his ilk. Going ahead with this deal at this time will be counted against the PAF simply because the Pakistani people wouldn’t understand it. Time therefore to reconsider. We know the PAF badly needs new fighters but at this time other, more pressing priorities loom.
When the earthquake is a memory, and there is money in our coffers, we can shop for all the missile frigates, French submarines and fancy aircraft we want. Not now.
Please, let’s hear no angry lectures about the imperatives of national defence. Since the country’s founding the nation has diverted its best resources to the military (incidentally, without much value for all this sacrifice if we consider the record of our failed wars and the loss of East Pakistan). Even now no one is grudging ‘necessary’ military expenditure. It is only the spectre of waste and extravagance which is giving rise to unease in the public mind.
More than early warning systems and F-16s, we need helicopters (50 of them) and mules (500) to bring succour to the uncounted thousands still battling cold and hunger on the mountains. If the defence ministry went about buying 50 helicopters, would a single soul in Pakistan object to that? The Pakistani nation is not unreasonable. As the response to the earthquake has shown, it is capable of great things. But it shouldn’t be taken for granted or have its intelligence insulted at every turning on the road.
And what about the new General Headquarters that the army has set its heart on in Islamabad? Will that too buttress national defence? The present GHQ in Rawalpindi is as good a headquarters as any army could wish for, not only serviceable but with its colonial-era, single-storey, verandah-surrounded bungalows far more picturesque (and I daresay romantic) than any concrete monstrosity to rise in Islamabad.
But when national priorities are skewed, the army as an institution catches the blame. With engineers working tirelessly to open blocked roads, aviators flying their helicopters to the limit, mules carrying relief supplies to cut-off communities, you would think the army would be earning praise for all this hard work. It is not, or not as much as it should, primarily because of that fatal initial delay in reaching the stricken areas. Private relief arrived first, army relief only later.
But who is to blame for this? Soldiers and young officers (up to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and even brigadier) do what they are told. Deployment of troops — units, brigades, divisions, formations — is the province of the high command.
Half of strategy is deployment, manoeuvring troops into position. If the army was slow to arrive in the quake-hit areas, this was a failure of command, a failure of deployment, not a failure of effort at the unit or individual level.
General-President Musharraf now says relief deployment took time because army units had to be moved from Gujranwala. Pray, why? Weren’t troops deployed in Azad Kashmir already? Weren’t there troops in Murree, Rawalpindi, Mangla?
Is the job of the famous Triple One Brigade stationed in Westridge, Rawalpindi, only to mount coups and oust civilian governments? How long would it have taken to move half of this brigade to Balakot and half to Muzaffarabad? If this was the speed of our response, what would have happened if there had been an incursion across the Line of Control? Would it have taken four days to mobilize troops and meet that threat?
So we should keep things in perspective and apportion blame where it belongs instead of making the army as a whole a national punching bag for the misjudgment and slow-footed response of its leadership.
From any angle this is a problem of part-timism, one of the world’s largest armies without a full-time chief. You can’t run a small enterprise this way, let alone a large one, but that’s how we are running both the army and what’s left of our political institutions.
In other countries the fighting forces command undiluted public support. The Iraq war may be unpopular in the UK and increasingly so in the US but in both countries the armed forces are not blamed for this misadventure, the political leadership is. But with us because the military is both military overlord and political master, it carries the can for everything.
Don’t blame the nation for not exactly warming to the army’s dual role and don’t blame the army for feeling upset when it has to carry the burden of public disapproval.