How Pakistan thinks: Army for hire, ideology of convenience

Pakistan’s army has been a rentier force available to a reasonable bidder. It has never come to the aid of any Muslims including Palestinians or the Gazans, except making noises here and there.

Illustration: Shruti Naithani/ThePrint

This sequel to last week’s National Interest under the same headline is triggered by one line I had added as a very belated afterthought, almost as the column was going into print. Take it from me, I had written, Pakistan will sign some equivalent of the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel much before it makes peace with India. The news cycle has moved dramatically within days. Pakistan now seems closer to that denouement than anybody would’ve imagined on 26 September (Friday) when I wrote that first part of ‘How Pakistan Thinks’.

Almost playing to a script, Donald Trump announced his 20-point resolution for Gaza in the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu and hinted that even the larger Palestinian question could be rolled into it. Within hours, never mind the time zones, Pakistan was the first Islamic country to rise in the fullest support. Check out this long tweet from Shehbaz Sharif. His language is breathless in praise and obsequious as you would expect from a minor feudal addressing the big badshah. That the fawning pleased the badshah is evident in how he acknowledged it in public, even calling the field marshal’s words, hailing him as a man of peace, ‘most beautiful’.

Even India waited a full day before expressing support, probably to figure out if friend Netanyahu was fully on board with this. Of course, by this time the Pakistanis had also done a closer reading and grown some buyer’s remorse, whispering that words had been changed from what they had been shown. However, they haven’t pulled back and in any case this minor confusion does not indicate how, in our understanding, Pakistan thinks.

It goes into the very heart of what kind of state Pakistan is. Is it indeed as Islamic as the constitution or the textbook ideology of the republic promises? If that were the case, how come the Pakistanis have never gone to fight for any Islamic cause? Across their western periphery, multiple Islamic states have faced threats and in some cases obliteration. Pakistan talks endlessly of the Ummah, invoking it to suit its convenience—at OIC routinely on Kashmir, for example. But is willing to do very little for it.

It isn’t as if its armies have never gone to fight in fellow Islamic countries, all to its west. It is just that to describe any of these as contributions or sacrifices towards an Islamic cause is fallacious. In Jordan (1970, Palestinian revolt) and Saudi Arabia (1979, Siege of Mecca) it was to protect the ruling royal families. Even today, the Saudis need Pakistani protection not against Iran or Israel but Muslim Brotherhood.

If you turn around and remind me that the Pakistanis sent some contingents to Jordan during the Yom Kippur war, especially its Air Force, I will remind you that the two countries had a deeper and long-standing military partnership rooted in western alliances. It was also reciprocal as Jordan had transferred 10 F-104 Starfighters to beef up the PAF fleet in the 1971 war. Details, even entries in the Royal Jordanian Air Force diaries, have been published in Fiza’ya: Psyche of the Pakistan Air Force by Pushpindar Singh, Ravi Rikhye and Peter Steinemann.

During the first Gulf War, the Pakistanis sent contingents not to defend Muslim Iraq but to protect the Saudis from Saddam’s armies after they occupied Kuwait. They were never fighting for any ideological cause, but for their favoured client. Or you might prefer to describe them as patron.

Afghanistan helps us understand this better. In the first Afghan Jihad, Pakistan was in the coalition against the pro-Soviet regime and they could argue that the Mujahideen’s cause was Islamic enough.

Then what happened when the Americans returned after 9/11 in 2001? Now the Pakistanis joined them again, but this time against the Taliban. Now who could be more Islamic than them? There are words spoken, recorded and archived which come back to haunt both sides. These also help establish our argument. Secretary of Defence in the Bush Administration, Robert Gates, for example, described Pakistan as a “stalwart ally against terror”. And this, by the way, was said in the wake of 26/11. So reassuring it must’ve been for New Delhi!

The upshot is that the Pakistani military and strategic capital has always been available for rent, whether for cash, kind (from the Middle-East Arabs) or strategic and economic benefit, as with the US. Not only did Pakistan collect billions of dollars in rent as military and civil aid fighting on opposite sides of the Islamist Mujahideen/Taliban in the two American wars in Afghanistan, it similarly collected from the rich Arab states as well. Just for a touch of irony I need to underline to you the names of the schemes under which the US sought to transfer F-16s to Pakistan: Peace Gate-1 (1983), Peace Gate-II (1986-7), Peace Gate-III (December 1988), Peace Gate-IV (September, 1989), Peace Drive (2005-6), and finally 16 second-hand Jordanian F-16s under a scheme called Peace Falcon-I.

The short point is that Pakistan’s has been a rentier army available to a generous bidder, Muslim or Christian. You’ve never seen it coming to the aid of Iran or its proxies like Houthis as they are pulverised by Israel and its American allies besides the Gulf Arabs who occasionally fight directly, as in Yemen, but mostly act as silent partners in anti-Iran coalitions. It has never come to the aid of any Muslims including Palestinians or the Gazans, except making noises. And now this endorsement at hypersonic speed of a plan that pleases Netanyahu, reduces Gaza to a gated colony under Western management and buries the very idea of a two-state solution.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah had, in fact, given Pakistan its Palestine policy. He would have balked even at a two-state solution. He wanted Palestine restored to its ‘original’ territories and an Israel, if at all, could be accommodated in Europe. The only country a Pakistani passport bars its citizens from travelling to is Israel.

I cannot help but tell you an enduring Pakistani lore I might have shared with you before. In 1947-48, with the Palestine-Jerusalem (Al Quds) fervour on, writer Saadat Hasan Manto would pass by processions shouting angry slogans in Lahore every day. One day he stopped to ask, ‘bhai roz aap kahan ja rahe ho? (brothers, where do you keep going every day?)’. Told that they were going to liberate ‘Philistine and Al Quds,” he said, ‘Theek hai … dekhiye, Regal Chowk se hokar nikal jaiyega; nazdeek padega (good idea … best that you take a shortcut through Regal Square, a Lahore landmark).’ What Manto underlined with his trenchant wit is the reality even today. Pakistani support to the Palestinian cause and the larger Muslim sentiment on Jerusalem has merely been tamasha and a cosplay version of farcical strategic posturing.

Pakistan’s army, in conclusion, is not an Islamic army and since the army owns the state, it follows that Pakistan isn’t an Islamic state either.

What is it then? If we read backwards to all we have listed here the net outcome would be that the ideological foundation of Pakistan is not Islam or Islamism. It is anti-Indianism (read anti-Hindu). It will make any compromises, rent services to any patron, dump Iran yesterday and today and tomorrow, abandon Palestinians for eternity, and kill fellow Muslims as long as it brings it wherewithal to weaken and challenge India. Pakistan’s occasionally elected leaders understand this. As long as anti-Indianism (anti-Hinduism) defines their nationalism the army will never cede power to them, whatever their majority. That’s why two of them, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, searched for lasting peace and were punished severely. Even Musharraf was not spared for peacemaking despite being the army chief. All of these leaders seeking lasting peace with India were seen by the army, and ultimately by indoctrinated popular opinion, as going against the ideology of Pakistan. I can rest my case here.