21 March, 1999
Shotgun governance
By Eqbal Ahmad
THE army is being called increasingly to rescue the country from its administrative failures. It went on a successful pursuit of ghost schools of which the very existence had been denied, not long ago, by a Federal Secretary of Education. Until the Supreme Court ruled the anti-terrorist courts unconstitutional, army officers presided over the special courts established to eradicate terrorism. Currently, the army is engaged in checking electric meters in private homes, and cleaning up the Augean stables of Water & Power Development Authority (WAPDA).
Citizens who have been troubled by the deterioration of public services and corruption in government departments have applauded the military's intervention. The press too has praised its even handed style of work. The relief and the applause are understandable. Some thought ought to be given, nevertheless, to the long-term costs of deploying the military to clear the mess created by bureaucrats and politicians.
It violates the principle of distancing the military from politics, quotidian life and civil administration. Since millennia this has been deemed essential to the health of the state and society no less than of military institutions and the morale of professional soldiers. When put in practice, this insight, which is almost as old as the state in human history, has been central to the consolidation and stability of states and empires. The violation of this principle has often been associated with the decline and failure of power. In the British empire, the forerunner of the Pakistani state and armed forces, the spatial expression of this principle was the cantonment, a habitation reserved for the military. These were often adjacent with but normally separated from the civilian urban area.
This was by no means a British innovation. In his excellent account of early Muslim dominion in India, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Delhi 1994), Richard Eaton has noted that Muslim armies were "concentrated in garrison settlements located in or near pre-conquest urban centres. ... The Turkish occupation of Bengal thus followed the settlement pattern found throughout the early Delhi Sultanate, anticipating in this respect the cantonment city employed by the British in their occupation of India in the nineteenth century."
The cantonment is still here of course but the principle it symbolized has been violated, largely by Pakistan's military dictators, but also by such elected governments as those of Z.A. Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif. Mr Nawaz Sharif is a rare politician in Pakistan in that, like Bhutto, he has come close to subordinating the military to civilian authority. One can only hope that he does not lack political wisdom to let this achievement slide away. He ought to be more mindful of history's lessons than Mr Bhutto was.
It is easy to sympathize with Mian Nawaz Sharif's predicament. As prime minister he confronts a deep, dual crisis of the state and the economy. Compared with the other institutions of the state the armed forces retain their discipline and cohesion, and appear capable of getting a difficult job done. It is tempting to call in the army where other state institutions fail to fulfil their public responsibility. The army delivers almost overnight. In the process it inherits resentments and controversies and in unintended ways becomes enmeshed in local and national politics.
WAPDA is the latest case in point. Like the education ministries which employ more men and women than the armed forces of Pakistan and whose swarm of 'ghost schools' the army exorcized so effectively, WAPDA is a rotten, outfit, up to the ears in corruption, a half-paralyzed white elephant. Called to clean up, the army has raked the muck, collected three billion rupees out of its more than seventy billion worth of unpaid bills, restored a thousand kilowatts of stolen electricity, and to great public applause charged more than a dozen Muslim League legislators of illegal tampering with electricity meters and power lines. Things look good but they are not quite.
Steadily the army becomes associated - however unfairly - with controversies, public complaints, and political manoeuvring. Army personnel are checking out individual consumers and small enterprises, and into the third week of its operation people were starting to ask: why don't they go where the big thefts and defaults are, big industry, large institutions, government departments, the military itself which is WAPDA's largest creditor? In our culture, complaints and stories escalate, enter the social scene, and erode the reputations of institutions no less than individuals.
When the army undertakes public administration, it inevitably becomes drawn into local conflicts which abound in rural areas. Feudal and political families are particularly prone to feuds which nearly always involve local officials. Among those alleged to have tampered with an electric meter is the outspoken, often controversial Syeda Abida Husain, the Federal Minister for Population Welfare and Science & Technology. She alleges that she has been framed by her antagonistic cousins. In her ancestral home and farm complex there are nine electric meters. The lead of one of these was allegedly changed to slow it down. This was done by WAPDA technicians, she says, who arrived after the army had been called in. "No one on our premises has the technical ability to tamper with a sealed meter. Altogether, we pay an average of 700,000 rupees per year in WAPDA bills. Does it make sense to change one meter, and save a few thousand rupees?" I may be biased.
Abida Husain is a friend. I found her explanation persuasive but did ask: "Do you pay taxes?" Yes, she says, "more than three million rupees per year in direct federal and provincial taxes." An independent inquiry which she demands and deserves should absolve her. The larger issue remains nevertheless: when the armed forces are pulled into this sort of work, they are inevitably implicated in societal conflicts and complaints, a phenomenon that is good neither for the army nor for society.
Typically, military interventions work temporary wonders, which is why martial law regimes in Pakistan have enjoyed short honeymoons. Soon enough old realities begin to work their way in, institutional lethargy returns, corruption makes inroads even into the officers' corps, reputations are sullied, rumours spread, and public discontent revives. Rarely if ever have armies improved governance. Hence, popular resistance to army rule always follows after the honeymoon ends. More importantly, engagement in civilian administration and politics nearly always has an adverse impact on army's leadership and morale. Hence, militaries in power have rarely, if ever, won wars.
Pakistan has been a parliamentary democracy for a decade. No one expects military rule to return. Yet it is important to recall that the democratic system is still in its infancy, feeble and malfunctioning. Its limbs, the institutions of governance and public service, have to be rebuilt and reinforced internally. External inputs will serve at best as palliatives. If WAPDA or our education ministries, or revenue collection agencies are not capable of reform by civilians, then soldiers will not be able to do it either no matter how carefully the government phases them out.
The military is often called, and should be called, to aid civilian power in times of natural disasters - a great flood, a catastrophic earthquake and so on. But to ask it to perform routine administrative tasks - collect bills, run a government department, dispense justice - admits to a failure of nerve and failure of will to which no civilian government should be entitled.
Armies which intervene in politics are invariably those which, by design or force of circumstances, become engaged in the political process. Even the most professionalized military develops the putschist tendency when circumstances force it to engage in administrative and policing work. The French army started to become involved in administering civilians during its counter-insurgency engagement against the Vietminh in Indo-China. During the Algerian war of liberation it got so enmeshed in French politics, that in 1958 it helped destroy the Fourth Republic and later its high command attempted a coup d'etat, a putsch Charles de Gaulle alone proved capable of quelling. Similarly, protracted involvements in "internal wars" in Angola and Mozambique led the Portuguese army officers to overthrow in 1974 the regime of Marcello Caetano.
For the armed forces of Pakistan this is, I believe, a time of great transition. New developments have occurred in the last few years to change Pakistan's threat perception. These changes await examination for their implications on the military outlook, strategy and tactic, training and force formation. The military high command has the awesome responsibility of preparing the armed forces to adapt to these. It is in the best interest of the country and the armed forces that they are not diverted from this essential task to perform duties which civilians ought to be doing.