THE core political-institutional problem of civil-military relations is civilian control over the military in issues of ‘war and peace’. Civilian control entails but goes beyond the problem of ‘military coups’ to include a range of behaviours from military subordination to military defiance and intervention in politics. It is a necessary condition for democracy: a normative good in and of itself. While civilian control can exist without democracy, as indeed it has in many single party communist dictatorships like the former Soviet Union and present-day China, democracy cannot exist without it. Civilian control is also correlated with other real world problems including ethnic conflict, inter-state war and nuclear proliferation.

The main empirical focus of this essay is on Pakistan, even though it draws on relevant cases from other regions of the world for comparative illumination. The motivating question is this: what explains weak civilian control and persistent military intervention in Pakistan? Most existing analyses of military politics and intervention in Pakistan focus on non-military explanations, including weak civilian institutions, economic instability and ethnic divisions. These are all important variables which provide the permissive context or opportunity for military political intervention. For instance, it is well documented that in contrast to India, Pakistan started its journey as an independent state without the political infrastructure (e.g., organized, mass political party) around which democracy could grow and develop. This institutional deficit created the space for the early rise of the military as an autonomous and powerful actor in domestic politics.

But ‘military behaviour’ cannot be sufficiently explained without considering the military’s institutional characteristics which make its autonomy and intervention possible in the first place. For instance, the sociologist Morris Janowitz has identified the degree of the military’s organizational cohesion as one such feature: the more cohesive a military, the greater is its capacity for sustained collective action in the political sphere. But the degree of cohesion tells us little about the direction of military political action: cohesive militaries can be apolitical as well as political. What matters is whether the military has absorbed the ethic or norm of attachment to civilian supremacy. After all, there is no logical reason why those with guns should obey those without them. The implication is that all else being equal, if a military believes that subordination to a duly constituted civilian government is its professional duty, it is much less likely to exploit an invitation or opportunity to coup than a military in which this belief is missing.

The argument advanced in this essay is that officer corps norms matter in determining the military’s political role. The Pakistani military holds a strong ‘praetorian’ belief in its role as the ultimate guardian of internal order and external security. Whenever it perceives that civilians cannot provide the internal environment necessary for fulfilling its primary war-fighting mission, it steps in to reset the political system.

To adequately understand the military’s political beliefs and preferences, one has to trace its historical roots. I think these ‘role beliefs’ (or shared institutional conceptions about the military’s proper role in the polity) are a product of the military’s formative experience under conditions of warfare in the decade following independence from British rule. More specifically, these beliefs are a product of the military’s perceptions of an external threat from India, and the process of rapid military organizational evolution spurred by that threat, which opened the way for the emergence of the military as a powerful political organization before civilian democratic institutions could develop.

 

Pakistan was born a deeply insecure state. Its insecurity was triggered by the chaotic conditions under which it acquired statehood after the partition of British India and the early onset of a territorial conflict with militarily stronger India over the princely state of Kashmir. To militarily balance the perceived threat from India, Pakistan set about boosting its military at birth and sought external military alliances with the West. The state’s heavy investments in the defence sector and cold war aid from the U.S. transformed the military from a ‘paper’ army in 1947 into a modern, well equipped professional force within a few years of independence.

In a process similar to the one described by Guillermo O’Donnell in his paradigmatic case study of the Argentinean military in the 1960s, this rapid reorganization engendered a sense of special accomplishment and superiority vis-à-vis civilians in the Pakistani military. For instance, Pakistan’s quest for a democratically crafted constitution was delayed by disagreement over questions of inter-wing parity and autonomy for the Bengali majority East Pakistan. To the military, this civilian deadlock appeared as a sign of civilian incompetence and failure to produce the national consensus necessary for its war-fighting mission.

 

If the military could reorganize itself on a war-footing, the soldiers saw no reason why they could not apply their professional skills and virtues (of discipline, order, and efficiency) to ‘fix’ civilian Pakistan. This belief in the applicability of military skills to the civilian sphere was reinforced through military participation in ‘aid-to-civil’ missions, as for instance in 1953 when the civil administration failed to quell sectarian riots in the city of Lahore and the military imposed a mini martial law.

From the early 1950s, the West Pakistan (mostly Punjabi) dominated military feared that a parliamentary system would bring a Bengali majority to power, which would dilute the power of the existing centralized authoritarian system to discipline the province. Thus, when the Constituent Assembly finally drafted a federal-parliamentary constitution, the military-backed chief executive Governor General Ghulam Mohammad (1951-1955) struck back with colonial-era emergency powers to sack the elected prime minister and dissolve the assembly. Similarly, when the first national parliamentary elections (scheduled for early 1959) on the basis of universal franchise threatened to shift significant power to a coalition of civilian politicians dominated by East Pakistan, the military preempted that outcome by seizing power – under cover of preventing disorder – in October 1958.

 

Ever since, civil-military relations have proven to be ‘path-dependent’ (or resistant to change) with a vengeance. Success in the first coup has bred success in the later coups (1977 and 1999) by lowering internal normative restraints on military intervention and habituating the military to a supra-political role. While civilians have periodically challenged the military, the institutionalization of the military’s autonomy and political power have narrowed their options by raising the political costs of changing the status quo. Civilian politicians may prefer more leverage and power over the military, but they anticipate that any deviations from the existing patterns and practice of civil-military relations could be counterproductive.

Arguably, the only juncture at which the military could have been tamed came when it suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of India in the Bangladesh war of 1971. With the military’s public prestige at rock bottom, and over 80,000 of its troops in Indian captivity, the generals handed over power to the first democratically elected Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government, led by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1972-77), which did everything prescribed in the coup-proofing manual to defang a politically overweening officer corps.

Bhutto purged potentially disloyal soldiers, created a paramilitary force to reduce civilian dependence on the military for internal order, erected constitutional barriers, and sought to weaken the army’s grip on defence policy by reorganizing the high command into a committee on the model of the U.S. armed forces’ Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, when the government and the opposition deadlocked over elections in 1977, the praetorian military under General Zia ul-Haq deemed it fit to use the resulting instability as a pretext to overthrow civilian rule rather than allow a political settlement of the impasse.

The case of Pakistan shows that defeat in war, rather than contributing to the demise of military praetorianism, as it did in cases such as Greece in 1974 after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and Argentina in 1982 after the Malvinas/Falklands war, did not prove sufficient to roll back the military precisely because war did not terminate the India-Pakistan rivalry. Instead, the state’s forceful dismemberment at the hands of its mortal enemy further exacerbated Pakistan’s security dilemma, which meant that the national security state could not be dismantled and the military institution could escape accountability for its political actions.

 

From 1977 to 1988, the army under Zia ruled ruthlessly, shielded from international pressure and adequately funded by the military’s alliance with the United States – a relationship that became of special importance to Washington after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Zia’s death in a mysterious August 1988 plane crash created another opening for a return to parliamentary democracy.

From 1988 to 1999, power alternated between the civilian governments of the PPP (1988-90, 1993-96) and the PML-N (1990-93, 1997-99). While these elected governments formally ruled the country, each lived under the constant shadow of an overbearing military. The generals tolerated the politicians as long as the latter did not threaten military prerogatives, lending credence to the argument that military disengagement from government does not mean military exit from politics, let alone properly institutionalized civilian control over the military. In such contexts, the soldiers often retain what the political scientist Alfred Stepan calls the ‘latent structural power’ derived from military ‘prerogatives’ in the defence sector, internal security, the legal system, and even foreign relations and nuclear weapons.

 

Civilian attempts to challenge and erode these prerogatives often produced swift retaliations. Such a backlash unseated Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif when, in October 1999, he tried to remove army chief General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008) for having started – without the full knowledge of his civilian superiors – a disastrous three-month war with India earlier that year in the Kargil district of Kashmir. Musharraf nominated himself to the post of ‘chief executive’ and, later, used a fraudulent referendum to appoint himself president, an office that he occupied until 2008.

The Pakistan Army once again staged a retreat to the barracks in 2008 in the wake of popular contentious mobilization for the restoration of independent-minded superior court judges arbitrarily fired by Musharraf in anticipation of an unfavourable ruling on his candidacy for re-election as a president in uniform. The February 2008 parliamentary elections and Musharraf’s August 2008 resignation spelled the effective end of Pakistan’s latest bout of military rule. But the country’s long history of political interventions by soldiers, and the military’s entrenched prerogatives under-girded by its self-image as the guardian of the system, continues to pose daunting obstacles to the consolidation of democracy, if by that term we mean the rule of elected officials without any extra-constitutional veto over their authority.

As scholars of democracy contend, democratic consolidation rests on both the behavioural and attitudinal commitments of politically significant civilian and military actors. One of the crucial dimensions of consolidation concerns whether the military has staged a tactical retreat from power, or is willing to play by the rules of the ‘democratic’ game. Democratic transitions which are not underpinned by changes in military norms in directions that are compatible with democracy are likely to remain unstable.

The question is not just that of a straightforward reversion to military authoritarianism, since the military’s exit from government is voluntarily executed for institutional reasons. Rather, it is one of a surreptitious threat of intervention by a military not habituated to a subordinate role in a democracy. At stake then is whether the military has withdrawn from power contingently and believes it has the right to take unilateral decisions without regard to the wishes of the civilian government. Does it consider itself subject to the constitution and the rule of law or does it conceive of itself as a law unto itself?

 

Since Pakistan’s most recent transition to civilian rule began in 2008, the military has formally signalled its intent to stay out of civilian affairs. Under Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, who replaced Musharraf in that post in November 2007, the military remained politically neutral during and after the elections, and the generals took a number of symbolic steps meant to highlight this commitment. The electoral success of the secular opposition parties (the PPP and the PML-N) showed that the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) – which has a long history of rigging elections, including the 2002 ballot under General Musharraf – refrained from extensive manipulation of the vote in 2008. In a move that elicited much comment in the Pakistani media, the army also closed down the notorious ‘internal security’ wing of the ISI tasked with ‘political management’.

 

Once the civilian government assumed power in March 2008, General Kayani ordered the withdrawal of hundreds of active-duty army officers whom Musharraf had placed in the civilian bureaucracy. In a rare gesture, the military high command voluntarily disclosed annual expenditures of each of the three armed forces (army, navy and air force), which until then had only appeared as a lump sum on a single line of the federal budget, and allowed them to be subjected to parliamentary debate.

These steps were not entirely surprising. From the military’s institutional perspective, its association with the deeply divisive Musharraf dictatorship had mauled its public image even in the traditionally pro-military Punjab, the province from which almost two-thirds of the officer corps is traditionally recruited. The vigorous lawyer-led movement for the restoration of the judiciary had brought the military regime in direct conflict with civil society.

Also threatening the military’s morale was the costly and unpopular counterinsurgency campaign against foreign and local militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the Afghan border. Lacking the endorsement of a popularly elected legitimate government, the military appeared demoralized and unwilling to fight a deadly counterinsurgency war with no end in sight. In August 2007 in South Waziristan, for instance, pro-Taliban militants captured some 250 Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops without a fight. In the end, the military had to agree to a swap, releasing 24 militants in order to get its own men back.

But appearances can be deceptive. If the past is any guide, the Pakistani military’s exit from power does not necessarily mean an exit from politics. And there is little evidence to suggest that the military’s latest withdrawal from government is not a strategic reversal of its supra-political, supra-legal role, but a tactical retreat. In fact, a deeper look at military behaviour seems to suggest that the institution continues to consider itself above the rule of law, and retains immunity from accountability for its actions.

For instance, the recent UN Commission Inquiry Report on the December 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto held the Musharraf regime responsible for failing to provide her with adequate security and points to the role of army intelligence officials in tampering with crucial evidence and obstructing a proper investigation into her killing. Yet, the military has effectively thumbed its nose at the civilian government by blocking any meaningful inquiry into the role of the army.

 

Democracy is likely to remain a hollow concept if the military withdraws from power but reserves the right to take autonomous action in wilful disregard of the wishes of the democratically elected government. In July 2008, for instance, within hours of the civilian government’s decision to place the ISI under the control of the federal interior ministry, the military virtually forced it to backtrack with a ‘midnight phone call.’ No less erosive for civilian authority was the high command’s reaction to the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill promising Pakistan $1.5 billion annually in non-military, developmental American aid. Rather than registering its objections to the civilian government in private, the army issued a public statement opposing the bill as a threat to Pakistan’s national security, in part because the bill made military aid conditional on an annual certification by the U.S. Secretary of State that Pakistan’s military was under civilian control.

 

The extent to which the military remains committed to circumventing civilian authority was nowhere more evident than in the case of military personnel policy. General Kayani has unilaterally granted service extensions to senior officers, including the Adjutant General and the Director General of the ISI. News reports suggest that the military is pressuring the civilian government to extend Kayani’s tenure by five years apparently to ensure continuity in anti-terrorism policy. In March 2010, Kayani went a step ahead in demonstrating the military’s supra-constitutional role when he called secretaries of key federal ministries (finance, commerce, foreign affairs, IT and petroleum) to the army headquarters for a meeting ostensibly to create ‘military-civilian coordination’ in advance of strategic talks with Washington.

Given the continuing imbalance of power between civilian institutions and the military, what is the likely shape of civil-military relations in the future? There are at least three possible future outcomes. The first is a ‘freezing’ of the political system in the grey zone between full-fledged democracy and military autocracy, the conventional format of civil-military relations under elected rule. While exerting sustained civilian control over the military poses a formidable challenge for any transitional democracy, the democratic government in Pakistan faces the additional burden of swiftly resolving a complex array of economic, political, and security crises, all of which are legacies of military authoritarian rule. In this scenario, where the civilian government is already under pressure to squarely tackle these issues, the military will continue to exercise behind the scenes influence and rattle its sabres at will to prevent undesirable outcomes. It is this latent military power which will likely act as an additional source of political instability and civilian institutional erosion.

 

The second outcome is the slow and steady institutionalization of democracy and the depoliticization of the military. Recent bipartisan civilian efforts to consolidate parliamentary democracy by reversing authoritarian prerogatives in the constitution (such as the infamous Article 58 (2) B which empowered the president to arbitrarily dismiss an elected government) augur well for democratization. Civilian politicians from the two main parties, the ruling PPP and the PML-N, have so far resisted openly knocking on the garrisons’ doors as they did in the 1990s. They appear to have learned from experience that it is better to play the electoral game and continue to tolerate each other rather than risk destabilizing the system and losing power to the military for another decade.

But permanently inducing the military to stay away from politics will be difficult, if not impossible, given that little has changed in the country’s complex geopolitical environment and threat perceptions, which historically fomented the military’s political role, continue to provide the basis for its monopoly over national security policy. In fact, the country’s threat environment has been even more complicated by an intensification of the internal security dangers emanating from militancy and terrorism. In regions like South America, the ouster of the military from power and crucially, a lasting reduction of military autonomy, were linked to the end of the cold war and associated cessation of the insurrectionary communist threat which had originally induced the military to turn inwards and take control over politics.

 

The third outcome is, of course, a military coup d’etat. In essence, the Pakistan Army is still a war-fighting force, not a permanent ruling army like Burma’s. It has no extensive and intensive doctrines for national development and governance, like those articulated and internalized by militaries in South America during the cold war. Besides, it is probably too soon for the military to step in as memories of Musharraf’s authoritarian rule are still fresh in the public mind.

Pakistan’s ‘resurrected civil society’ and more democratically committed political parties will likely ensure that the military has no real occasion to openly undermine or overthrow an elected government. The external costs of military rule will likely act as another inhibitor. But given the military’s praetorian professional norms, some form of authoritarian backsliding with at least a hidden hand from the military cannot be ruled out especially if civilian institutions (like the judiciary and the executive) were to openly clash or if governance were to falter. Democracy in Pakistan is likely to remain stillborn unless the officer corps’ praetorian norms and prerogatives undergo sustained erosion and the military is brought under firm democratic-civilian control.